Mirrorless Pics: Indiana World War Memorial with the Nikon 1 J4

One of the best things about the Nikon 1 J4 is it lets me use the word "antepenultimate" in a sentence, because after its launch in January of 2014, Nikon only released the Nikon 1 AW1 and the 1 J5 before discontinuing the entire Nikon 1 line of cameras. Their first attempt at a mirrorless system had been a marketplace failure.

"Antepenultimate" happens to be my third favorite word. Anyway...

On a visit to the Indianapolis World War Memorial the other day, I mounted the little 1 Nikkor 10mm f/2.8 lens on the 1 J4 and tucked it into the space in my Lowepro Event Messenger 100 bag that normally holds the long 30-110mm zoom lens.

On the 1" Nikon CX-format sensor, the 10mm lens offers the same field of view as a 28mm lens on a full-frame camera. Wide angle, to be sure, but not crazy wide. I can always use the practice with a wide angle lens, because I don't really "see" images at fields of view much wider than the one offered by a 40 or 50mm lens.

I keep the Nikon 1 cameras set up to save each image as both a high-res monochrome JPEG and also as a RAW file. The photo of the World War Memorial above is an unedited JPEG straight out of the camera.

The photo below is lightly cropped. It shows off the level of detail that can be delivered by the 18MP 1" sensor, especially at its base ISO of 160.

After exploring the inside and outside of the Memorial, we ventured a block south to University Park.

It was a gorgeous day for early November in Indy. Nearly sixty degrees by lunchtime with a bit of a breeze and hardly a cloud in the sky.

I still don't really have that eye for wide angle lenses I'd like, but I'm getting a better feel for them.

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Digicam Pics: Around SoBro with the Nikon Coolpix S6500

Released in January of 2013, the Nikon Coolpix S6500 is right at the cutoff date for what is considered a "fossil" on this blog.

There are only six years separating it from the Panasonic DMC-TZ3 from the earlier post, yet the technological gulf between them feels far more vast than that.

The 2007-vintage Panasonic has a 28-200mm equivalent lens in front of a 7MP CCD sensor, while the 2013 Nikon packs a 25-300mm equivalent lens and a 16MP Backside Illuminated CMOS sensor into a package that is slimmer, lighter, and altogether more pocketable. It also has built-in WiFi & GPS, a host of optional automated portrait features to remove dark circles under eyes, add color to cheeks, and even whiten teeth.

Further, where the Panasonic had a $330 MSRP, suggested retail on the Nikon was only $220, and I picked up this one as an open box sample at Best Buy in 2014 for only eighty bucks.

This is because by 2013, the pocket camera market had entered freefall following the introduction of smartphones with truly usable cameras. With a Samsung Galaxy SII or an iPhone 4 in their pocket, most folks had their snapshot needs covered. Digital camera sales had peaked in 2010, with CIPA reporting over 120 million cameras sold, while just three years later had plummeted almost by half, to 62.8 million.

Here's the SoBrosaurus at the widest angle:

And here we are zoomed in on just his noggin:

Even at an equivalent focal length of  257mm, the Nikon vibration reduction in the lens works pretty darn good. That's 1/40th of a second at f/6.1, ISO 400.

It's pretty crisp and detailed in Photoshop. Of course, there's no shooting in RAW and no manual modes of any kind. You can futz with the white balance, the ISO, and the metering, but that's about it. There's no driving stick shift with this camera; you have a dizzying array of presets and special effects, but everything's processed to JPEGs right there in the machine.

"Look, Ma! I can shoot in old-timey sepia!"

This is a handy little camera if all you need is a fast 'n' friendly pocketable superzoom. That 300mm lens lets you do things you can't do with a cell phone, and the camera's smaller than a deck of cards, so it's not any real hassle to carry in pocket or purse.

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Vintage DSLR Pics: Flowers in the Rain

It was raining off and on last Sunday, and there's no DSLR that I trust in the wet as much as I do an Olympus Four Thirds pro body. The E-3 and E-5 are absolutely tops in the weather-resistance category.

This photo of a morning glory speckled with raindrops was taken with an Olympus E-3 and the Zuiko Digital 14-35mm f/2 zoom lens.

The next night we got our first real hard freeze of the season and all the morning glories along this neighbor's fence are wilted and gone until next year.

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Digicam Varieties: The taxonomy of point & shoot cameras.

Peak digicam years started in the early Aughties, say 2002 or 2003, when prices on usable ones got low enough that most consumers could justify one. They ended probably around 2011 or 2012, when cell phone cameras like the ones in the iPhone 5 and Samsung Galaxy SII started getting good enough for most people's simple snapshooting needs.

Before that you had your basic compact point & shoots. Everybody had one of these for taking pictures to put on MySpace or eBay or send in emails. They usually came in a few different price tiers, and sometimes manufacturers would offer a more fashion-forward line, too.

Then there were the travel zooms, similar to your basic compact in size and form factor, but generally offering longer zoom lenses.

Enthusiast or Luxury compacts had optical viewfinders, manual modes, and allowed for shooting RAW. They usually had physically larger sensors, too.

Adventure cameras were like your basic compact in terms of functionality, but came in ruggedized, waterproof outer shells.

Bridge cameras tended to be almost the size and shape of small DSLRs, with the same array of manual modes available, and usually had extremely long zoom lenses, to make up for not having interchangeable glass.

Nowadays these are mostly all gone except a smattering of Adventure and Bridge cameras, with a few Enthusast compacts that mostly cater to the hipster street photography market.

Cell phones have eaten the rest.

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Digicam Pics: Around SoBro with the Panasonic DMC-TZ3

Playing around with the Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ3 from 2007.

From about the early Aughties until the early Twenty-Teens, digicams actually came in a variety of types as manufacturers tried to slice the market ever finer. The TZ3 came out in 2007, a year when Panasonic alone launched over a dozen different models that could loosely be termed "pocket digicams", not counting larger bridge cameras or DSLRs.

The TZ3 was one of two "travel zooms", hence the nomenclature. Panasonic's travel zooms were pocket-size cameras with long zoom lenses ("10X" in consumer-speak, "28-280mm equivalent" if you're a shutterbug) that should allow you to do it all when you were on a trip. You could take landscapes, closeups of architectural details, or bring that scenic castle across the river closer without having to "zoom with your feet".

The TZ3 differed from its stablemate, the TZ2, in having a 7MP sensor to the 6MP one on the lesser model, as well as a 3" LCD screen versus the TZ2's 2.5" screen. They both sported the same 4.6-46mm f/3.3-4.9 MEGA O.I.S. lens, with the TZ3 having a higher MSRP at $330.

Here's a wide-ish shot of the SoBrosaurus, a frequent test subject of mine...

It was heavily overcast, and even with O.I.S. or "Optical Image Stabilization", which is Panasonic's trade name for their lens-based image stabilization, the little camera had difficulty returning a sharp image at the long end of its zoom range in that light, fighting both camera shake and Panasonic's own heavy-handed noise reduction. In retrospect, I should have set maximum ISO at 400 and taken my chances.

Colors on the little 1/2.35" CCD sensor are somewhat muted under the dim lighting...

...but pop nicely when the sun comes out.

I guess it's back on?

I'd lamented before that my plan to do some extensive work with Nikon's 1 system of CX-format mirrorless cameras had hit a snag and I was calling it off.

Finding a working 32mm f/1.2 at Roberts (UsedPhotoPro), however, has me fired up to try again. I even have a brace of adorable miniature Speedlights!

Olympus E-300 EVOLT review, part 2…

(Continued from Part I...)

The DSLR market… heck, the whole digital camera market …was way different in 2004 than it is now. It’s even different than it was in the mid ‘teens before cheap digicams were crushed by the increasing abilities of camera phones.

Due to the price of sensors, early DSLRs were marketed directly to professional photographers, the sort of people who could write off camera purchases on their taxes as a legitimate business expense. Sure, some well-heeled amateurs bought the early Nikon D1’s and Canon D30’s in 1999-2000, but interchangeable lens digital cameras remained a phenomenon reserved for people who could blow quite a wad on one. 

By early 2004, the first “inexpensive” DSLRs had hit the market from Canon and Nikon. The Digital Rebel from Canon (sold elsewhere as the 300D) stickered for right at a grand with a kit zoom lens, and Nikon’s D70 went for the same sticker price for just the body; adding a lens to the Nikon took the tariff to twelve ninety-nine.

Looking back at the DSLR market from its sunset years, it’s common to refer to the lowest price models in any manufacturer’s catalog as “entry” or “beginner” cameras, but you couldn’t really classify these cameras that way, since they had to serve two market niches. One niche may have been actual beginners, but the other was photography enthusiasts who just hadn’t been convinced to spring for a “serious” digital camera yet.

Bear in mind that the thousand dollar Rebel or D70 in 2004 was selling for the equivalent of sixteen hundred bucks in 2023 dollars.  These days that’s a sum of money that will get you solidly into the ranks of “prosumer” cameras.

When Olympus jumped into this market in 2004 with their second DSLR, the EVOLT E-300, they had to make a camera that wouldn't intimidate novices, but would offer enough control to avoid alienating advanced amateurs.

So the dial on the top offers the usual PASM modes for the latter, as well as the little icons of a face, a mountain, a running dude, and the cryptic hieroglyph that signifies a backlit subject to appease the former. In addition, there's a "SCENE" setting on the dial that drops you into a menu of more than a dozen other presets, to include everything from "fireworks" and "night portrait" to "museum" and "document".

Bobbi's rental Tiguan in the foreground, my '94 GT in the background
Olympus E-300 & Zuiko Digital 14-45mm f/3.5-5.6 

In 2023, the E-300 has several downsides.

While it's capable of taking perfectly adequate photos in capable hands as long as one stays within its limitations, those limitations are pretty severe.

The camera's ISO range is limited to 100, 200, and 400 settings, and the vintage Four Thirds CCD-type sensor is hella noisy by the time you're at 400. Compounding this problem is the fact that, if you pick up a used example and nobody's bothered to update its BIOS, it will only work with the old Four Thirds kit lenses that existed when it was new. I have several good pieces of fast Four Thirds glass, but the first time I tried mounting the 12-60mm f/2.8-4 on the camera, I thought I'd bricked it. It took turning it off and removing the battery for a hard reset to get the thing up and running again.

Further, the Porro finder is a dim and cramped little tunnel that will leave you pining for the subpar pentamirrors found on a D3000 or Rebel XTi.

All in all, unless you are just chasing a retro experience for giggles, collecting old Olympus DSLRs, or trying something a little challenging, I'd probably pass on an E-300 for actual use.

My pal Bug behind the bar at Fat Dan's in SoBro.
Olympus E-300 & Zuiko Digital 14-45mm f/3.5-5.6

Fossils at the Fair, Part 1

The Canon EOS 5D Mark II hit the market in November of 2008. It sported a 21MP full-frame sensor and was the first Canon DSLR (and the first full-frame DSLR from anyone) capable of recording 1080p HD video. The 5D Mark II was used to shoot things as diverse as the opening credits of Saturday Night Live, whole episodes of House, and scenes in Hollywood movies like Act of Valor and The Avengers.

At launch, the MSRP for the camera was $2,699 without a lens. Nowadays you can pick up a nice used body for $350 or less, which is about as inexpensive as a good full-frame DSLR gets. A lot of these cameras were picked up by enthusiastic amateurs based on the hype and then sat largely unused until their owners decided to trade them in on some new mirrorless hotness or other. Batteries are still available new and of course you can use the entire library of Canon EF lenses without having to worry about an adaptor.

One of the attractions of using the Canon EF lens mount are its "L"-series lenses, identified by their red rings, high quality construction, premium optics, and (typically) enormous price tags.

The latest version of the L-series midrange zoom, the 24-70mm f/2.8L II, goes for something like eighteen hundred bucks at BezosMart, but you can get the older version from the 1990s, the 28-70mm f/2.8L, for around six bills at KEH Camera Brokers if you're willing to settle for "Bargain" grade. (And you should be, because KEH grades very conservatively. Their 'BGN' would be 'VG+' most places.)

Introduced in 1993, the 28-70mm f/2.8L was noted for its optical qualities and indeed still holds its own at DxOMark. I use mine on my 50MP EOS 5DS without worrying about it not being sharp enough on the super high res sensor.

So there you go. If you're willing to shop used, you can get a very competent professional DSLR body and lens setup for eighty percent off.

(Cross-posted at the other other blog.)

What counts as a fossil?

Ten years is my cutoff line for "fossilization" for electronica.

With the march of time, that means that cameras like the Canon EOS 5D Mark II qualify. It was introduced at the end of 2008, just in time for Christmas shopping, and discontinued in December of 2012.

Still, though, it feels weird to call a 21MP DSLR that's capable of shooting HD video a "fossil".

Time marches on. The Sony Mavica was a wonder in its day, too.

Taken with an EOS 5D Mark II

E-300 update...

Just needing to gather up some more photos with the Olympus E-300 EVOLT to illustrate the second half of the review.

Here's a loaded baked potato shot in indirect sunlight at base ISO of 100 and a pistol shot on a heavily overcast morning at the max ISO of 400. (Well, maximum unexpanded ISO. But it's noisy enough without faking ISO 800 or 1600.)

Both were taken using the Zuiko Digital 14-45mm f/3.5-5.6 kit lens, more about which in the closing part of the review.

Old Enough to Vote

Had the Nikon D1X out to keep the shutter exercised yesterday. With a 21-y.o. camera, you don't take that for granted. Sooner or later it will snap its last photo...but that day wasn't yesterday!

The staff at Fat Dan's is friendly!

The problem with the D1X for indoor work by available light is my paucity of Nikon DX lenses. The best DX lens I have for the purpose is the 16-80mm f/2.8-4E VR, but the D1X is too old to control the electronic diaphragm on that lens. There's the 17-55mm f/2.8G, but it's not stabilized and it's a bazooka of a lens; very unsubtle.

I went with the 18-70mm f/3.5-4.5G, which is also not stabilized, but at least is compact and light. The 18-70 was originally a kit lens for the then-new D70 in 2004. The lens was discontinued in the early 'teens, but is a hidden gem in the Nikon DX lineup. Inexpensive and tack sharp, even dudes like Thom Hogan speak well of it.

With an old camera like the D1X, your maximum realistically usable ISO is 800, and even that's pushing it, as you can see by the noise in the portrait I shot.

It's hand-held, 1/125th of a second at f/4 at a focal length of 34mm in aperture priority mode with the lens cranked as wide open as it would get.

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Digital Fossils

In a Telegram conversation, I remarked that the 7" Kindle Fire tablets that Amazon is selling for the price of dinner for two at Applebee's would have been props on Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Marko replied "If the Fire had existed when TNG was still running, it would have been the most powerful computing device on the planet by a fair margin. Weird to think about."

He's not wrong, either.

I remember back in the days of dialup and BBSes, call it 1990 or so, one of the rotating sig lines in my SLMR (Silly Little Mail Reader) file was "And you may tell yourself 'This is not my one gig drive'."

My boyfriend at the time had a 386DX 33 with an HDD that was so huge that it had to be partitioned into virtual drives. Like eighty whole megabites or something like that!

Coincidentally, the SD card slot on my computer right now is occupied by a 64GB card from an old Nikon D7100. Each 24 megapixel RAW image file takes up over 30MB. 

My wristwatch has higher screen resolution than a Sega Genesis.

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Olympus E-300 Review: Part 1

Olympus launched their first DSLR, the E-1, to much fanfare in 2003. Not only was it the first DSLR from Olympus, it was the first interchangeable lens system camera designed from the ground up for a digital sensor, rather than being adapted from a film camera.

Unlike Canon and Nikon, Olympus didn’t have a huge installed user base of autofocus lens owners they had to lure to digital, so they started with a clean sheet of paper for their sensor and lens mount.

As part of the Four Thirds consortium, along with Kodak, Panasonic, and Fuji, they used a smaller sensor, which would be less expensive, an important factor in those days when image sensors were still phenomenally spendy. The E-1 had a ruggedized, weather-sealed magnesium alloy body, an innovative ultrasonic vibrating sensor cleaning mechanism, and resolution equivalent to or better than the contemporary Canon EOS-1D and Nikon D1X despite only costing $1699 (about 2800 bucks in 2023 dollars).

Almost simultaneous with the launch of the Olympus E-1 came the next shot fired in the DSLR wars, from Canon, who announced a stripped down consumer DSLR with a plastic body shell for under a grand. The 6.3MP EOS 300D, sold in the US as the Digital Rebel, hit shelves for $999 with a bundled 18-55mm kit lens. Olympus returned fire in 2004 with their second DSLR, a consumer-grade 8MP camera named the E-300, which sold for $999 with a Zuiko 14-45mm f/3.5-5.6 lens included in the box.

The E-300 had three selectable autofocus points, had an ISO range of 100-400 (expandable to 800 or 1600, but don't bother), shutter speeds up to 1/4000th of a second, and could shoot 2.5 frames/sec...at least for four frames, at which point the buffer was filled.

Despite the lack of a viewfinder hump (due to its odd Porro finder system) and small Four Thirds sensor, the E-300 wasn't meaningfully smaller than its competition from Canon, although it offered more megapixels for less money.

Part two of this review will have some photo results and conclusions!

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Portrait Photos With the Olympus E-510

Olympus's DSLR cameras have been discontinued for more than a decade now, but that doesn't mean they can't still snap a decent picture.

The E-510 was their midrange offering from 2007 that introduced the Panasonic-designed MOS sensor to the Oly DSLR lineup, replacing the Kodak-manufactured CCD sensor used by the earlier cameras. 

Its predecessors had already introduced dust reduction and live view to the DSLR market, and to those features the 10-megapixel E-510 added in-body image stabilization, previously a Pentax exclusive.

I've been out shooting with my E-510 lately, using the excellent Zuiko Digital 12-60mm f/2.8-4.0 zoom lens, which has a field of view equivalent to the classic 24-120mm focal length zoom lens on a full-frame sensor.

Here are a couple of casual portraits snapped with this setup at my neighborhood hangout, Fat Dan's Chicago Style Deli...

Time Machines

The D2X is long in the tooth, but I still get a ton of use out of mine.

Just think about it, when the Nikon D2X was new, that Camaro was only twenty-three years old!

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Sensor Sweep

Interestingly, I happened to get photos of the same subject at the same time of day, albeit about a month apart, with two different cameras of broadly similar vintage and capabilities.

It's midafternoon, I'm sitting out front of Fat Dan's on College Avenue, and here comes that gorgeous Elm Green Volkswagen Karmann Ghia!

The first time is August 31st, and I've got the Nikon D700 wearing the compact 28-200mm f/3.5-5.6G super zoom.

The D700 came out in 2008 and packed the 12MP full-frame CMOS sensor and EXPEED processor of the previous year's pro D3 camera into a smaller body. Priced at $2999, two grand less than the D3, it lost some features, like the vertical grip and larger battery, the second card slot, and was downgraded from 9fps to 5fps, but it was still ruggedized and weather sealed. 

The 28-200 lens mounted on it favors compactness and focal length range over ultimate optical performance, but it's a Nikon and still does a pretty good job.

This was shot at a focal length of 95mm in Program mode with the camera set at its base ISO of 200, and the camera went with 1/400th of a second at f/10.

About a month later, early October, I'm sitting the same place around the same time when here comes the Karmann Ghia again!

This time I had a Canon EOS-1D Mark IV with the excellent EF 24-105mm f/4L IS general purpose zoom lens mounted.

Released in 2009, the $4999 EOS-1D Mark IV was Canon's top-of-the-line pro camera aimed at sports and wildlife photographers and photojournalists. It had a 16MP APS-H sensor, slightly smaller than the full frame one the company used in its studio & landscape oriented -1Ds series. This is because it prioritized frame rate; the Mark IV could blaze away at 10fps until the buffer filled.

The 24-105/4 "L"-series lens has a field of view equivalent to a 31-137mm lens on the 1D, due to the 1.3x crop factor of the APS-H sensor.

I was shooting in Aperture Priority mode at f/5.6 to ensure reasonably fast shutter speeds at the base ISO of 100 in the late afternoon sunlight.

Both images were shot in RAW and minimally processed through Photoshop's Camera RAW convertor.

It's interesting that a decade and a half on, the prices of the cameras have decreased dramatically, but the relative price gap remains fairly consistent. Nice used D700s are running around $300-400, while a 1D4 is still going to set you back six or seven hundred bucks.

Both lenses are discontinued. The 24-105mm f/4L IS has been replaced with a "Mark II" version. The handy little 28-200mm f/3.5-5.6G, a marvel when it was released, lacks an internal focusing motor or any kind of stabilization, and is therefore not amenable to being used on mirrorless cameras or most Nikon DX DSLRs.

It's fun to use these old pro cameras I never could have afforded when they were new. They were built to last and plenty were traded in with a lot of life left in them. There are D700s running out there with a million documented shutter actuations; if you run across a used one with only a few thousand on the clock, it's barely broken in.

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Two is one and one is none...

So what do you do with dual card slots in a camera, you ask?

Well, it depends.

Back in the day, when you had the one SD slot and one Compact Flash slot, it was common to record a JPEG to the SD and the much larger RAW file to the CF, since read and write speeds on Compact Flash were higher.

It's as common these days to have both cards of the same type, but some folks still use them like that. Others will have the second slot set up as an overflow when the first one fills.

I shoot everything in RAW these days, and so I record simultaneously to both cards, using one as a backup in case a corrupted card is unable to be read. That way if I shot a whole day's worth of photos at a class or event or something, all is not lost if a card craps the bed.

The only time I do differently is in the Fuji X-T2. I love Fujifilm's JPEG film emulations, and so I'll record RAW to one SD card for post-processing in Photoshop or Lightroom, and then a film emulation JPEG of Velvia or the like on the other card.

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Grumble...

Here's a gripe...

Olympus's E-3 DSLR came out in late '07 and was roughly comparable to the Nikon D300 and Canon 40D. It had two card slots: A CF card slot like a normal camera and a slot for Olympus's almost-proprietary xD card. It couldn't record to both simultaneously, and you couldn't even set it to switch over automatically when whichever one you were using filled up. Oly was just clinging to xD like grim death and wanted to sell cards, I guess.

Anyway, a couple years later the E-5 came out. An updated E-3 with HD video, 2MP more resolution, and some other tweaks, it was the last gasp of Olympus's Four Thirds DSLR system, and the closest to a true pro body they'd yet made. They even bowed to the inevitable and replaced the xD slot with an SD slot like a normal camera.

Guess what? You still can't write to both slots simultaneously.

WTF, Olympus?

Project Evolution...

Sometimes I get a little carried away with a project idea...

Nikon F5 > D1X > D2X > D3

The need for speed...

One thing I noticed when I was shooting the D1X last month was how quickly the buffer filled up. I popped off several shots at that Caddy as it rolled by and the camera made me stop and let it catch up at something like seven or eight.

This confused me as all the media about the camera, even when it was new, claimed the D1X could shoot three frames per second for 21 consecutive shots before the buffer filled. 

The sports-oriented D1H had less resolution but could blaze away at 5 FPS for forty shots before it bogged down. That's a full eight seconds with the shutter button mashed; enough time to cover an NFL play from the snap.

The disconnect, as I soon figured out, was that I was shooting in RAW, which was not as often done in the earliest days of digital. That buffer that held twenty-some JPEGs only holds six or seven .NEF files (Nikon's proprietary RAW format.) You can count "two Mississippi" and then you're done until the buffer's flushed out, or has room for another image.

From a retrospective on the D1X's predecessor, the original D1:

The super fast speed was partially hindered by the settings. While JPEG processing was really fast and almost instantenious, switching to RAW cause the camera to crawl. Storage time went sky high, 45 secs per photo not uncommon. People complaining today about slow CF/SD cards shoud respect that a microdrive could only deliver 0.5 MB/sec and the D1 electronics limited the fastest CF Cards (12x Lexar) to data rates well below 1 MB/sec.

I was using a 133x Transcend 2GB card, probably capable of receiving data a lot faster than the old D1X could send it, so at least the buffer probably cleared faster.

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