20 GOTO 10: ANSI (part 1)

[foxgrrl]

20 GOTO 10: ANSI There is an art show dedicated to ANSI Art, currently taking place in San Francisco until Jan 31, 2008. I was at the opening last night, and these are some of my favorite photos from the event. photo, art gallery, ansi, demoscene, Jan 12 2008, 20 GOTO 10, 679 Geary, San Francisco, CA, USA Julia Wolf Julia Wolf image/jpeg 2008
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

There is an art show dedicated to ANSI Art, currently taking place in San Francisco until Jan 31, 2008. I was at the opening last night, and these are some of my favorite photos from the event.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Comments

[hep.livejournal.com]

ja thats similar to the sigma lens ive been looking at lately, but i hate sigma. i have a d50 at home and d200s at work. hows the shift between the d200 and the d300? is it worth upgrading? we were thinking about it, but it seems like a pain if it's only small differences.

[foxgrrl]

I've been meaning to write a short review of the D300, this will be the extra-short version. I had my D200 for 16 months, and then found myself a reason to get the D300, which didn't involve cameras at all (long story).

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.

[foxgrrl]

Oh yeah, and I forgot to mention: The auto-focus works much better on the D300 than the D200. Especially in low-light with a lens with a very shallow depth of field. Mostly... The really really annoying thing that the D200 used to do, was when you had everything in focus, and then go to release the shutter, and the D200 tries to refocus, and sweeps over the lens's full range, stopping at either infinity, or the one foot distance on the lens. So, you refocus again and it locks on, and you go to release the shutter, and is refocuses the lens again, over the whole range, stopping at the totally wrong focal distance. Repeat ad infinitum, or until you switch over to manual focus, (or auto-focus on something else, a close distance to the 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 manual 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.)