Nikon Archives - Teton Photography Club

July 26, 2017August 1, 2017

Working in 16 Bit Mode

Memory is Cheap — Memories are Priceless!

I typically shoot in 14 bit and process in 16 bit in Photoshop as long as I can. Here’s why…

16 Bit Clobber and Recovery

The issue is not what you can see, or what your monitor can display, or what your printer can print—but what is under the hood of the file! I believe you will be amazed by the examples! (For this article, 8 bit vs 16 bit refers to Color Bit Depth while using Lightroom and Photoshop.)

The image above was captured with a Nikon D810 in 14 bit mode. I set that in the camera’s menus long ago and never looked back! The files are much larger, so they fill cards faster, fill the buffer quicker, and possibly slow down the frame rate on some cameras. You might consider these issues up front. You can always “downgrade” a capture during your workflow, but you can’t “upgrade” one. As seen in the screen grab, I export images from Lightroom to Photoshop by selecting the 16 bits/component option. Continue reading

February 7, 2015

Time lapse footage Old Bills

Old Bills vantage point

Old Bill’s Fun Run Timelapse

Some of my Old Bill’s Fun Run time lapse footage was used in the 2014 1% For the Tetons Video Blitz Film Festival. Check out the film here:

Any part with the race, banner or runners were my shots. There were taken with a Nikon D800, Nikon D300s, and a Sony RX-100 to create the footage for part of this film.

Time Lapse Shooting Tips

Nikon 85mm f/1.4 aperture

I used Nikon lenses with aperture rings to take all of the shot sequences to avoid flicker. When building up a time lapse video, flicker is the bane of time lapse shooters. It’s caused by subtle variations in the aperture setting when the camera takes pictures. You’ll never notice these in normal shooting but if you lay the shots down in a video sequence, the effect is distracting and ruins the video.

There are software tools to “de-flicker” or deflicker the video sequence. That’s all fine but it’s another step. All of Nikon’s new lenses are G series without aperture rings. I rarely use them but for time lapse. But when you need it, there’s nothing better. The only way to directly avoid this problem is to leave the G lens wide open or stop it all the way down. Both of these options aren’t as ideal.

Canon lenses and cameras used for time lapse shooting suffer from the same problem. If you are lucky enough to own a lens with an aperture ring and are thinking about selling it, consider that if you’re ever going to shoot time lapse, you’re selling off a superior tool.

The post Time lapse footage Old Bills appeared first on Aaron Linsdau.

November 21, 2014

Panasonic Lumix DMZ-FZ1000 review

It shoots very nice UHD (not truly 4k) video. There is some noise in the image but that’s to be expected for this price point.

For the body size and handling, it’s really a nice camera for the right person. I can’t use it for my general shooting for several reasons but if I want a stealthy UHD camera, this one just might fit the bill. At a price below $900, I was stunned just how good it actually was.

Image quality

Photo courtesy of Sava Malachowski, © Sava Malachowski

The IQ (image quality) of the camera for a still is pretty good, though it’s not a higher end Nikon or Canon. Don’t be fooled. In dark areas at low ISO it’s easy to see the noise. A huge zoom lens just won’t have the resolution for stills. For most, they’ll be amazed. But if you’re discerning, you’ll be only “okay” with the shadow performance.

If you click on the image on the right, you can see a small sized sample of the full image. The red box shows the 1:1 sample area of the image on the moose hide. For as good as the image looks in full screen, when you get down to the nitty gritty, you’ll see it’s “okay”. I didn’t have time to do a MTR test or anything, but those don’t translate well into “what does it actually look like” terms.

1:1 quality of moose hide, you can see noise in the image, 1/160, f/5, ISO 125, 63mm

But for video quality you get a very nice image. I was pretty amazed to see it on an iMac display, even though the image was interpolated. It was just clearer than I’ve seen HD. Really, it looked like HD played on a 120Hz TV display. That was the look. The video samples were shot at 60FPS, so perhaps that helped. It really looked like the real thing. I didn’t expect it to be that much better than HD. But if you stack up a 3-chip HD camera with better dynamic range against a limited range, small sensor like this, you might be pressed to tell the difference. Again in the shadows there will be noise. The again, what do you expect for a small form factor single chip camera?

Lens

The aperture goes from about f/3 to ONLY f/8. That’s really miserable for photography. Nature of small sensor cameras. Even though the specs claim f/2.8 to f/11, in the shooting I was testing it with, it only really gave me f/3 to f/8 to work with. That’s a tough one, especially in full daylight shooting.

That zoom and optical stabilizer is awesome. I’d love to have something that goes from 25mm to 400mm and does a real good job on my D800. If I did, I could dump a bunch of other lenses. But I’d need it to be f/2.8 and have it go to f/22. Oh well, I can dream.

Dynamic Range

We had a snow shot with moose and it worked pretty well. But the snow on the mountains was blown out in the video with zebras set to 95%. Again, it’s not a D800 but it’ll blow away your little basic point and shoot. But I think my Sony RX-100 probably still beats it for dynamic range.

View finder

The electronic viewfinder – not bad for a video camera, okay for landscape shooting but poor for sports/action/moving things. When you pan/tilt, you get an image jitter. The swim is very small but the smearing in the image will irritate you if you shoot an optical DSLR. EVF (electronic view finders) aren’t there yet. I worked at a digital night vision company where we went to great efforts to have zero swim, jitter or anything else and this isn’t even close. Then again, those systems were $60,000 and this is $900. You get what you pay for.

The info in the viewfinder for a video camera is very nice. It fits the bill of shooting things where a video camera would get you into trouble. For the price, the image quality is pretty amazing. Is there better dynamic range and such out there? Yes, The GH4 and upwards. But for what this is going for, it really makes UHD accessible.

Controls

The switch to go from zoom to MF – not a fan. 2 rings are more expensive, though. There’s the zoom rocker on the shutter release. Eh, it’s under a finger, so it feels like a little point and shoot zoom for the video camera it’s designed for.

The fully manual video camera mode – thank goodness! Not allowing me to control Auto-ISO ruins other camcorders/DSLRs. Locking down exposure is critical if you want professional-looking images.

The different programmable function buttons are nice for getting what you want. Some of the switch modes like focus control are appreciated. They’re not in ergonomic places like my D800 at all. There are buttons which are appreciated on a video camera but the layout leaves lots to be desired. Like all things, it’s something you get used to.

Autofocus

The autofocus – amazingly fast. I’m not sure what they put in there but it must be a hybrid phase/contrast focus system because it matches my Nikon D800 focus speed quite easily. However, when you need to control focus points, that’s where it falls apart.

Storage

You’ll need lots more storage to use UHD on this camera. Your puny little 320GB drive will be gone in no time shooting with this. Think 2TB drives minimum. Why do I say this? I’m editing my film, Antarctic Tears, which is a feature length film. And it eats up 228GB of my SSD drive. And that’s shot in HD. This camera has almost 4x the resolution. Even a 500GB SSD won’t even come close to supporting a feature length film. 4k/UHD video is what HD was to our computers 10 years ago. Be ready to spend a LOT of money if you want to really work with this.

Other items

Major video shooting issue: This thing has no earphone out. That is one major failing. Why in the world they left this out is beyond me. Perhaps Panasonic is trying to push you into a higher end camera. You might be able to use the AV out and cobble something together. Who knows w/o that cable.

If you don’t have ears on your video camera, you’ll realize only after the shot is over what went wrong. I can pipe audio through my ZoomH4n and listen there, as I can use that as my XLR input, but still. No, this doesn’t have XLR. Of course not.

ND filters for video – buy one. You’ll need one. Or two. For a 3-stop ND, I use this Hoya filter.

The batteries seem to konk out pretty quick, but we were shooting at 10 degrees F with wind chill. Buy more batteries.

You’ll need an UHS-1 SD card for it. UHD video eats up a LOT of card space. I hope you bought a spare hard disk or three. Editing this video – get Rocketstore Thunderbolt enclosure with a SSD drive with a fast computer.

Buy your Panasonic Lumix DMZ-FX1000 here at B&H Photo.

Thank you to Sava Malachowski of Sava Film and Open Range Films for the sample images and video. He had excellent footage to sample and work with in tough conditions, shooting in a Wyoming winter with dark animals and bright snow. There’s not much tougher.

The post Panasonic Lumix DMZ-FZ1000 review appeared first on Aaron Linsdau.

February 16, 2013

Camera features helpful for nature photography

The first few posts on this blog were what I would call introductory and general postings about the site and its photographs. In this and the next several postings I hope to address specifics about the equipment, techniques, and processing that are fundamental to nature photography. Since there are many experienced photographers, professionals and advanced amateurs, viewing this site, I hope the posts will generate questions, comments, and discussion - so please, join in.

Selection of a camera is about as fundamental as it gets when you want to take pictures of our natural world. While the brand of camera is not so important, the features available and the quality of the camera are crucial for good image capture. In other words, a good camera can be used poorly and result in mediocre photos but a bad camera, generally, cannot produce good photos. Having said that, there are many good point-and-shoot cameras and even mobile phones that can take very good photos, but at some point all serious nature photographers will want to take the plunge to a digital single lens reflex (dSLR) camera. Why do I think this is true?

The dSLR gives the photographer tremendous flexibility and choices when photographing in a variety of conditions and terrain. So what are the characteristics of a dSLR camera? The major difference between a dSLR and a point-and-shoot or super-zoom camera is the availability of multiple, interchangeable lenses (and the internal mechanics that allow this.) Interchangeable lenses give the photographer the choice to determine perspective, range of focus (depth of field, DoF), and composition of a photo. Changing lenses changes the "feel" of a photo and not just the sense of closeness to the subject. Modern dSLR cameras can use standard lenses, wide-angle lenses, telephoto lenses, and a variety of specialty lenses used in creative photography. Manufacturers of the lenses offer a variety of quality and, therefore, price of the lenses to allow lower cost investments initially and higher cost investments for higher quality as skills progress. Lenses are the most important and most expensive part of a nature photographers equipment and I will use a later posting to discuss lens selection in greater detail.

Other features in a dSLR camera that offer flexibility and creative control include the ability to move from automatic control of the camera settings to manual control of virtually all of the settings. You might think that automatic control is a good thing, and sometimes it is, but being able to adjust the settings manually can dramatically alter the quality of your photos. The three components of proper exposure of a photo can each be controlled manually on a dSLR camera. The aperture size determines how much light passes through the lens to the image sensor. Aperture, as we will discuss in more detail in the next posting, also is a key component of the range of focus or depth of field (DoF) in an image. Shutter speed determines how long the sensor is exposed to light coming through the lens. Shutter speed is another key component of exposure but also determines the effects of movement (either the subject or the camera) on the image. The third determinant of exposure that can be controlled on a dSLR camera is the ISO or the sensitivity of the sensor to light. These three components of exposure (aperture, shutter speed, and ISO) will be discussed in depth next time.

Another setting that can be adjusted automatically or manually on a dSLR camera is the focus. The ability to focus manually is crucial to the nature photographer who often has to shoot through a cluttered scene. Most auto focus systems adjust the lens to the point of greatest contrast of the nearest object in the area of focus. Sometimes this is the subject of the photo and sometimes it is a tree branch in front of the subject. With a dSLR camera you can focus manually or you can choose the point in the viewfinder that the camera will choose as the primary subject. Most dSLRs allow multiple ways to select the focus automatically as a single point, from multiple points, and even from points tracking a moving subject. Since focus is one of the five ways to ruin a photo, this flexibility is needed in nature photography.

Auto-focus speed is another key factor in selecting a dSLR camera. Shutter lag was a technical problem introduced by digital photography. There is nothing worse than pressing the shutter button and having the camera take the photo a third of a second after the bird took off! Shutter lag is still common in point-and-shoot and super-zoom cameras (although it is improving) while quality dSLRs capture the image when you press the shutter release.

Most dSLRs offer the ability to shoot in high speed bursts of images. This is very helpful when shooting birds in flight or a rapidly moving animal. The burst rates have increased from about 3-4 frames per second to well over 12 fps. This feature is useful in sports photography as well as nature photography.

While image sensors are improving rapidly in all cameras, dSLRs tend to have the largest sensors and the highest resolution in each manufacturer's product line. Sensor size and resolution are key components to high quality images and the ability to print these images at a large size. While the pixel count is highly touted in camera ads, it is really the sensor size and pixel size that determine resolution of the image. Larges sensors that approximate the size of 35mm film are referred to as full-frame sensors while smaller sensors are called crop sensors. There are advantages and disadvantages of each but dSLR cameras seem to be moving towards larger, full-frame sensors, even though the cost is typically higher.

The last advantage of a dSLR camera over others tends to be the quality of the construction. The dSLRs tend to be larger, heavier, and have a ruggedness with more metal rather than plastic construction and better seals to prevent dust and water from entering the camera and damaging the sensor or internal mechanics of the camera. These are important to the nature photographer but also create problems of greater bulk and weight when photographing in remote locations.

So like everything in life there are trade-offs when selecting your "perfect" camera. Features are critical, quality is essential, but there are many good quality cameras available that, when coupled with a quality lens, will produce amazing photographs.