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First official images from Nikon D200 flash and zoom

John, Interesting that you say that. Yesterday, I had a discussion with a friend of mine who is a gallery-owner. Recently, he had an exhibition by a Burmese painter, mostly paintings of monks, young and old. Buyers expressed worries about the paintings with young monks, saying that they couldn't buy them fo r the risk of being taken for being a paedophile.

I often meet children on the street who ask to have their picture taken, just to see it on the LCD afterwards. In slum areas, I don't worry, since people are more open and flexible, but I must admit it is a worry.

One of my customers, a travel agency here in Bangkok, told me very straight forward: no photos of children, period.

It's a pity. Children are such good photo objects, particularly when they are out on their own, like the girls in my photo. "Normal" people's attitudes is a problem sometimes.

Jorgen
 
there is almost public hysteria about photographing children at the moment. A photographer, however innocent, has to be very careful to avoid being suspected of nefarious activities. It is a real shame. >

Well stated, it is very shameful that a few (albeit horrific problems) that now even talking to children is looked upon poorly by some. When I was a youngster I always enjoyed speaking to adults as I always learned something. Here some idiots have some notion that if you have binoculars your up to something. There too stupid to observe the beautiful birds, flowers, plants, and animals we have. I normally carry binoculars with a camera or two. So I hope this hysteria stops before it becomes a Witch Hunt too. Any allegation of perceived wrong doing will ruin your life. (The Witch Hunts here in America started because of hysteria and ignorance).

Best Regards:

Gilbert
 
> I also like small cameras whenever possible simply because they are to > me much more pleasant to use.

However, rather difficult to hold still at low shutter speeds, and having to carry a big tripod negates the size advantage many times over. The big accessory battery pack/grip on my CP8400 is as much to give it mass and surface area as it is to take advantage of ubiquitous AA cells.

> I don't like menu systems at all but it would probably be > necessary on my as yet imaginary camera as sadly there would be little > room for dials and aperture rings.

The Coolpix 8400 is the third camera of the type that I have owned. The difference in user interface is dramatic compared to the first. A selection knob accesses most of the common functions and a thumbwheel adjusts them. For ex&le, select Aperture Priority with the selection knob, and the thumbwheel becomes your aperture ring. Tap the manual focus button, and it becomes your focus ring.

Tap another button and you can toggle from full information on the LCD to live histogram - a lightmeter that gentle Ansel Adams would have killed for, a projected grid lines for lining up horizons or verticals in buildings, and the picture to be shot, devoid of any other distraction. Buttons are used anyplace that toggling through choices is common. The first page of the menu is custom. Select any six items to fit your working style. A tap on a button takes you there. Great improvement over the pages of menus one was required to scroll through on the CP990 of just a few years back.

Yes, it is not intuitive to someone who shoots with a view camera daily. Of course, a view camera is not intuitive to someone who shoots 35mm either. When one buys a new camera - specially of a different type or format - many hours will be spent mastering it. A 35mm shooter does not buy an 8x10 monorail camera and immediately head off to the studio expecting that the swings and tilts and bellows draw exposure compensation will be a no-brainer. Even film cameras like the Nikon F6 now has menus.

These are products of the digital revolution that took place about the beginning of the century. At a single moment, itbecame more economical to control devices of all kinds with digital rather than analogue controls. For the user, this has meant incredible flexibility and a richness of control and features that simply could not exist when mechanical links were the only way to interact with the device.

The cost of these riches is a challenging learning curve, but the rewards at the end are enormous. I only regret that this happened at the end of my career, not the beginning. While I still shoot medium format film on occasion, digital cameras have liberated me and empowered me in countless ways. Had these existed back then, my overall corpus of work would have been much much greater.

Each generation brings actual progress. It is not a matter of "planned obsolescence" where a bit of trim is moved and a "New and Improved" sticker is applied. The edge continues to move, and when one pushes the edge, it clearly shows up in the content of one's images. On a recent journey, I sought to push RAW format to its limits, shooting in some of the most challenging environments with the goal of both producing fine content, but also capturing a dynamic range equal or beyond what the eye can see. RAW lets one coordinate exposure and processing very tightly - many of the camera functions can be transferred to the interpretation stage. Exposures can be supremely fine tuned for the final result using RAW.

In this case, I exposed ONLY for retention of maximum highlight detail, knowing that the extended range of RAW would later let me dredge up the shadow detail. As with shooting chromes, when a highlight is blown, it is gone forever. Over the past few weeks since I posted the results, I have got an amazing amount of very positive feedback and many requests for tutorials on how it was accomplished. http://www.larry-bolch.com/las-vegas/

This could also be done with film, if you had a totally precise pin-register carrier on your enlarger and a pin-register easel plus the knowledge to make masks. It would be horrendously difficult. With digital, I planned exactly what I intended to do before leaving, and upon returning, simply realized what I had pre-visualized. There was not a single failed exposure in the whole shoot.

larry! http://www.larry-bolch.com/ ICQ 76620504
 
Dear Larry,

I'm sorry that I have taken so long to reply and hope that the thread has not meanwhile lost its momentum but I have not been able to spend much time at the computer over the last few days.

I still do prefer smaller cameras though and do not generally find that holding steady for slow shutter speeds is a problem with e.g. my Contax Aria. With my Contax T2, I often use the long strap as a tensioning device to steady it and although I do have a carbon fibre tripod. I also find that my monopod is useful. It doubles as a walking stick and is called a camcane.

I still think that people are less intimidated by a smaller camera because the user does not stand out so much. I used to like using a twin lens reflex because I found that the waist level viewpoint gave a slightly different perspective and also that people took less notice of it, probably because as you point out, they are not being stared at so much by an aggressive staring eye appearing to accentuate the effect of being stared at be the human who is operating the camera.

As for menus, your description of the Coolpix 8400's controls is quite illuminating and encouraging. It does sound very good. As you say it will be interesting to see what Nikon come up with if it uses the new Sony APS size chip. I can see definite advantages for the "Bridge Camera" type but I do not so far like electronic viewfinders. An optical finder is so much brighter and clearer and for general use, composing at eye level is to me more satisfactory. It gives you the impression of a much larger canvass showing more detail.

The new Nikon D200 sounds as though it will be a very interesting camera but no screen for live previews or to fold out for candids, of course.
Cheers,
John
 
Dear Jorgen and Gilbert,

I have seen street pictures from past eras which show children playing and ones which also include adults. These are to me fascinating historical as well as artistic documents but I personally like history and old photographs. Maybe some of these pictures would never have seen the light of day if they had been taken today.

It is sad that things have changed so much as the result of the behaviour of a few wrongdoers. I suppose it is always the minority who mess things up for the rest of us and of course it is better to be better safe than sorry, especially where children are concerned but I do think that this has gone too far. People do not seem able to understand that photographers can be photographers without any ulterior motives and that they can provide valuable and ineresting records.

There is a letter in this week's Amateur Photographer in which the writer comments that he was asked to stop photographing kayaks because there were children in some of them and that the member of the kayak club who asked him to stop said that even he was not allowed to take photographs of the kids.

There was general hate towards photographers after the death of Princess Diana in the Paris car crash when the speculation that the crash was caused by press photographers was at its height. Perhaps this antipathy still remains.

I have not so far experienced threatening behaviour when I have plucked up courage to take street pictures but I am always concious of the possibility.
Best wishes,
John
 
> > I'm sorry that I have taken so long to reply and hope that the thread > has not meanwhile lost its momentum but I have not been able to spend > much time at the computer over the last few days. > It can always be picked up.

> As for menus, your description of the Coolpix 8400's controls is quite > illuminating and encouraging. It does sound very good. As you say it > will be interesting to see what Nikon come up with if it uses the new > Sony APS size chip. I can see definite advantages for the "Bridge > Camera" type but I do not so far like electronic viewfinders. An > optical finder is so much brighter and clearer and for general use, > composing at eye level is to me more satisfactory. It gives you the > impression of a much larger canvass showing more detail.

Any time one moves from one type of camera to another, there is a period of adjustment. Going from a rangefinder where you are accustomed to looking through a bright window with a superb focusing mechanism and instant response, to a large-format field camera with a dim image upside down on grainy ground glass is not an intuitive transition. It is like a guitar player adding a mandolin - all the notes are in the wrong places - and it takes work to come to terms with it. You just don't buy a mandolin the afternoon of a gig and expect to play it any more than you would buy a CP8400 on the morning of a shoot.

In fact, SLR optical finders tend to be rather dark in comparison, specially with the slow zoom lenses that are now common. I shot with lenses in the f-1.2 to f-2.0 range mostly because the very fast lenses gave a level of illumination in the finder with which I could work. Now with budget lenses being f-3.5 to f-5.6 or even slower at the tele end, the view is dark indeed. I don't know of any zoom faster than f-2.8 at the moment. If they do exist, they are certainly rare and expensive.

Shooting in the very low light that I love, the screen is far more brilliant than the environment, due to its electronic nature. It &lifies the light. I see more with the monitor than I do with my bare eye! It is brighter. The CP8400 extends the view to several -EV beyond the previous CP5k. In a room dark enough to require a four second exposure at f-2.6, ISO50, the room appears brilliantly lit on the screen. Even at -1.0EV beyond that - eight second exposure - the screen has begun to dim, but is still quite usable.

I have no problem using the monitor in sunlight either. Of course, if I was willing to put the camera up to my face, I also have the EVF - the electronic view finder - which is both bright and completely shaded by its housing. I may use it on occasion if I need to totally reconfigure the camera in bright sunlight. A little easier if one is doing a lot of menu browsing. However, this is rare.

I do have a friend who uses his EVF on pretty much every shot and loves it with his CP8800, a sister camera. It has an eye adjustment, so the view is very sharp and clear even without glasses. However, I am tired of having a camera jammed into my face, and the monitor represents libertation for me.

A lack of finder detail never bothered me. I NEVER dwell in the viewfinder of any camera. The picture is composed before I even look into the camera, and the viewfinder is simply there to confirm that the camera agrees with what I see. This is true whether I am shooting SLR, rangefinder, view camera or mirrorless digital camera, in studio or on location. With a manual camera, the screen is used for focusing and framing, but it is the bare eye that sees the detail. The ground-glass, viewfinder window or monitor only confirms.

Dwelling in the viewfinder is the mark of the novice. I recall seeing so many tourists photographing their families while zooming in and out, squinting into their SLRs with one eye tightly shut, all the while the tension meter is going off the top of the scale in everyone in the shot. Working shooters barely glance into their cameras. They are looking for the next shot while getting the present one.

This is specially true of sports shooters. I followed a colleague as lead sports shooter on the newspaper, after he ignored this rule. He was photographing a college football match, dwelling in the viewfinder, using the zoom to frame the action. He completely lost track of the distance to the players until four very large armour-clad young men landed on top of him. He was in hospital for weeks with broken bones and internal injuries. Reality became the little movie the zoom lens was projecting on the glass in the camera, and he had no idea how close the players were until they flattened him.

I did a lot of auto-race coverage at super-speedways in the USA. Sometime about 2/3 of the way through a race there is invariably a car that blows a tire or gets tapped, goes sideways and sends half of the field or more into smokey swirling chaos - offering the fans a thrill and the shooters, great pictures. Working with a 200mm to 300mm lens, your view is narrow. Dwell in the viewfinder and you miss most of the spectacular shots. The wreck spreads over a large area. With manual cameras, you are focused on where it will happen, then it is a matter of seeing the trajectories of the race cars, and framing the spots where they will come together. You MUST work with both eyes.

A portrait studio photographer may only look into the camera at the beginning of the shoot, and then again if the setup is changed. A landscape or architectural shooter with a field camera would never dwell on the ground-glass, because it is so difficult to see. Use a magnifier for critical focus, stop the lens down and close the shutter then wait for the cloud to drift into place. Once the shutter is closed and the film holder inserted, there is NO WAY to see through the camera. View cameras have no view finders!

To move to the next level of photography, learn to use BOTH eyes, and use the finder - whatever variety - as little as possible.

> The new Nikon D200 sounds as though it will be a very interesting > camera but no screen for live previews or to fold out for candids, of > course.

And of course, it shares the curse of all dSLRs - dust. Any microscopic bit that lands on the sensor will be embedded in every image until it is delicately removed. When seen on an 8x10 print, it is anything but microscopic. Of course, dust can be avoided by never changing the lens, but that is really the only advantage of a dSLR. Dust is one of the big reasons why I prefer a sealed camera with a built-in lens and components to change the range. With a 35mm SLR, one does get dust on the occasional frame, but when the film advances, the dust is carried with it.

The built-in 24mm->85mm lens uses ED glass and is very sharp and crisp, and covers the range of the classic photojournalist kit and beyond (28mm or 35mm, 50mm and 85-90mm). One component gives me a range of 18mm->64mm, which I find quite ideal for perhaps 75% of all my shooting. Image quality is not visibly degraded by mounting this component. I have a second that gives me 140mm->170mm a medium long telephoto and a third that gives me 255mm, which I rarely use.

There is also a fisheye available which can be either a full-frame fisheye or the classic circular fisheye image. In the past it was of no consequence to my work, but now I am spending more time at virtual photography - 3-D modeling and rendering - than actual photography, and the program will use fisheye shots for image-based lighting. One can capture the ambient light of any actual environment and bring it into the program to light the scene that you have created there. It will also make use of the extreme dynamic range HDR files that the current version of Photoshop introduced. At this point, I am more involved in cartoonish stuff than precise realism, but should I want to go super-realistic, then the fisheye would be invaluable. http://www.larry-bolch.com/shade/

larry! http://www.larry-bolch.com/ ICQ 76620504
 
Larry:

I am overwhelmed and searching for words. I am reminded of some of the great air-brush work, Vargas, and the clarity of the outstanding cells from Disney.

Thank You.

Gilbert
 
Thanks Larry,
Your arguments are very convincing. I shall think on.

I do agree with your comments about using the viewfinder. So often the photographer will have you staring down the barrel of the lens for ages before finally tripping the shutter by which time all spontaneity has evaporated.

The best ex&le of good practice I have found recently was the photographer who photographed our daughter's wedding last month. He put the guests completely at their ease taking over 300 pictures very quickly and made the most natural people pictures I have seen for some time.

Have you seen the new Zigview digital angle finder? This attaches to an SLR viewfinder, digital or otherwise and gives you a rotatable 1.9" TFT colour display.

Here is a link:
http://www.warehouseexpress.co.uk/index.cfm?PHOTO/zigview/zigview.html

It looks as though it might be a useful device and could provide some of the benefits you mention, to a camera with a mirror. I have not handled or tried one though and obviously it is a compromise. It may be the best of both worlds -or maybe the worst!

The digital world is certainly moving fast. The anti shake technology which is becoming popular seems to me to be worthwhile and a great convenience provided it does not compromise the quality of the results.

I understand the dust problem. Olympus include a special "filter" for this, which apparently works, in their E system. I think that Canon may have some dust catching system too but I am not sure on this. The dust problem is one of the reasons I have so far abstained from buying a DSLR.

I just have not yet been convinced on the bridge camera concept but you are doing wonders in moving me towards that direction. I would like a larger sensor though and await more cameras with the APS size sensor.

I think that your "cartoonish" pictures are amazing and would love to know how you do them. From what you say, I gain the impression that you have a special program to help you do them.
Best wishes,

John
 
> Have you seen the new Zigview digital angle finder? This attaches to > an SLR viewfinder, digital or otherwise and gives you a rotatable 1.9" > TFT colour display.

With the Nikon F3, I have both a 90° finder that replaces the prism and a screw-in Nikon 90° device that attaches to the prism itself, so am aware of how handy it can be at times. However, a £115 device to turn a mirror camera into the semi-equivalent of a mirrorless camera seems a bit of a byzantine excercise when mirrorless cameras are not only ubiquitous but generally cheaper than the mirror designs.

> Posted by Gilbert James (Gjames52) > > > I am overwhelmed and searching for words. I am reminded of some of the > great air-brush work, Vargas, and the clarity of the outstanding cells > from Disney. > > Posted by John Strain (Jsmisc) > > I think that your "cartoonish" pictures are amazing and would love to > know how you do them. From what you say, I gain the impression that > you have a special program to help you do them.

Obviously my "virtual photography" has caught the eye of a few here. Since it is virtual photography, I suggest that anyone not interested skip to the next message rather than complain about off-topic.

There are a bunch of 3-D modeling, rendering and animation programs spanning a wide range of prices and purposes. All are virtual photography programs that use a software camera that works like a real one. Everything that I have ever learned about photography has applied to 3-D and 3-D has taught me a lot about photography.

Most programs present you with a workspace that shows the scene from above, front, right and in perspective. In this space you create objects and the environment in which they will be seen with powerful modeling tools. If you can imagine it, you can "photograph" it. The degree of realism is pretty much up to you.

Not only does the camera work in the same fashion as a hardware camera, so do lights. Both distant lights like the sun and local lights like a spotlight or light bulb. Some programs have a feature called radiosity, and it not only recreates direct light, but light that reflects around within the environment. With this, architects and designers can present a view of an unbuilt room to a client, showing how it would look at any time of the day or night with high accuracy, saving a lot of money and time.

At the moment, I am primarily working in the program Shade, which is ideal for quick creation of environments like you see on my site. It has an incredible camera. The camera is capable of still shots and movies. It has full view camera movements. You can type in the focal length of the lens you want in 35mm terms. It will do stereo pairs, panoramics and fisheye shots as well. When doing movies, it has the full six degrees of freedom to move, zoom and so on while shooting. If one wants to shoot a series of objects with several identical viewpoints of each, just place as many cameras as you want in the scene and toggle between them. The cameras are invisible to other cameras, so they don't get in the way.

One can also create as many lights as one wants, and of any type. Most programs give great control over light, letting you set parameters of sharp or soft shadows, intensity and colour for each unit.

Some programs also do image-based lighting. With Photoshop now incorporating the HDR file format, a bracketed series of fisheye shots can be done in an environment, combined in Photoshop with the full dynamic range of the light in the actual scene. This file can contain in the vicinity of a 70EV range!!!

Thus if part of a scene in a movie would be too expensive to actually build or do in reality, it can be modeled and animated in virtual space and blended with the actual film footage. Since it is lit with exactly the same light as the movie-set, the virtual and film blend seamlessly. A BUNCH of this was used in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. A lot of the Orcs had digital breath.

Shade, LightWave, Maya and SoftImage are all general purpose 3-D programs. Shade is affordable and a great place to start. LightWave, Maya and SoftImage are industrial-level applications. Bryce, Vue, World Construction Set and WorldBuilder are primarily aimed at terrain generation, with Bryce and Vue being quite affordable and the other two, high-end. Since most can use USGS elevation maps, actual locations can be recreated for military, ecological or planning purposes as well as art.

Poser is unique in being aimed at character animation. All the people in my scenes were generated from Poser. Rather than building people from scratch which is exceedingly difficult, Poser provides a starting place of a completed human or animal object. It then allows you to alter every characteristic, size, shape, race, age and so on. While a number of programs will accept Poser figures, Shade and Poser are both from e-frontier and are tighly integrated. Since current and proposed future projects involve people, this was the natural combination. There are two levels of Shade - standard and pro. I use the much less pricey standard version and it does everything I want. The high-end version is primarily aimed at architects and designers.

When the weather is not to my liking, I can still do photography of my imagination. I have the ultimately versatile camera with its unlimited arsenal of lenses and formats. I love the modeling aspect as well. Creating exactly the right object for the scene, whether it is a piece of furniture or a view camera. Shade provides a good variety of tools to created just about any object from scratch and great tools for creating its surface characteristics. It does particularly well with complex curved surfaces, using spline similar to the bezier curves in Adobe Illustrator - but in three dimensions.

Just added a few more s&les, including a closeup on a field camera, a panorama, chambered nautilus with a candy-apple red paint job and an attic rental suite which is more about shadow than light. 3-D is extremely accessible to anyone with a photography background and I would highly recommend it both for the pleasure it gives and the photographic learning it provides.

It does require the building of skills, and the initial learning curve can be a bit daunting. However, the satisfaction is immense. As I learn, the site will continue to grow and change. http://www.larry-bolch.com/shade/

larry! http://www.larry-bolch.com/ ICQ 76620504
 
Larry,
Thanks for the generous explanation. It sounds interesting. I'll maybe have to give it a go.
John
 
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