M
Mitch Alland
Guest
Last evening I shot some "crossover" pictures, sort of between street photography and landscapeto familiarize myself further with the D300 and to prepare for shooting game in the Etosha Game Park in Northern Namibia. As the evening approached twilight the colours of the sky and the dirt road reminded me of Eggleston.
It seems to me that the D300 can do very good colour and that the 17-35mm f/2.8 is excellent lens that, even though it is not a prime, doesn't yield anything to my Leica-M lenses except maximum aperture.
Here are three colour D300 pictures all shot at ISO 400 at f/8. Processed in Nikon Capture NX the colours seem good to me, without the over-rsaturated Velvia look that I dislike. For comparison I'm including B&W versions of the last two. Of course the B&Ws have quite a different feel and am interested in which you prefer.
D300 17-35mm f/2.8 lens | ISO 400 |f/8 | 19mm [28.5mm EFOV]
D300 17-35mm f/2.8 lens | ISO 400 f/8 | 28mm [42mm EFOV]
D300 17-35mm f/2.8 lens | ISO 400| f/8 | 25mm [37.5mm EFOV]
On NX: I'm really beginning to like it. It renders the Nikon files very well and is powerful software. It's U-point facility and Photoshop-type selections allow dodging and burning. Also, contrary to what I wrote incorrectly yesterday it has a good cropping facility. This means that I should be able to do all my post-processing in NX without having to finish off files in LightZone. A negative point, however, is that NX is somewhat flakey, with a tendency to crash (go into a non-response mode) on the Mac often when you try to close files. Since you can save the NEF with all the NX processing steps, you can in effect include the colour and white versions of the file in the NEF file rather than having to save two larger TIFF version of the file, which can save a lot of disk space. However, I couldn't find a facility for naming the steps the way you can in LightZone, which is useful to make it clear which file you need to check or uncheck in order to move from the colour to B&W version. All one can do is, for example, to be consistent in saving the file with all the colour steps checked, which makes it obvious that the unchecked ones are the ones that need to checked to create the B&W version, or vice versa; but the trouble is that one may have some other steps in the file that one may want to toggle for creating different version: therefore, a facility for naming the steps would be useful. BTW, all the steps can be saved as a style and applied to other pictures, individually or using batch processing.
These three pictures are cropped to square format because I still often find the 3:2 aspect ratio to "long" for the type of composition that I like. I have a feeling that if the D300 had a choice of a 4:3 aspect ratio I could have shot these pictures without having to crop.
—Mitch/Tsumeb, Namibia
http://www.flickr.com/photos/10268776@N00/
It seems to me that the D300 can do very good colour and that the 17-35mm f/2.8 is excellent lens that, even though it is not a prime, doesn't yield anything to my Leica-M lenses except maximum aperture.
Here are three colour D300 pictures all shot at ISO 400 at f/8. Processed in Nikon Capture NX the colours seem good to me, without the over-rsaturated Velvia look that I dislike. For comparison I'm including B&W versions of the last two. Of course the B&Ws have quite a different feel and am interested in which you prefer.
D300 17-35mm f/2.8 lens | ISO 400 |f/8 | 19mm [28.5mm EFOV]
D300 17-35mm f/2.8 lens | ISO 400 f/8 | 28mm [42mm EFOV]
D300 17-35mm f/2.8 lens | ISO 400| f/8 | 25mm [37.5mm EFOV]
On NX: I'm really beginning to like it. It renders the Nikon files very well and is powerful software. It's U-point facility and Photoshop-type selections allow dodging and burning. Also, contrary to what I wrote incorrectly yesterday it has a good cropping facility. This means that I should be able to do all my post-processing in NX without having to finish off files in LightZone. A negative point, however, is that NX is somewhat flakey, with a tendency to crash (go into a non-response mode) on the Mac often when you try to close files. Since you can save the NEF with all the NX processing steps, you can in effect include the colour and white versions of the file in the NEF file rather than having to save two larger TIFF version of the file, which can save a lot of disk space. However, I couldn't find a facility for naming the steps the way you can in LightZone, which is useful to make it clear which file you need to check or uncheck in order to move from the colour to B&W version. All one can do is, for example, to be consistent in saving the file with all the colour steps checked, which makes it obvious that the unchecked ones are the ones that need to checked to create the B&W version, or vice versa; but the trouble is that one may have some other steps in the file that one may want to toggle for creating different version: therefore, a facility for naming the steps would be useful. BTW, all the steps can be saved as a style and applied to other pictures, individually or using batch processing.
These three pictures are cropped to square format because I still often find the 3:2 aspect ratio to "long" for the type of composition that I like. I have a feeling that if the D300 had a choice of a 4:3 aspect ratio I could have shot these pictures without having to crop.
—Mitch/Tsumeb, Namibia
http://www.flickr.com/photos/10268776@N00/