Apr 26, 2012 | Field Reports
I thought after a few emails and a phone I’d better explain my post of yesterday, What’s Your Favorite D4 Feature in a little depth (just to avoid more emails). The D4 is new in my camera bag, it is an expensive tool and like any tool, I wanna know what it can do. If part of that D4 price tag is paying for a 10fps, 72 file buffer, I wanna know if nothing else if I’m getting my monies worth. Yeah, I can sit in my office and hold down the hammer and see it work, but that’s not good enough for me. So when I had the opportunity last week to blast away as each B-25 took off for the Doolittle Reunion, I thought it was the perfect field test for this system. The combination of the D4 having to autofocus, fire and write over and over again was a great stress for the system and proved to me, it works. You get MORE then your monies worth as far as I’m concerned in this system.
Just so we are clear though, I was testing the system, this is not my shooting style! Like I’ve written many times before, I shoot in “sniper” mode. That is taking one shot and getting it right. Does this mean that I never lean on the hammer? Hell no, at times I do it just because if nothing else it sounds great! But it’s not a method I use to get the shot the vast majority of the time. The biggest reason is because when you shoot astroblast, you have a ton of images to edit when you’re done. I don’t like making more work for myself. But I wasn’t about to have a product advertising it can perform like this and not test it. It was kinda ironic to me that that very same night after satisfying myself the system works, I actually needed it in an air to air shoot. Knowledge to me is confidence and when you’re working for a client, confidence in yourself and your gear can make all the difference in getting the shot. And that’s what photography is all about!
Apr 26, 2012 | Field Reports
You might remember a few weeks back my looking for and finding an easy and inexpensive way to clean my sensor brushes. Well, during that process I went looking for other sensor cleaning solutions. My current MLP Ed sent me a great product shot he had done of Copper Hill brushes so it made me think about their products. I contacted them and while I was in Dayton, their box arrived. I just got to FL and my first opportunity to work with them. THEY ROCK!!! First, their brushes are gorgeous and really inexpensive. Next, their cleaning swabs are killer (seen pictured here)! You use a “common handle” over and over again, simply swapping out the cleaning cloth. This is not only environmentally friendly and really inexpensive, its the same basic system (but not the tools) Nikon uses to clean sensors. I can carry the one handle and a tone of cleaning swabs for pennies and no space with the Copper Hill system. So while I love Visible Dust, I’m switching to Copper Hill!
Apr 24, 2012 | Field Reports
I put it in words the best I can, check it out. Who knows, it might just help your exposure
Apr 24, 2012 | Field Reports
Ever since I started shooting, I’ve been a basement shooter. I didn’t buy high ASA films and the vast majority of the time I don’t crank up the ISO in digital. It’s a matter of quality and craftsmanship. I have been pounded by folks asking about the D4, high ISO and noise performance and didn’t intend to really do any testing there since, well, I don’t raise the ISO. This past week I broke with my norm and raised the ISO. It started with the morning launch that started long before the sun rose. I figured I had nothing to loose since I couldn’t shoot otherwise so raised the ISO to 3200 and shot. And I have to admit, I really liked the results. I continued to play with raised ISO all week when using it as a tool made sense like shooting in the USAF Museum in Dayton (great place!). These were taken at ISO1600 and when I really zoom in I can see noise but I made a 24×30 and know the average person wouldn’t see it. More importantly, it didn’t zap the sharpness which is important to me. So while I’ll still shoot in the basement, I might use higher ISOs more often now that I’ve tried it and like it.
Apr 23, 2012 | Field Reports
The specs say there is less so many were concerned the new “greener” D4 battery just wouldn’t deliver. This past week I pounded the D4 bigtime with the biggest day being nearly 98GB of capture, still & vid combined. I mentioned I rented two batteries to CYA only to never use them. The D4 battery never went dead on me after a day’s use delivering the same performance I was use to with the D3. So with shooting and chimping and AF operation, the new battery didn’t let me down.
Apr 23, 2012 | Field Reports
“How do you get the most out of the D4 file?” This is a very common question right now and rightly so. To be honest with you, I’ve been trying to answer that question for my own images. I’ve tried everything out there like Lightroom 4 and ACR 6.7 and some others you don’t know about yet and I’ve found the program bringing out the most and best from the D4 file right now is NX2. Now I’d not used NX2 in over 3yrs so had to go and get it to test and was quite surprised it looked exactly like how it did 3yrs ago. Yeah, there are a couple new sliders and it’s a bit faster, but otherwise, it’s still the same. The main thing though is NX2 has the secret sauce pulling out the small nuances of color and exposure that other programs simply weren’t. It adds to my workflow processing time but the additional look to the images is worth it to me.
Now before the call for side by side comparisons come flying into my inbox, lemme just say I’m not going to post any and here’s why. First and I’m still surprised how many don’t realize this, but images posted on the web are sRGB color space. Those I’m looking at and comparing are in the ProPhoto color space. There is a BIG difference between those two when it comes to subtle details that you’re not going to see on the web. Second, just because I like NX2 better doesn’t mean you will. How do you find out one over the other? You process the same file in other programs and do your own side by side. That’s why I’ve not posted them here.
While I was comparing, I checked out HDR processing and I found the Nik’s HDR Efex Pro did a better job with D4 files over the other options on my computer.
The top image is of the Texas Flying Legends Museum Aleutian Tiger P-40 and “Dakota Kid” P-51D that I shot air to air this past week from the tail of the B-25J “Panchito.” It was processed in NX2 by simply launching NX2, opening the file and doing a Save As. That’s it, nothing else. The bottom image was processed in CS5 using HDR Efex Pro with all its defaults except I move the Structure slider up a couple of points. The D4 just keeps me hopping as I learn more and my photography grows just a tad more with age.
