Grinding Gear

So, the Shitty Camera Challenge is fixin' to start again, and I figured it would be fun to use the Nikon Coolpix 990 that was so state-of-the-art in 2000 but which definitely falls into the "shitty" category by modern standards.

Mine had been sitting on a shelf in the living room since I last played with it for this blog, back in...wow, it's been three years!

I pulled it down yesterday and the batteries were flatter than the horizon in Amarillo. "No problem," I figure, "I'll just get some fresh AA's out of the kitchen drawer." (I keep a well-stocked battery tray in there.)

I put the new batteries in the camera and turned the power on and...nothing.

Hmmm. Popped the battery compartment open and cleaned the contacts with a pencil eraser. Still nothing.

Blew air under the power switch and proceeded to pivot it back and forth vigorously. Apparently that worked, because the camera powers up now.

Fat Dan's Deli and Twenty Tap

"...television tuned to a dead channel..."

I stumbled across a neat (and very comprehensive) review of the game Neuromancer, which I have fond memories of playing with a friend at his apartment in Athens, Georgia, back when a 286 with EGA graphics was still a pretty decent gaming rig.

Go and check it out!

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Lenses I Live By: 50mm

The basic building block of any lens kit is, or at least used to be, the fast normal prime. In full frame terms, that's generally a 50mm lens with a maximum aperture of f/1.8 or faster. I have something like this for just about every system I use.

Nikon's excellent little 35mm f/1.8G is a great crop sensor prime, letting you isolate the subject and blue the background nicely.

Fuji makes a few 35mm XF primes of varying prices and maximum apertures, but on my Fuji cameras I like the 32mm f/1.8 Zeiss Touit. If you really feel the need for speed on a budget, Sigma offers their 30mm f/1.4 Contemporary prime for the X-mount, too.

The Zeiss makes me happy...

Still, given the versatility of modern zoom lenses, I usually only break out the 50mm equivalent when I need the really fast aperture. They do see more use than my 35mm wide-ish angle primes, though.

It comes in handy with cameras that aren't great in low light, like the small-sensor Pentax Q series, which has an 8.5mm f/1.9 prime that's a 50mm equivalent.

DSLR Pics: Triumph TR-3A with the Nikon D800

It's hard to believe that the Nikon D800 is over a decade old now. It's still an enormously capable camera and 36 megapixels is still rather a lot.

The image above, snapped on a Saturday afternoon in October, is a JPEG straight out of the camera. Like with all my cameras that can shoot RAW, I have the camera record one RAW file and one high quality monochrome JPEG. The reason for the JPEG is because that's the photo that gets shown for review on the monitor on the back of the camera when I chimp, and it keeps my head in that "light and shadow and texture" frame of mind.

Sometimes the JPEG itself is actually a keeper, too, like the one above. It should embiggenate quite nicely.  It was shot at ISO 200 and the lens was the 24-120mm f/4 VR zoom.

The actual color photo processed from the RAW is below.

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All those Redbox kiosks have been fossilized.

Further proof that if something has a CPU and a screen, someone's rigged it to play Doom...

The code that runs Redbox DVD rental machines has been dumped online, and, in the wake of the company’s bankruptcy, a community of tinkerers and reverse engineers are probing the operating system to learn how it works. Naturally, one of the first things people did was make one of the machines run Doom.

As has been detailed in several great articles elsewhere, the end of Redbox has been a clusterfuck, with pharmacies, grocery stores, and other retailers stuck with very large, heavy, abandoned DVD rental kiosks.

In case you think I'm kidding, here's a dude playing Doom on an old Kodak point & shoot camera.

Lenses I Live By: 35mm

I'm not a wide-angle shooter by nature. I rarely use the wide end of zoom lenses, so wide primes are not a thing I typically have in my kit.

The widest prime lens I use with any regularity is the Fujifilm XF 23mm f/2 R WR. With a field of view equivalent to a 35mm lens on a full-frame body, the compact little "Fujicron" is fast, sharp, and (like it says on the label) weather resistant.

When I'm shooting with longer glass on my Fujifilm X-T2, I'll bring the XF 23mm f/2 along, mounted on my X-E1, to handle wide interiors, streetscapes, and other similar chores.

Plus, I really love the way it looks with that retro vented hood. I keep telling myself that I'll be an ace street photographer with this setup someday... someday. First I'll have to overcome my reluctance to get up in people's grilles with such a relatively wide lens, though.

Tagging Photos

Jim Grey at Down the Road has a post up about problems he's encountered sorting, storing, and finding photos:

When I started making photos again in about 2006, I didn’t have any photo-editing tools beyond an ancient copy of Paint Shop Pro. But I didn’t have that many photos to store. I created a folder called Camera, created a folder for 2006, and created folders for each digital photo outing or roll of film. From the beginning I’ve named those folders with the date and often some information: “2006-08-15 Birthday” or “2007-10-11 Yashica MG-1 Kodak Tri-X.” I still do this.

He notes that, as the sheer number of photos he stores has grown, and as they cover a longer and longer period of time, he's having more difficulty finding older ones and wishes he'd been tagging them all along.

I feel his pain. Almost exactly.

I have two ways of sorting photos. Photos of a specific event or occasion, like a trip to the zoo or a museum visit or just a photo walk downtown, will get stored in a folder labeled "YYYY-MM-DD EVENT NAME".  Every January, I round up all the previous year's photo folders and move them into a "YYYY" folder and archive that inside my "Pictures" folder.

The random and incidental pictures, like ones of cars and dogs and squirrels and people that just get randomly shot during the course of a day get stored in a folder labeled with the camera that was used, e.g. "D700" or "1D Mark III".

Thus far this hasn't been much of a problem, but...

Yesterday I was looking at a photo I'd posted on Facebook and thought it might make a suitable subject for my car blog. I didn't note with which camera I'd shot it, but I did leave myself a clue in the caption: 

In the thirty seconds I had these open in Photoshop Bridge to convert them from NEF to JPEG, I grew a mullet and a flock of bald eagles landed on the front porch and started screeching the opening chords of Lee Greenwood's Greatest Hit.

So I knew it had been snapped with a Nikon, and I knew it had been taken in November of 2021 from the date on Facebook.

I spent probably thirty minutes scouring the following folders: Coolpis P7000, D2X, D3, D200, D300S, D700, D800, D3000, D5000, D7000, D7100, Nikon 1 J1, Nikon 1 J4, Nikon 1 V1, and Nikon 1V2 before finally looking in the folder of the one camera I was sure I hadn't used... and there it was, in the D1X folder.

I have really got to get better about tagging photos.

Baby Steps

Back in 2015, Bobbi and I went to the Indianapolis Museum of Art (I refuse to call it "Newfields", no matter what the current signage reads) to see the touring "Dream Cars" exhibit.

I brought along a few cameras. Two were SLRs, a Canon EOS 10S, wearing an EF 35-135mm f/3.5-4.5 zoom lens and loaded with Ilford Delta 3200, and the other was an EOS Rebel XTi wearing the EF 50mm f/1.8 "Nifty Fifty". There was also the Nikon Coolpix P7000 I carried in my pocket all the time.

Thing was, I still had a lot to learn (and also re-learn) about photography. For instance, all my SLR experience before I bought the Rebel had been back in the film days, so I didn't know anything about crop factor. I slapped the 50mm on there because of the fast aperture, but the APS-C sensor on the Rebel made it effectively an 80mm lens. It was unstabilized, the fairly primitive sensor in the XTi struggled in low light, and I had way too long of a lens for shooting in the tight indoor quarters of a museum.

Meanwhile, even with the high speed B&W Ilford film in the EOS 10S, the unstabilized kit lens really struggled with the lighting.

The only camera that I got any really decent results with was the Coolpix, which had a fast, stabilized zoom lens, and which I put in Program mode at ISO 400 and just let 'er rip.

Not only was the gear primitive and my lens choices questionable, but I was shooting SOOC jpegs and my metering bag of tricks had, like, only two tricks in it.

Given what I had available at the time, I'd have been better off with the unstabilized 50mm on the film camera and just going with the stabilized EF-S 18-135mm travel zoom on the Rebel.

I would love to go back in time with my Fuji X-T2 or Nikon D800...

Mirrorless Pics: Motorcycles with the Olympus E-M1X...

Of all my cameras, the Olympus E-M1X is easily the least fossil-y. It was announced in January of 2019, meaning it's barely over five years old; a spring chicken among the stringy old hens and roosters in my camera coop. They're still available new-in-the-box, although used copies are only about a third the price.

Still, although it was announced in 2019, it uses the same Sony-manufactured 20MP LiveMOS Four Thirds sensor first introduced in the 2016-vintage OM-D E-M1 Mark II, albeit backed up with dual TruePic VIII image processors, which gets it close to at least honorary fossil status.

I wish...

That picture of sleepy Huck was snapped with the Nikon 1 V2 and the 1 Nikkor 32mm f/1.2 portrait lens. That was the closest thing to a professional lens Nikon made for the Nikon 1 system. Well, that and the 70-300mm telephoto zoom.

I wish they'd made some pro-type zooms to go with the V-series bodies. A 10-45mm f/4, which would be a rough 28-120mm equivalent would be a banger.

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Small is Beautiful

An all-in-one "walking around" zoom lens is what's normally on my cameras. I like them because they're more versatile than a fixed focal length lens and have more reach than the typical 24-70mm pro zoom. They don't have as much reach as a superzoom. In non camera nerd speak, these are "5X" rather than "10X" zooms. 

The lack of focal length, however, is made up for by much better optics as well as larger available apertures over the most of the range of the lens. For instance, my favorite Nikon full-frame superzoom, the 28-200mm f/3.5-5.6, has a maximum aperture of f/3.5 at 28mm, while the 24-120mm f/4 VR is a third of a stop slower. But by the time you've zoomed out to 50mm, the 28-200 can only manage f/4.5, while the 24-120 will hold f/4 all the way out to 120mm.

The bigger hole lets in more light, allowing you to use lower ISOs or faster shutter speeds indoors or in the shade.

These lenses tend to be compact, but still fairly chonky, and that's one reason that smaller sensor cameras still appeal to me.

Thanks to the magic of crop factor, these are the equivalent lenses for full-frame, APS-C, and Micro 4/3rds:

• Nikon 24-120mm f/4 VR: 84x103.5mm, 710g
• Fuji 16-80mm f/4 OIS WR: 78x89mm, 440g
• Panasonic 12-60mm f/2.8-4: 68-86mm, 320g

That Micro 4/3rds lens on the Olympus, seen in the photo above, is almost an inch shorter, about a half inch smaller in diameter, and less than half the weight of the full-frame Nikon, yet it covers the same effective field of view and is a full stop brighter on the wide end, to boot. 

That's just shy of a pound's weight difference between the Nikon and Panasonic glass, and you notice that when it's hanging around your neck during a long day.

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Mirrorless Pics: Neighborhood people with the Fuji X-T2

Here are a couple more shots from the Fujifilm X-T2 and the XF 50mm f/2 R WR "Fujicron" short telephoto.

Mirrorless Pics: Neighborhood people with the Fuji X-E1

Some shots of the crew at Fat Dan's Chicago-Style Deli at 54th & College, using the Fujifilm X-E1 and the lovely little Zeiss Touit 32mm f/1.8 lens.

Being a roughly 50mm equivalent focal length, it's about as short of a lens as I'll ever use for portraiture, and its fast maximum aperture is good for making the subject stand out against a softly-blurred background. At the same time, f/1.8 and an APS-C size sensor is less likely to wind you up in those "Oops, I only had enough depth of field to get one eye in focus" situations than, say, f/1.4 on a full-frame.

Two Slots, Two Shots

So, when I have a camera capable of shooting in RAW format, I’ll set it up so that it records both a RAW file and a high-res monochrome JPEG with each shot.

I have the JPEG set to monochrome because that way it displays in B&W in the image review on the rear screen after each shot, and that helps me with the whole “light and shadow and shape and texture” part of photography. I mean, I can see the colors with my own eyes without even needing the camera.

I used to do the thing where I’d save the smaller JPEG on the slower slot in the camera (the SD slot, if the camera had both SD and Compact Flash slots), but now? Now I save JPEG+RAW to both slots, because I’m more worried about a card going toes-up than I am about ensuring maximum burst rate or whatever.

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Mirrorless Pics: Neighborhood people with the Nikon 1 V2

Out and about on an unusually chilly Saturday afternoon in mid-April with the Nikon 1 V2 wearing the 1 Nikkor 32mm f/1.2 lens.

Fuji XF portrait lenses...

I really enjoy candid... well, technically I guess "casual" would be a more accurate term ...portrait photography. I'm usually relatively close to the subject, so anything in the 85mm to 135mm focal length (in full-frame terms) range generally works for what I'm doing. Probably a fast 85mm would be my favorite axe.

I would love to get a dedicated portrait lens for my Fujifilm XF cameras. I'm in more or less constant danger of winding up with their 56mm f/1.2 or 90mm f/2 if I find a deal on a used one.

The only thing that's saved me so far is that I got a smokin' deal at Roberts on a used XF 50mm f/2 R WR. While the 75mm equivalent focal length is a little shorter than I find ideal, it's compact, fast, and sharp as a tack. It sure spends a lot of time on my X-T2.

Blast from the past...

An ad from a 1999 issue of FamilyPC magazine for the new Sony Mavica digital camera!

Mirrorless Pics: Neighborhood people with the Nikon 1 V2

I had the Nikon 1 V2 and the 1 Nikkor 32mm f/1.2 portrait lens with me yesterday. Even though I set an upper ISO limit of 800, the tiny 2012-vintage 14MP Aptina-made 1" sensor does get noisy.

Despite lacking VR stabilization, the whopping f/1.2 aperture on the 32mm lens allows usable speeds in reasonable indoor lighting.

Mirrorless Pics: Neighborhood people with the Fuji X-E1

These are straight-out-of-camera JPEGs from the Fujifilm X-E1 and the wonderful Zeiss Touit 32mm f/1.8. This is one of my favorite combos, pairing a compact rangefinder-style body with a nice, fast standard prime.

DSLR Pics: 1952 Chevy truck with the Canon EOS-1D Mark III

This photo was shot with the handy EF 24-105mm f/4L IS general purpose zoom lens mounted on the Canon EOS-1D Mark III.

It was shot in RAW and processed through Adobe Photoshop's RAW converter using the "B&W with red filter" setting.

Like I usually do, I have the 1D Mk3 set up to record both a RAW file and a high res monochrome JPEG. Even though I (almost) never use the straight-out-of-camera JPEG, this ensures that the image shown on the back of the camera is in monochrome and helps me keep my head in that B&W mode, looking for light, shadow, and texture rather than colors.

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DSLR Pics: Holden with the Canon EOS-1D Mark IV

It was a gorgeous day on Sunday, sunny but cool, and I figured it would be a primo day to get some squirrel photos on the way to and from lunch.

So I grabbed the EOS-1D Mark IV and EF 70-200mm f/4L IS combo, which is pretty much my favorite squirrel-spotting rig. On the way out the door I noticed Holden lounging in his perch atop the cat tree in the living room, which puts him at roughly eye-level. The bright March sunlight filtering through the drapes made the shot irresistible, so I put the camera in Aperture priority mode, opened the lens wide, bumped the ISO to 3200 and (with help from Bobbi to get the lad to look around some) started snapping.

The bottom photo is processed from the RAW and the top is a SOOC monochrome JPEG. 

On the way to lunch I didn't see many squirrels. I guess when you're arboreal you don't venture out of your drey much when the branches are waving in a 10-15mph breeze.

I did, however, see this Eastern cottontail doe...

Mirrorless Pics: Neighborhood people with the Fuji X-T2

The Fujifilm X-T2 is the least fossil-y camera I have. Despite being three generations old (Fuji's up to the X-T5 now) its release date in 2016 makes it the newest interchangeable lens camera I own.

As a result, the low-light performance is mind-boggling to me. If I'm shooting indoor candids by available light, I'll open the lens aperture wide and let the camera pick the ISO and shutter speed.

These photos were both shot with the Fujinon XF 50mm f/2 R WR lens cranked all the way open. The camera selected ISO 2000 for the upper pic and a whopping ISO 12800 for the lower.

The sharpness achieved at a five-digit ISO seems amazing, considering that a decade earlier anything over ISO 400 was an unusably noisy mess.

I really like the 50mm "Fujicron". It's so compact but offers a good focal length and fast aperture for indoor candids.

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High ISO

Canon EOS-1D MkIII & 24-105mm f/4L IS, ISO 3200

While the Nikon D1X could go up to ISO 800 and the Canon EOS-1Ds Mark II went all the way to 1600, I was leery of using either one at more than ISO 400 for fear of unusable amounts of noise.

It wasn't until 2007, with the release of the Canon EOS-1D Mark III and the Nikon D3 that 1600 and 3200 became practical settings, at least in my opinion.

This seems impossibly quaint here in 2024, when I'm seeing friends posting images from Canon R6's and Nikon Z7 II's at five-digit ISOs with no really noticeable noise, but it was a big deal back then.

Nikon D3 & 24-120mm f/4G VR, ISO 1600

Canon EOS-1D Mk III: The Need for Speed

One of the problems with early DSLRs, especially when shooting in RAW, was the time it took to record image files to the storage device.

Back in 2001, the Nikon high-res D1X pro body would shoot at 3 frames per second, but it filled the buffer with only six RAW (or NEF, in Nikon-speak) frames. A couple years later, the consumer-grade Canon EOS Digital Rebel could nearly equal that frame rate at 2.5 FPS, although it filled its buffer in only four shots and then required a full "five Mississippi" count until the buffer was cleared.

The big revolutionary breakthrough was the Canon EOS-1D Mark III. Released in 2007, it came with a pair of Canon's DIGIC III image processing chips (as opposed to the lone chip found on lesser Canons) and these worked in parallel to allow not only a blistering 10 frames per second max speed, but it took a full thirty RAW files before the buffer finally tapped out and needed time to catch up. If you just wanted to shoot JPEGs, you could hold the shutter button down for a full eleven seconds before the buffer needed a breather. This was a 20% increase in frame rate and a 50% increase in buffer capacity relative to the 1D Mark II it replaced.

The sound of a mirror and shutter working at ten frames a second is noticeable. It was pushing the limits for the DSLR at the time and wasn't appreciably surpassed until the 14FPS EOS-1D X of 2011.

The Wrong Lens

I almost threw the big 80-400mm f/4.5-5.6D VR lens on the Nikon D3 when I headed out the door for lunch yesterday, but opted to stick with the old 80-200mm f/2.8D push-pull zoom instead.

The latter doesn't have as much reach, but it's lighter and less bulky, and the fast aperture makes it a pretty fair jackleg portrait lens.

So of course I no sooner round the corner at the end of the block than I encounter three squirrels chasing each other all over a tall-ass oak tree.

A 200mm lens on a full-frame camera is long, but not wildlife-photography-long. On top of that, the 12MP sensor of the old D3 doesn't give a ton of leeway for saving a marginal shot by cropping the bejeezus out of it.

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DSLR Pics: Neighborhood people with the Canon EOS 7D

The EOS 7D was something new for Canon. When it was released in 2009, it didn't replace the then-current EOS 50D, but rather it slid into an entirely new niche above it.

Up to that point, the two-digit EOS bodies had occupied an unusual spot in Canon's marketing strategy. Because of the high cost of the pro-oriented 5D and 1D bodies, the two-digit line had to serve two audiences: Enthusiasts who wanted a feature-laden camera, as well as pros on a tight budget.

So they were rugged metal-bodied cameras, fairly weather resistant, but also had the various "Basic Zone" modes like Sports, Portrait, Landscape, et cetera, that are beloved by more casual users.

When the 7D appeared, it was essentially a pro-grade 5D Mark II body, but with an 18MP APS-C sensor in place of the 21MP full frame unit. Gone were the Basic Mode settings, replaced by a battery of user-programmable presets.

Over time, the two-digit line lost its metal body and weather-sealing while the 7D and later 7D Mark II carried the torch as crop-sensor pro bodies, popular with airshow and wildlife photographers for their frame rate and the effective 1.6X focal length bump they gave Canon's big telephotos.

The pictures above were shot with an EOS 7D and Canon's excellent EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 IS USM zoom lens, which is an "L" lens in all but name. They're straight-out-of-camera monochrome JPEGs.

The 7D remained in the catalog nearly five years before being superseded by the Mark II version and used ones today can be found for well under two hundred dollars, which is an incredible amount of bang for the buck.

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