IMHO: AF-S DX Nikkor 4/12-24mm

This is the first in what could eventually become a series of articles that describe my own very personal impression of working with my lenses. That's why the post has that big "IMHO" in the title. I do not provide optical facts here, but my personal opinion. A technical review of the lens can be found on PhotoZone for example.

I bought Nikon's DX wideangle zoom about 1.5 years ago, and I use it quite often. I like playing with the extreme wide angle effect. More or less recently, Nikon has replaced it by the 10-24mm DX which offers even more wide angle. The newer one is - IMHO again - a quite desirable lens, especially because it still goes to 24mm on the long end (it does not have a constant aperture of f/4 anymore, but that's really not a big issue for me). Those are the two focal length's at which I use the lens the most: 12mm and 24mm. Much more seldom it's something in between.

The original 12-24mm DX is a "gold ring" lens, indicating some extra high quality, or something. I don't know, because I can't really say that it feels so very "extra". It's rather lightweight so the build quality feels not that impressive. The "light" impression is something that I maybe associate with the zoom ring operation - it could be a little stiffer for my taste. The lack of aperture markers on the distance to focus scale is sad but true for so many modern lenses.

The newer 10-24mm DX doesn't have the gold ring anymore - and I dare say that Nikon knows why. If there's one thing that gets on my nerves very much it is chromatic abberrations (CA), and like many other DX/consumer zoom lenses from Nikon, this one has plenty of it! And by plenty I mean that the CA are visible not just in the 1:1 view, but in the downsized version of the image when I "zoom to fit" in Lightroom.

This is a 1:1 view (click on the photo please, the actually size is 900x600 pixels), and believe me, you DO see this in the on-screen version of the full image (remember, I'm using the S5pro, so a 1:1 crop of the 12mpx raw image is not really 12mpx).


CA...(FinePix S5Pro, 1/125s @ ISO 100; f/11, 12 mm DX)

Yes, this is the extreme corner of the image (upper left), but nevertheless... for an otherwise not very color-intensive photo, this is pretty bad.

Of course, CA can be fixed in post processing, and the newer Nikons will automatically fix it for the JPEGs as good as possible. But sometimes, when you have very fine details in the corners, the corrections "overlap" and turn black twigs against a white sky into blue twigs against a white sky. That's not very desirable for me. CA get on my nerves so much because fixing them in post means fiddling around in post with two sliders, and you never can make it disappear evenly everywhere.

Conclusion: I'd test the competitors (especially the Sigma 10-20mm) more thoroughly should I ever have to make the decision for or against a wideangle zoom on DX again.

What will Nikon do?

Usually I do not comment on camera development... and I know that being against the megapixel race is very common at the moment... but given that a Canon EOS 5D Mk II body with 21mpx costs about the same as a Nikon D700 body with 12mpx, and that I'm not very interested in high ISO performance as a landscape photographer I wonder if Nikon will provide a tool for those of us who want more megapixels. Hmmmm.

Website Update

I've recently (well, not so very recently) updated my website after reading an interesting article on one of my favorite photography blogs, The Online Photographer - the article is called "The Tenset" and Mike, the main T.O.P. editor suggests that photographers put their ten favorite pictures very prominently up front in their web presence.

With a little help from a colleague with l33t (that's an interesting read!) HTML skillz ;-) I was able to add AutoViewer to display my personal favorites selection (at the moment it's photos from 2009, and it's a nineset) in a neat presentation - it's using Flash, which should be replaced some day, yes... but it was a quick and convenient solution for me.

Organisation

Sometimes, when I look at fellow photographer's harddisks (to be precise, the chaotic mess that is their photo collection on disk) I remember that it was exactly the same for me back then... and that I should write a blogpost to share my way of organizing my photos today.

But I just found out - I don't have to. It's not a big surprise that - once more - Brandon Oelling already covers all aspects of organizing a photo collection in his excellent blog. It's a four parted series of articles, for easier navigation I directly paste the links here:

1. Data {Part 1}
2. Folders {Part 2}
3. Filenames {Part 3}
4. Derivative Files {Part 4}

Other than that, I can only add: use keywords, keywords, keywords (for the Picasa users: tags, tags, tags!). Building your own keyword "library" in Lightroom can be bothersome, but it's totally worth it because it is SO easy to browse your photo library by keywords, set up smart collections that really deserve that name, etc. etc.

If you're publishing your photos on some photo sharing service like Picasa Web Albums or flickr, you can do so many nice things with tags/keywords! Like searching for them. :-) Want to see my personal favorite abstract photos in my Picasa Web Album? You can search for combined tags like "fav,abstract" in Picasa Web - and use the result!

Quality Control (Part 3)

While I'm talking about "Quality Control" I can't resist to make a statement on the big flickr groups too. It's just too obvious that the big groups are - IMHO - not much more but a collection of average snapshots nowadays. Everyone just adds their stuff and the admins of those groups apparently have a very low (if any) standard for the quality of their group's content. Maybe my expectations are too high - when I look at a group called "The Forest" (over 50k photos!) I'd expect beautiful forest photos - and not blurry snapshots of people taking a walk in the woods (of course, beauty and art are the most arguable and subjective things to define. I just share mine for the sake of giving an example).

And then these flickr group admins and members run around and add a plethora of butt-ugly invitation badges and awards to photo comments (something like "OMG! This photo screams photographer! Add it to the scream of the photographer group! Now! Or we'll all die!!!" - I cannot decide if that is pathetic, awkward, hilarious, or all of it -- because if there's one thing that my photos never do is scream, and neither do I!).

I wonder: who's happy to contribute a good photo to a giant pool of mediocrity?!

And then there's the photos on flickr that are in something like 50 group pools - indecision? Maybe. For me, it only shows so very clearly the flickr group problem: I dare say that, for every photography situation, there are at least three groups on flickr. Maybe more, but the ones with 5 items and 1 member don't count. :-P People are looking for their audience - so they add one photo to something like 10 groups that all have the same topic.

For me, it's only logic to stay away from the big groups and pick small and strictly moderated groups. Not each of my submissions might be accepted, but that keeps the quality of the group high. It's just totally not worth to spend time browsing group collections of thousands of boring photos. There are so many wonderful photos on flickr, but most big groups are degenerating into a showcase of dilletant averageness. That's a pity.

One of the few groups that I find absolutely worth checking out: Fine Art Classic Black and White Landscape. So far, none of my photos has made it into the selection. And that's not a problem (but what is a problem is that it is impossible to find out if a photo has been rejected once it was submitted...).

If anyone can recommend noteworthy flickr groups just leave a comment. :-) Thanks!

Flickr photos in the feed

Those of you who read my blog with a feed reader have already noticed that the photos that I post to flickr automatically appear in the feed, too. This (IMHO) nice feature is made possible by the "Photo Splice" feature of feedburner. I hope you like it.

(I think that the current online world has far too many places one has to visit "manually" to keep up with "things", so I try to aggregate. I wish there was a way to include Picasa Web Album publishing to the feed!)

Quality Control (Part 2)

I ordered one of my own prints at the german artist platform "mygall" to get an idea of the appearance. That was just before christmas, and when it arrived (I had it sent to the office) I got a notice from one of my colleagues that it's damaged - the glass was broken. I thought that these things can happen once in a while and inspected it.

The packaging was practically a joke. How any of their framed products can arrive at a buyer without getting damaged (at least if glass is involved) is a mystery to me. The framed print was roughly wrapped in bubble wrap, and around that was cardboard - and that was it! No filling material to stabilize the product, hinder it from moving around and damped vibration during transport. Poor!



I left it there at the office, gave them a call, claimed a replacement which the friendly person at the telephone of course granted me. That was 2 weeks ago. I haven't heard from them ever since, nor has the replacement arrived. I can understand that, it was christmas & new year, they might haven taken a time off, but nevertheless, a short message with an order confirmation and a price 0f 0,00€ would simply have made things clear for me. As it is now, I don't know if there's anything in the making, if they forgot me, or whatever.

So, today was my first regular day at the office again, and I inspected the product closer now. Let's see what the description on the website says for the framed prints:

"Unsere hochwertigen Holzrahmen machen aus mygall-Kunstdrucken stilvolle Kunstwerke. Ultraklares Premium-Acrylglas bietet bruchfesten Schutz und lässt Ihr Kunstwerk noch leuchtender erscheinen."

(translation: "our high quality wooden frames turn the mygall Fine-Art prints into classy pieces of art. Ultra clear premium acryl glass offers break-proof protection and lets your art appear even more glowing")

The reality is a bit different from that. The "high quality wooden frame" turns out to be a light-weight coated MDF (ok, I think MDF is made from wood fibres, but is that what you expect when you read "wooden frame"?). How break-proof the glass is might be arguable due to the poor packaging, but why and how this is called "ultra clear premium acryl glass" I do not understand. It's a thin, standard 2-3mm glass. The passe-partout was poorly cut and had some curves where it shouldn't. And when you take the whole product in your hands it's surprising how lightweight it actually is (without the glass, I mean - I carefully removed the cullets).

The print quality itself is OK - it's a tiny bit darker than what I see on my calibrated monitor, but it's no problem. Detail is exactly the same as I have on screen (which is to be expected with today's high resolution photo printers).

So much for that. All in all - I'm disappointed. Especially by the cheap MDF frame and the unprecisely cut passe-partout. I removed the link the MyGall from the left sidepanel of the blog for now, and I won't upload new photos.

Addendum: of course. One day after posting this, I got the replacement. The packaging was the same, but it arrived undamaged. And it's good! And it actually confuses me more, because now it is a real wooden frame indeed. The passe-partout is perfect now too - and it has a slighly different color. The first one was plain white, the new one is like a little bit of creme/beige. This goes along with the black & white print better, actually. It seems that mygall has different subcontractors that do the actual printing & framing. It bothers me that the quality is so different. If someone orderer through "my" gallery there now and would get the quality that I got first (the damaged one) I'd be unhappy. If it was of the quality of the replacement delivery, that would be ok.

Quality Control (Part 1)

While I'm virtually travelling in the online photography world, it becomes more and more obvious to me that the combination of "digital photography" and "online photo sharing" has one major crux - and that's the absence of some sort of quality control.

What I'm up to (once more) is: please - show less photos, and choose those that you show wisely. I'm not saying that I don't have that problem. It usually starts like this: I come home from photo-walk-ing my dog, the memory card filled with something that I considered worth trying to make a photo of (yes, that's where the quality control starts already!), import them into Lightroom, and the memories are still fresh, the eagerness to explore the new photos, process them, share them with the world as fast as possible because these new photos are grand, majestic, the best ever made (so far;-) ...I think it sounds familiar to a lot of dedicated hobby photographers.

Just in case you didn't notice: I'm not talking about the documentary photography in which one preserves the memories of an event for friends and relatives. :-) But even there, a tighter selection with less photos would often make these albums more enjoyable. Whenever I get a Picasa Web Albums notification like "XYZ has added 127 photos to the Christmas album" I simply pass. I don't look at it. How can one evening result in over 100 successful photos? Imagine those people would shoot film - they'd all be starving while the owners of photo labs would all drive Rolls Royce cars.

Depending on the situation, light, equipment that I carry with me (sidenote: I recently re-discovered my monopod in the trunk of my car, ahem ahem - it's quite a nice supportive tool when I don't want to haul around the "big bag" with tripod and everything, but just the camera and one or two zooms) this might be something from two or three to hundreds of photos. I try to get the best exposure, so that's usually two or three shots, and with scenes with a lot of action and/or rapidly changing conditions (such as animals, or clouds moving along a mountainside) I might take a big sequence of photos of a single scene to be able to pick the best one at home (try to get 5 swans in a row and none has it's head under water).

When I look at other's online photo albums, I quickly become bored if I see two or more very similar pictures. So I try to pick "the one". The single best exposure, the best shot. And that's not easy, of course not!


"The tall ships" (FinePix S5Pro, 1/125s @ ISO 320; f/5.6, 300 mm DX)

I have eight photos of that very fleet of swans (and of course, there was always one which had it's head under water...). And something like 50 more with different angles, numbers of birds, etc. etc. - all are photos that are very much alike, and I like many of them. But how much would the impact of that lovely golden reflection (of bare trees and bushes) with the swans be reduced if I'd choose to show 3, 4, 5, maybe even 10 photos of that series?

And that's why I try to be my own quality control. I'm not successful all the time, but I try the best I can.

Happy New Year 2010!