![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
20 GOTO 10: ANSI (part 1)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
no subject
no subject
grf, must come home soon
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
Lens: Nikon [AF Nikkor] 50mm f/1.4 ← BEST LENS EVAR!
The lens is about US$350, and the body is like around US$1800. But you can use the lens with any other body and still get the same sort of results. I was doing these same kinds of photos with a cheap D50, and an old fashioned N90s before that, and an old Nikkormat from the 1960's before that. That lens will work any any camera that Nikon has made in the last 50 years, except on the recent D40 where auto-focus won't work. (Because the D40 doesn't have the motor which drives the lens.)
Anyway, with f/1.4 and ISO@1600, you can do hand-held point and shoot photography in the dark. (See above for examples.)
no subject
no subject
One of the first things that switching to the D300 made me realize, is just how much of my photographic still is pure muscle memory. I'm not consciously thinking about what my hand is doing when I take a photo; I just have a picture in my head, and if I move my muscles in a certain way, I'll have the same picture in my camera. (It's enough of an extension of my body, that I can take photos of visuals that I see while on acid.) Anyway, the D300 is just different enough from the D200, that I'm totally screwing up most of the time now. I'm gradually retraining myself, but still not getting the consistent results I was with the D200. Fortunately, some of the errors are easy to correct in post [see below].
The spot meter on the D300 seems to completely not work, or at least not work with auto-iso mode. In low light, I'll usually shoot with my shutter and aperture locked at 1/30" f/1.4 and let the ISO float. On the D200 I could get it to ignore whatever else was in the fame, and it'd pick the right ISO for my subject (spot metered). On the D300, it seems to alternate between just-right and way-way-too-dark. And it will do this in identical rapid-fire shots less that 1/5" apart. I've checked that it really isn't in bracketing mode. (Tangent: Shooting 6 to 8 frames per second is pretty neat, but you can only do it in regular 12-bit mode. In 14-bit mode it drops to like 2fps at best.)
The thing that, as a low-light photographer, I've been finding incredibly useful, is that the D300 has 14 bits of dynamic range per channel [red, green, blue]. It's like getting HDR without all that tedium of taking two photos. (The D200 was 12-bits per RGB channel.) Take these two photos for example:
The original, stupid-auto-iso-underexposed version is on the left, and the tweeked version is on the right. For the amount I had to crank up the low end in Lightroom, on one of my old D200 photos it would have left everything looking a weird low-contrast gray, on these (14-bit raw) D300 photos, the results look normal.
no subject
(Actually upon considering the number of auto of focus shots from 20 GOTO 10... but I believe those were cases where I was impatient, I set my D300 to release-priority, rather than focus-priority, because in low light sometimes, the D300 will think that it's not in focus when it really is, and will lock the shutter - really not cool for most situations I shoot under. Focus-lock IS really useful for doing macroscopic work, but with lenses focus-priority doesn't work.)
Oh, that also reminds me of one of the other things that makes macroscopic photography much much easier: Live-video mode. Which locks up the mirror, and displays whatever light that falls upon the CCD [CMOS] on the LCD display, with only a slightly noticeable lag. It works surprisingly well in really low light too; Like when I have my bellows set to f22, in daylight (shade), I can still preview the image for what will be a one second exposure at ISO200. (I haven't done the math yet on just what the ev range is.)
no subject
Great meeting you, send me a message sometime, would love to hang out.
- R
no subject
no subject
Re: jason scott sings
no subject