The awesome new Nikon 70-200 mm f/4 VR

Warning: To those interested mostly in my pictures, please ignore this nerdy gear related post.
After quite a bit of analysis and renting lenses (I like lensrentals.com I settled on the new Nikon 70-200mm f/4 VR lens as a good compromise between weight and image quality. It came in the mail a few days ago and I tested it out the first chance I got two days ago. I knew it was good but I am still astounded at the enormous detail you can get out of this when used correctly. Here is a sample image:

Snowy Canyon. Bigger and prints.
Nikon D600, Nikkor 70-200 mm f/4.0 at 70mm, f/5.6, 1/50s (handheld), ISO 100.

Of course this a web image so you won't really see how sharp this really is, so here is the central portion of the image with the top of the little S in the road showing.

I did not optimize this image for retina displays, nor display sharpen it. The only real adjustment in Lightroom is a +1EV exposure adjustment ( I forgot to overexpose for the white snow). So on retina it will not look as good as it does on normal screens. Just look at that detail. On most computer screens (usually around 100 ppi), you are looking at the equivalent of a 60"x40" (1.5 x 1 m) print.

Here is another example:

Powdered sugar. Bigger and prints.
Nikon D600, Nikkor 70-200 mm f/4.0 at 120mm, f/8.0, 1/30s (handheld), ISO 100.

That is handheld at 1/30s at 120 mm! Now check out the 1:1

Pretty amazing if you ask me.

Evening over Denver

Impressions of the great smog cloud ;-)
These are some images I took testing out a rented Nikon 70-200mm f/2.8 lens. Truly an amazing lens. Incredibly sharp, even hand held. Heavy though. Be sure to click through for much bigger versions.

Denver dusk panorama. Buy a print. On flickr. On Facebook.
Stitched from 17 handheld images, Nikon D600, Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 at 70mm, ISO 800, 1/80s, f/5.6

Color layers. Buy a print. On flickr. On Facebook. On Google+.
Nikon D600, Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 handheld at 200mm, ISO 1800, 1/200s, f/5.6
On the original you can see the individual cars on Colfax avenue. You can also see that air quality sometimes leaves something to be desired in the Denver metropolitan area. The blocky structure up front is NREL's new solar covered parking garage.

Perils of photographing a waterfall

The image I posted yesterday needed some cleanup. The misting was so strong that within a few seconds, my filters would be covered in drops. Too fast to prevent by working fast, so I knew that digital tools would have to be involved in rescuing the images.

Right: Before extensive Photoshop spot healing tool work
Left: After

I had lots of trouble with drops on the filters as the below image will make very clear:


Amazing what is visible at 11mm and f/22. Obviously that image is a total loss apart from the novelty of showing it here. The dark corners are due to the stacked ND and polarizer and are visible when zoomed out all the way to 11mm on the Tokina 11-16mm and largely disappear when I apply lens distortion correction in Lightroom and crop a little. The price of stacking filters on a ultrawide lens I guess.

Vroom Vroom

Stop!

Just playing with my new Tokina 11-16 mm lens. Fantastic piece of glass.

Shooting a panorama using a fisheye lens

Some time ago, I built myself a panoramic head that allows for full 360 degrees panoramas in both space angle directions. The point of such a head (I'll post some pictures and instructions later) is to allow you to rotate the camera/lens combination around its entrance pupil and not its nodal point as you will often read, to avoid parallax. Now I used to shoot panoramas using my normal wide angle lens of 18 mm (28 mm equivalent in35 mm cameras) which made it necessary to shoot 32 portrait-oriented pictures for a full panorama, 4 at 60 degrees down every 90 degrees, 12 at 30 degrees down every 30 degrees, 12 at 30 degrees up, and 4 at 60 degrees up. Rather tedious indeed. So I got
myself a fisheye lens (the 10.5 mm Nikkor) which has a much wider field of view. I experimented with some patterns. The most popular on the web seems to be to shoot 4 pictures in landscape horizontally at 90 degree angles and then make a nadir and apex shot. These are very tough to stitch, so I settled on a much smarter strategy that gives way more overlap between shots and is far easier to accomplish since you do not have to change the camera from landscape to portrait orientation, but you can keep it on its side. The pattern is simply 4 pictures at 30 degrees down every 90 degrees and then 4 pictures 30 degrees up every 90 degrees, but shifted 45 degrees from the bottom row.



This can then be easily stitched in a program like hugin to the result below: