Curious? Hit the external link and bask in the knowledge.

So, after seeing a used Canon EOS-1D body come in this morning, I got curious to sit down and see just how bad things have become with pricing, and what features you get for those prices. And, I came up with the following information:

Nikon

Nikon was the first of the big two out with a digital SLR. The D1 was introduced in the now-dusty year of 1999, and had a massive 2.7 megapixel sensor and a price tag of $5,500 body only (1999 currency). Because getting high-yield sensors was difficult and expensive, Nikon opted to use a lesser-known film size, the APS-C standard, for its sensor size, creating the 1.5x crop factor DX format that it still uses in many bodies to this day. If we compare specs and prices adjusted for inflation, this is how it stacks up next to its newest incarnation:

Canon

Canon was a bit later to the DSLR game, coming out near the end of 2001 with its EOS-1D camera. It launched with a then-unusual 1.3x APS-H sensor packing 4.48 megapixels, and a 2001 price tag of $6,499.

As you can see, with the prices adjusted for their relative purchasing power at the time, these new pro cameras are actually notably less than their predecessors, and feature generally dramatically improved specs at the same time. The problem with pricing perceptions has a lot more to do with an inattention to the declining value of the US dollar, and much less to do with any purported disconnects from the two big manufacturers. The relative cost of these imaging machines hasn’t changed drastically over the past decade (and the change that did happen was down in relative spending power, they cost less), but the amount of technology inside has. Which is pretty much as expected from technology (last year’s price, this year’s tech).

So, if any of you remember Fuji’s work on their EXR sensors, you’ll know that Fuji isn’t necessarily a believer in traditional sensor arrangements based on the Bayer filter pattern. And, it seems like they’ve put their lab coats back on, fired up the tesla coils,and resumed their mad science ways, because the X-Trans sensor even more completely eschews the conventional wisdom of the Bayer filter, instead emulating the natural randomness present in the grains of silver halide film.

Say huh?

OK, for those not familiar with the Bayer filter, here’s the idea: the pixels on your sensor just see light. White light. They don’t really care about color. Mostly, we do, so, we use a filter over each pixel to limit it to collecting only one of the three primary colors: red, blue, or green. The Bayer filter is the long-standing champ at this, using alternating rows of 2×2 pixel overlays. Then, in the camera, clusters of 3 pixels are interpolated together to form one pixel with all three colors. The Bayer filter looks like this:

Illustration by Fujifilm

And, mostly, the Bayer filter works. But, it has a couple problems. One is that interpolating those pixels causes a phenomenon known as moiré. Moiré is an effect most notable in fine, repeating patterns and shows up as unexpected and (often) undesired random swirls in the photo.

By Flickr user peretzpup

To combat this, cameras employ what’s known as a low-pass filter. This reduces moiré, but also takes a toll on fine sharpness and details, as it averages out multiple pixels. Additionally, this averaging can lead to a slight false color in spots, as it mixes neighboring pixels.

Fuji’s new X-Trans filter uses a 6×6 “aperiodic” arrangement for its pixels, which uses natural random interference to break up the moiré effect, which completely removes the need for a low-pass filter, and–in theory–yields naturally sharper images with truer colors.

Illustration by Fukifilm

Neat, huh? We think so too. Now, though, it’s all down to the proof-in-the-pudding once this thing comes out and see if it lives up to its own theory.

Well, here’s a trick I used when I was switching systems from Olympus to Nikon and had to shop all new lenses that didn’t really line up nicely with what I was used to using. If you aren’t shopping for a special needs lens (all-in-one, macro, fisheye, tilt-shift), but just a regular ol’ lens, then you can use your exisiting photos to give you the best insight into what focal lengths you actually need in your bag. And, as always, I recommend the assistance of Adobe’s stellar Lightroom.

First off, fire it up and look at your library. Lovely, aren’t they? Your photos? Of course they are. Now, let’s get them to tell us some useful data. For this, we’ll use Smart Collections. Smart Collections are a way for us to use the embedded EXIF in our photos, where we store them, and what we’ve done to them and tagged them with to build collections that update as our catalog grows. Very useful things.

So, here’s what you do:

1. Go to the “Library” View

You can click on this in the top right, or, if you’re a shortcuts kinda person, Ctrl+G or Command+G will get you there (think G for Grid).

2. Find “Collections” In The Left-Hand Bar

3. Click the “+” Button

This’ll open the Add Collection Dialog. Select “Create Smart Collection”

4. Pick A Focal Length Range

What you want to do now is tell Lightroom to only show you photos that fall within a certain focal range. I recommend a focal “range” because with zooms it’s unlikely all of your photos will be at one of the common marked focal lengths. Most will probably be within a range of similar focal lengths: Ultra Wide, Wide, Standard, Short Tele, Tele, Moderate Tele, Super Tele, and (for some of you), Exotic. Some recommendations I have for useful focal ranges are below.

Full Frame:

• 14-24 (Ultra Wide)
• 24-35 (Wide)
• 40-60 (Standard)
• 70-90 (Short Tele)
• 100-190 (Tele)
• 200-290 (Moderate Tele)
• 300 (Super Tele)
• 400 (Exotic)
• 500 (Exotic)
• 600 (Exotic)

Crop Sensor:

• 10-16 (Ultra Wide)
• 18-24 (Wide)
• 28-40 (Standard)
• 50-70 (Short Tele)
• 80-100 (Telephoto)
• 100-190 (Moderate Tele)
• 200-290 (Super Tele)
• 300 (Super Tele)
• 400 (Super Tele, Exotic)
• 500 (Exotic)
• 600 (Exotic)

5. Create A Rule

Now, to create the rule. From left to right, you want to select “Focal Length”, “Is In Range”, and then whatever focal lengths you want for the current rule. Don’t forget to give your collection a name you’ll recognize.

Note: Depending on your workflow, you might want to rule out certain conditions, such as a picture being in a “B-Sides” folder, or being tagged “Commercial” as opposed to “Personal.” The above shot shows how you can add multiple filters to isolate just the part of your collection you’re interested in. All are completely optional, of course.

5. Save, And Examine Your Collection Count

6. Repeat For All Applicable Focal Lengths

Once you’ve made similar filters for all focal lengths you use, you can quickly see what lengths are actually useful to you. For example, let’s take a look at my own catalogs results:

What can I deduce from this? Well, off the bat, here are a few observations I have:

1. The 70-90mm range is my most commonly kept focal length for personal photos. When combined with a realization that they’re mostly pictures of people, this indicates that I might benefit from an 85mm f1.4. And is why I have recently ordered a Sigma 85mm f1.4 to that end.
2. The 40-60mm range is rarely my preference. This means that while many people might rave about the joys of a nifty 50, I personally wouldn’t benefit much from it, as its field of view is clearly not one I prefer.
3. I shoot a lot at the extreme ends of my focal lengths, with a preference for ultra-wide and super-telephoto. Lenses that specialize in these areas but don’t cover much of the ground in-between will benefit me more. A 28mm prime would be a good fit for me. A 35mm would be less so. It also means that a 70-300mm was a better purchase for me than a 70-200 would have been. Knowing that matters going in.

Conclusion

So. Now you know how to use Lightroom to help you make future lens choices, especially if you’re starting to be tempted by the cheaper fast primes that have been so hot lately. You can use photos that you already like to help get a feel for how you shoot. Look through them and see what you shoot in those ranges. Are they available light pictures of people? Then yeah, maybe that fast prime in that range is a good plan. Are they studio shots at f11, or landscapes in at 1/4000 of a second? Maybe a sharp zoom with slower apertures will do you just as well as that f2.8 constant your buddy keeps suggesting. A little know how and an existing photo collection can tell you a lot about how your upgrade path should look. What’s yours telling you? Let us know in the comments.

If you’re new to photo and still hazy on what crop factor is, we recommend you give this a watch.

For a fancy description of what a polarizing filter does to the light that makes your image see this incredibly boring wikipedia article.  For those of us that cant call MIT our Alma Mater, a polarizing filter allows certain wavelengths (colors) of the visible light spectrum to come through the lens and bounces other wavelengths away.  These filters are very effective at reducing reflections and this is why polarized lenses are used in sunglasses.  Here is the tricky part though, you can purchase $10 sunglasses or $200 sunglasses and there is a major difference in how efficient the glasses are at polarizing the light.  The same holds true for lens filters.  A high quality filter (which will cost more than a few Jeffersons) is going to deliver consistent results across the entire field of view of the lens.  This is especially important when using wide angle lenses.

Wide angle lenses have a very large field of view which means the light that makes that image is collected and bent into the camera lens at a steep angle.  High quality camera lenses are built to correct for optical aberrations that occur as a result of the light being manipulated in this manner.  Low quality filters are not.  A cheap polarizing filter will not provide a consistent effect across the entire field of view of the image.  Instead you will be left with the effect in one area while the rest of the image remains unaffected.  Keep in mind a cheap polarizing filter for an average sized consumer lens can set you back about $50-70 .  Typically you will invest another 25-35% for a pro-grade filter like the B+W or Hoya HD brands.

So, while most photographers think of using polarizing filters for landscape shooting because it produces a rich blue sky with nice contrast in the clouds,  it is also minimizing unwanted reflections and glare in your scene.

The image to left is shot with exactly the same camera settings, lens, camera body, position of camera, etc as the image to the right.  The only difference is the use of a polarizing filter on the image to the right.  Note how the reflection of the sun is not completely hidden.  No polarizer will do that.  Pick your battles.  More importantly, notice how the beautiful color of the classic Corvette comes through with a properly used filter.

Both of the following images were shot with a polarizing filter, but the filter was set to different position in its rotation.  The top image was set to reduce glare on the hood of the car.  In this case the color wasnt being drastically affected by the reflection of the sky, but the reflection was extremely annoying to see.  However, notice the glare on the side of the truck to the right side of the image.  Because  these two surfaces are perpendicular to each other, you cannot polarize to reflection on both surfaces simultaneously.

The image below shows the reflection on the hood of the car but omits it on the truck.

As always, click on any image to see it larger.

Mark: And the battery, you want to get the battery as well?
Me: Uh, doesn’t it come with a battery?
Mark: It comes with one battery, which is only 35-40 minutes, so I would definitely recommend getting one of the extended life batteries.
Me: What do you mean by 30-40 minutes?
Mark: It is a short battery, it is not a long-life battery. You need to buy the extra one, the long one.
Me: So when you say 30-40 minutes, it is for taking pictures or video?
Mark: Both of them. When the screen is on or anything, it cuts down very short (yawns).
Me: Oh, so the one that comes with the camera only lasts for 30 minutes?
Mark: Yeah. Then you have the two hour which is $129 and a four hour which is $169.

Read the full story about how this conversation came to happen and the rest of the comical (and terrifying) sales escalations at the link below.

The following is reposted from LensRentals.com by permission of the original author, Roger Cicala. Visit their site for more article and posts about a variety of photographic subjects, it’s all well-worth the read.

-Roberts

OK. First and foremost this is a fun post. It is not episode 362 of “Should you put a UV filter on your lens”. Some people use them. Some don’t. There’s not enough bandwidth to ever end that argument.

But here at Lensrentals, we have a ton of filters. We have some really good, very expensive filters. We have some OK, middle of the road filters. And because some customers, uhm, happen to return a very cheap filter in place of the one they were sent, we’ve obtained some crappy filters. Brand names aren’t necessary. If it cost $22 in 77mm size, it’s a crappy filter.

Anyway, one of the techs has to clean all those filters, make sure the threads are OK, and test them out. Honestly nobody likes to do it, so it gets put off until we need some filters or there’s just nothing else to do. So the other day Kenny is cleaning filters and testing the threads by mounting them one in front of the other until he made a nice mountain of 50 UV filters.

Not being the kind of people to let well enough alone, we decided to mount them to a 5D Mk II and 300 f4 we had handy and take a few pictures.

And of course see if the filters affected image quality. See if you can tell which images was shot with the 50 UV filters, and which without:

Of course there’s a lot of vignetting and haloing on the full size image:

Compared to no filters

Roger, do you have anything constructive to say, or are you just wasting blog space again?

Yes, actually I do. Fifty filters stacked is pretty ridiculous. But in that stack of 50 filters, as I said, there are some very good ones and some very bad ones. Lets compare a stack of each, shall we?

First, I had Kenny put the worst filters on the top of the stack (all were nonbrand, or brands we know are cheap and bad) and take a picture of the stack at an angle. All were freshly cleaned and if you look straight through them reasonably clear. Like a filter should be. But if you stack them and try to take an angled picture through several layers of them, the results were ugly.

Yes, I know they don’t look clean in the image, but every one of those filters was freshly cleaned, and checked under a light. And if you look straight through them they were pretty clear. Looking at an angle tends to show you the weaknesses of a filter much better than looking straight through it. And remember: most of the light rays coming into the lens are coming in at an angle, not heading directly to the sensor in a straight line.

Now lets compare the stack with the expensive, top of the line filters (B&W, Heliopan, etc.) stacked the same way.

Hmmm. I’m starting to think there might be a difference here. But the proof is in the pudding. Lets modify our original experiment to something only slightly ridiculous. Instead of shooting through 50 filters, lets take the shot through 5 top of the line filters and another through 5 bottom of the line filters.

Here’s a 100% crop of a bumper sticker across the parking lot shot first with no filter, second with 5 stacked high end UV filters, and then with 5 stacked low grade UV filters.

Now stacking 5 filters doesn’t have a ton of real world implications. Most people rarely stack two. But it is a fun demonstration that there really is a difference between good filters and cheap filters.

The good filters do a remarkable job: 5 stacked filters means 10 air-glass interfaces before the light even gets to the lens. That there’s only a little bit of image quality loss through all those filters is pretty impressive. This crop is from the center of the image, there’s more degradation to the sides, but still, it’s an impressive performance. And certainly lends credit to the idea that a high quality, multicoated UV filter has little effect on image quality.

Five bad filters, though, is another thing entirely. I’m completely aware, for those of you who are going to feel the need to point out the obvious, that nobody shoots with 5 UV filters. And I understand that one cheap UV filter wouldn’t have nearly as bad an effect on image quality as 5 of them. But I don’t think you can disagree that the good (and expensive, I know) filters have much less effect on image quality than the cheap filters.

BTW – before anyone asks, I avoided name brands of cheaper filters for a reason: many filter manufacturers make both pretty good, and pretty bad filters. You can tell the difference by the price or by reading carefully about the number of coatings, etc. A Tihoya $29 “high quality” filter is not the same as a Tihoya $79 “Professional” filter. This wasn’t meant to be a filter review, just a fun demonstration of the obvious.

Roger Cicala

Lensrentals.com

June, 2011

Photo By Nikon USA

This is a topic of some real concern among a lot of our customers, and it’s not adequately explained by Nikon anywhere, so, we’re taking it upon ourselves to help make sense of this Nikon VR II nonsense that’s confusing so many people.

Here’s what’s happening: Nikon has recently started making revisions to some of its most popular lenses, and so far exclusively to popular lenses featuring its VR technology. Thus, something like the AF-S 70-200mm f2.8 IF-ED VR gets an update and becomes the AF-S 70-200mm f2.8 ED VR II. The II at the end is added to indicate this is the second version of the 70-200mm VR lens. Makes sense.

The fly in the ointment is before Nikon started updating these lenses, it quietly and less publicly revised its actual VR system used in all VR lenses. The new system offers a theoretical 4 stop advantage, while the original VR system could only promise 3. What did they name this new, improved technology? Why, VR II, of course.

So, what you end up with is this odd scenario where all current mark II lenses use the new and improved VR II technology, but there are a good number of lenses that use VR II technology for their first revision. Since the mark IIs are so well-reviewed, there’s a lot of excitement when a lens becomes a “VR II.” And a lot of ensuing confusion when it’s just the second-generation tech, and not a second-generation VR lens.

Still confusing? Fair enough. Let’s take a look at a sample Nikon product page here and break it down. In the graphic below, I’ve highlight the key things to note. The name of the lens series is highlighted green. The current revision of that lens series is highlighted reddish-pink. Any mention of the second generation VR technology giving you 4 stops instead of the old 3 stops is noted in blue.

Now, if you look, what you’ll notice is this:

• If the “II” appears in the Product Name, it indicates it’s the second version of a lens that happens to have VR tech.
• If the “II” appears in the Description, it indicates that it uses the 4 stop second generation VR technology.

Since we’re all about helping out, I went through the current selection of 24 VR-enabled lenses Nikon offers and figured out which ones use which technology, and I present the results to you below.

VR - Nikon VR (Vibration Reduction) Image StabilizationVibration Reduction, engineered specifically for each VR NIKKOR lens, enables handheld shooting at up to 3 shutter speeds slower than would otherwise be possible, assuring dramatically sharper still images and video capture.

• AF-S DX NIKKOR 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6G VR
• AF-S DX VR Zoom-Nikkor 55-200mm f/4-5.6G IF-ED
• AF-S DX VR Zoom-Nikkor 55-200mm f/4-5.6G IF-ED
• AF-S VR Zoom-NIKKOR 24-120mm f/3.5-5.6G IF-ED
• AF VR Zoom-Nikkor 80-400mm f/4.5-5.6D ED
• AF-S VR NIKKOR 200mm f/2G IF-ED
• AF-S VR Zoom-NIKKOR 200-400mm f/4G IF-ED\

VR II - Nikon VR II (Vibration Reduction) Image Stabilization Vibration Reduction, engineered specifically for each VR NIKKOR lens, enables handheld shooting at up to 4 shutter speeds slower than would otherwise be possible, assuring dramatically sharper still images and video capture.

• AF-S DX NIKKOR 55-300mm f/4.5-5.6G ED VR
• AF-S DX Micro Nikkor 85mm f/3.5G ED VR
• AF-S VR Zoom-Nikkor 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6G IF-ED
• AF-S DX NIKKOR 16-85mm f/3.5-5.6G ED VR
• AF-S DX NIKKOR 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6G ED VR II
• AF-S VR Micro-Nikkor 105mm f/2.8G IF-ED
• AF-S NIKKOR 28-300mm f/3.5-5.6G ED VR
• AF-S NIKKOR 16-35mm f/4G ED VR
• AF-S NIKKOR 24-120mm f/4G ED VR
• AF-S NIKKOR 70-200mm f/2.8G ED VR II
• AF-S VR NIKKOR 300mm f/2.8G IF-ED
• AF-S NIKKOR 300mm f/2.8G ED VR II
• AF-S NIKKOR 200mm f/2G ED VR II
• AF-S NIKKOR 200-400mm f/4G ED VR II
• AF-S NIKKOR 600mm f/4G ED VR

Notice that both revisions of the 300mm VR use VR II tech, despite only the newer being named VR II. That’s why this distinction is important to understand, right there. to review:

“VR II” in a Product Name means the second version of a VR-enabled lens

“VR II” in any Description or Spec means second-generation VR technology offering 4 stops advantage instead of 3.

We hope that helps.

And, since DPS doesn’t seem to have them linked in order in many places, I’m providing them here so I can more readily point people towards them in the right order. So:

101.1 – Light and the Pinhole Camera

101.2 – Lenses and Focus

101.3 – Lenses, Light, and Magnification

101.4 – Exposure and Stops

101.5 – Aperture

101.6 – Shutter

101.7 – ISO

101.8 – The Light Meter

Once again, all articles are credited to Neil Creek, and thanks to DPS for posting them out there for the world.