Gallery of stitched images

I put together a quick gallery of images that I stitched from multiple images from simple DSLRs to get a high resolution landscape for an upcoming howto article. The gallery can be found here. Enjoy!

Kayakers on Clear Creek in Golden

Last Tuesday I went to shoot some pictures of the Kayakers that are stunting on Golden's Clear Creek most of the summer. These people are fun to watch. I've tried Kayaking before but was constantly bailing out because contrary to quiet water, I could rarely get myself upright again after flipping in even slightly more rapid stuff. Fun, but cold sport. I shot all in jpeg on my D300 and as always focus and exposure were basically perfect everytime. Quite amazing. This is just a tiny subselection of the images I shot:











There are far more images on the smugmug gallery. See the whole set here as a slideshow on smugmug.
If you're a flickerite, a subset is found on my flickr pages here.

What does 12 MP buy you over 6MP?

After a few months in repair, my D50 finally came back working perfectly. This allowed me to compare the two cameras. One thing I noted is that the exposure meter is far more intelligent in the D300 than it is in the D50. The latter regularly underexposes by a full stop if you let it do what it wants. Another thing is resolution. Since the D50 is 6 MP and the D300 is 12 MP you would expect a considerable increase in resolution. It is a question how significant this is of course as the linear resolution increase is only √2. So I shot a few realistic images with sharp lenses using a tripod in the same location and same lighting and same exposure.

Here is the overview:


At this scale there is no difference whatsoever between the cameras when using Lightroom to develop the RAW except a small difference in color, so I didn't bother to put both up. Below is a detail. Left = D50, right = D300. Both are using default capture sharpening in Lightroom. Both can benefit about equally from some finetuning of the capture sharpening but it doesn't impact the comparison really.



And here is the D50 image scaled up to match the D300 image:


I did all cropping and scaling in Photoshop to avoid the very annoying bug in Lightroom that causes halos around strong contrast edges that even shows up when all you do is just cropping. The bottom line is far more detail in the D300 image and this is the cheap kit lens that came with the D50. Of course the image you see is a detail of a blowup of 42"x28" (I assume your screen is 100 ppi) for the D300 case and 30"x20" for the D50 case. When printed at something like 8x12, you will not see any difference between the cameras, except perhaps with a magnifying glass. These differences are smaller than you'd think at normal print sizes. Also, technique is far more important than sensor resolution in general. No sensor is going to save you from motion blur, unsteady hands, or incorrect focus. Most lenses, even cheap ones, are plenty sharp when used correctly. All a camera like the D300 does is focus faster and more consistent, expose better, and in general get out of your way more. I love my D50 for how light and simple it is and if you do not need the better framerate or better focusing, something like a D40 will work fine for you.

ISO noise quantified

Warning: geek content!

In my previous post, I looked at noise in bokeh areas on my D300. You can clearly see some noise at ISO200 in darker out-of-focus areas on that camera. At the end I showed that the noise is quantified in the jpeg filesize. Being the science geek that I am, I did a quick analysis on it. Here is the filesize plotted vs the ISO rating:



The red curve shows a fit to a simple square-root dependence on ISO. This is not just some arbitrary choice. If the noise is coming from simply photon-counting statistics, you expect approximately a square root dependence of the signal-to-noise ratio on exposure time. In this case, this means that the absolute noise should also scale with the square root of the ISO rating. Indeed, you can see, barring an offset of 129 KB owing to the fileheaders and the actual scene information, there is a square-root dependence of the filesize on the ISO speed. Interestingly, since the jpeg encode is a visual compression scheme, this should correlate with how visible the noise is as you could clearly see in my previous post. Also, at ISO 100, the amount of noise is indeed almost negligible as you can see from the negligible difference in size between the ISO 100 jpeg (144 KB) and the limit at (the impossible) ISO 0 of 129 KB.

Now there are some issues here that I have not addressed. 1. Lightroom might be doing more noise reduction at higher ISOs than it is at low ISOs, and 2: Jpeg filesize does not linearly correspond to the amount of noise. This is a toughie!
So you should just take this for what it is, despite appearances, rather unscientific! I do find it intriguing however, that the metric clearly seems to scale with visible noise and that the metric seems to indicate simple statistical noise, meaning that the amplifiers in the camera do not seem to introduce much noise at this light level.

Noise in bokeh areas on the Nikon D300

I usually shoot my Nikon D300 at ISO 200 (the default). However, in certain circumstances, I have noticed noise in darker out-of-focus areas (i.e. in the bokeh). You can completely remove it in Lightroom by just dialing in a luminance noise reduction of 5. However, this prompted me to check out the noise as a function of ISO in a realistic image using default RAW conversion in Lightroom instead of some silly test chart. The NEF was shot at 14-bits and using only lossless compression. I used a 50mm f1.8 lens at f2.8. Here is the awesome scene I shot:



Here is a 100% crop at ISO 100


ISO 200:


Clearly there is far more noise in the bokeh. There is very little chance you will ever see that in a print and as I said, you can take care of it easily with just a tiny bit of luminance noise reduction, but it might be good to be aware of it.

Now for completeness:

ISO 400:


ISO 800:


ISO 1600:


This is where I reached the maximum shutter speed on the D300 (1/8000 s), so I cannot show you any more. The D300 does very well even at ISO 6400 as I reported before. At the low ISOs, Capture really doesn't do much better than Lightroom in noise reduction for those who are curious to know. However at high ISOs (>800), Capture does far better.

Interestingly, if you look at the filesizes of the jpeg exports I made from the 100% crops at high quality, you can see the exact same trend. Jpeg size, due to the way the compression operates, correlates with noise as the agorithm cannot distinguish between noise and real information. Here is the list:

ISO Size (KB)
100 148
200 160
400 172
800 188
1600 212

Since the scene and lighting was exactly the same in each image, the only thing that is different is the amount of noise in the image. Amazing that the effect is that clear.

Next: Analysis of the filesize in terms of noise

High ISO noise in Lightroom and Capture NX

Together with the new D300 came a free copy of Capture NX, Nikon's dedicated RAW converter software. Apparently Nikon wants to push the use of this program. First, after trying it a little let me say that this program still has by far the worst user interface of anything I have ever encountered. In its current form it is a major disaster. The side panels are horribly designed and the way everything works is designed as an 80's X-windows program. Horrifying to say the least. What Nikon does know very well is how to deal with the data coming from their cameras. By default it gives great color and contrast. One other thing it does well is high-ISO noise. I shot the following image at ISO 6400 with the D300 and loaded it as a .NEF in both Lightroom (2.0 beta) and Capture NX. This is the default conversion (the camera was set to Vivid picture style and Capture picks that up, Vivid adds some saturation some sharpening and some contrast)



You see this camera is usable at this ISO. There is a little noise in the dark blue sky but pretty nice. Amazing how far this has come, the image is better than film at ISO 800. Now for some 100% comparisons. This is Capture default conversion



Pretty amazing if you ask me. The noise is very grain like as if it is film.
Now Lightroom. Left, default Lightroom conversion, right optimized noise reduction (about 50/50 in both luminance and chroma)


As you see, Lightroom's conversion is far noisier by default and it is typical digital noise. The more optimized conversion is still noisy and becomes splotchy. Not very good. You also see strange speckling around the lights in both images that is not present in the Capture conversion.

Conclusion: Not surprising since the software comes from the camera maker, Capture NX deals very well with high ISO noise. If only the program were not so horrible in its use that I dread opening it every time, I would use it all the time and import tiffs or jpegs into Lightroom from it.

EDIT: because of a request below, I added the Mac OS X (i.e. identical to Aperture - my trial license for Ap 2 expired) default system RAW library conversion. It looks like this:


Very similar to Lightroom default version but not as good as Capture NX's. Somehow the noise seems to be a little more even than in the Lightroom conversion, so perhaps it would be easier to deal with, but I digress.

Flickr video

Here is the same timelapse that you can see in glorious HD on my smugmug page but in a little flash movie generated by flickr. Much lower quality indeed, but I can at least embed it! It's stuttery the first time around so just hit play again to see it smooth.

Timelapse movie

I created a little timelapse using the interval feature on the D300 of the sunset in the park around the corner from where we live. The sunset was not very spectacular but it works. I think I'll do this more often. Check it out in full H264 High-Def glory by clicking on the link below:



I'll write down sometime how this can be done.

New camera

A recent mishap where somebody drove their car over my backpack containing my camera, breaking the lens out of the mount (luckily a plastic lens) and breaking the command dial (making the camera rather useless) made me realize I need a second camera. I usually borrow or rent a second camera for events but otherwise have been very happy with what I had, even if it was only a 6 MP machine. For landscapes I would often use film anyway or stitch multiple images together and the very sharp 6MP allowed for surprisingly large blowups (I've gone to 20x30 and they still look great and surprisingly sharp). Anyway, since there is a great deal from Nikon that is active on Adorama, B&H, ritz, etc, where you get $300 instant rebate on the D300 together with the 18-200VR, I went for it. Note that Adorama has already run out of them in just a few days! This camera is astonishing. I used the D200 and Canon equivalents, but this camera beats most of them in use and feel. I wonder what a D3 would be like? Next to being great in use (the AF system is a dream), it is sharp to the pixel (at least in RAW) and that screen is superb. Also, its jpeg engine is astonishing. I was playing around with it yesterday and shot this mêh scene of a child's slide on our deck. I am astounded by the color. Especially since this was pretty boring hard light.



That's straight (except for scaling and sharpening for the web at a larger size than you see here (follow the link) by LR2 beta) out of the camera. Some more here:







Now you have seen a lot of the silly stuff in our garden ;-)

RAW files for the D3 and D300

Just found these examples of RAW files taken with the new D300 and D3 and compared to the D200. Lightroom and ACR will read all these files, so you can easily compare them yourself. The white balance is wrong in the file, so use the eyedropper on the grey patches in the colorchecker to get good color. Shortly, the high ISO performance of the D3 is absolutely crazy. It is also amazingly sharp. At 1600 ISO, compare it to the D200 file. The D3 has gobs and gobs more detail. Even if you take the ISO all the way up with the D3 and compare that file to the 1600 ISO D300 or D200, you'll see far more detail. This might be the often discussed full-frame advantage. Quite extraordinary. Makes me lust for a D3, however new windows for the house are more important right now ;-)