Be Excellent To Each Other

I'm very seriously contemplating buying a flash for my camera tomorrow.


I'm leaning heavily towards a Nikon SB700, though the cheaper Nissin Di662 ii's are supposed to be good too. To be honest, I think I'll be a natural light photographer first and foremost, but I want to see where added lighting options take me. I also felt the need for it after sunset during the US Civil War thang.

I'd also very much like another prime lens some time this year. Either:

24mm f/2.8d

Pros: Sharp. Focal length same as 35mm, so sweet for street photography. Contrasty.

Cons: Not quite wide enough for OMG! landscapes.

Or:

20mm f/2.8d

Pros: Wide. Contrasty. Equals 30mm, which is good for landscapes and street.

Cons: Not as sharp as the 24mm, and stupidly expensive for the price Nikon charges. (£420! Surely that's a foul, ref!?)

With that set up I think I'd be well content. I'm still just not feeling interested in zooms. Although if someone handed me a 17-55mm f/2.8, er, that could change. But for street photography I want my camera to appear as discreet as possible. There's just no point in shooting with a big lens from far away, in my opinion.

Attention!

I've finally stopped torturing myself over what next bit of kit to buy and have now purchased a...

*Drum roll*

The Nikon SB700 speedlight!

I've taken the flash out of the box and had a looky-touchy. Great build quality and the clip on colour temperature filters are great. There's a neat little glossy 'Sample photos of different lighting scenarios and wot we did to take them' booklet and the manual is suitably chunky. I'm going to play with it doing self portraits tonight. The cool hat may be involved.

Oh man, flash has totally revealed my pig ignorance in photography. Any which setting I choose, a belm is the result.

This is going to take a while.

Be worth it though, Pete. Looking forward to seeing the fruits of your labour.

*tries to stop thinking about how a speedlight would help drop the ISO loads for macro shots*

Well, I mentioned previously I bought a Panasonic Lumix GF3 so thought I would write a brief review of it. Now bear in mind I have never used an SLR so some of these issues might not be for you more regular camera users.
I bought the GF3 with two lenses, a 14mm "pancake" lens, and 14-42 lens, and although I played around with the two lenses a bit, I didn't notice anything hugely different between the variable lens at 14 and the static 14. However, the GF3 when fitted with the pancake lens is small! It is only slightly larger than a digital compact and can easily fit inside a coat pocket. The downside to that is the screen is very large and has no protection, so you have to be careful not to scratch it. TBH, i isn't huge even with the 14-42 lens on, being ~1/2 the size of an SLR.
The size does have its downsides though, there is no viewfinder and you rely upon the screen to take photos. This is okay, but there are some issues, the menu system is fiddly, and variable depending on which mode you are in, and where you start from. The lack of viewfinder (and prism) means the manual focus comes on the screen; in order to aid with the fine focussing a box of really zoomed in area comes up on the screen allowing you to fine tune the focus to the length you want. However, the fine tuning is a bit off, and a number of photos where I was aiming at a short focal length came out a good few inches behind where the screen told me I was focused.
Mostly though I used the camera in autofocus mode, which was annoying at times, the auto focus allows you to touch an area on the screen and focus on that, but it doesn't always work, possibly due to my fat fingers, but also you have to psh quite hard and you move the camera. Another function is the face recognition which finds faces anywhere, and then ignores them, it will find a face and then focus on a feature in the background, which is annoying. Also the manual is a bit shit.
Generally thugh it seems to be nice, and I took some nice photos, but it is often difficult to see how bad a photo is on the screen and it will look fine until you put it on the PC and realise just how out of focus it was.

Nikon D3200 announced: http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/19/29589 ... screen-red



Based on that, the (presumably to follow) 5200 could be very nice indeed. The Wifi sounds nice (although my Eye-fi card already does all this):

D600 being rumoured on Nikon Rumors, apparently pitched as a cheaper entry level prosumer full frame camera! If so and at the price of the D7000 then OMGWANT!

Finally I've been saving up my pennies and got a prime for the m4/3. Went with the sigma 30mm 2.8, mostly because it's cheap. The girl likes to take photographs with me and has swiped the GF3 which leaves me using the D300 when I would rather be using the G1 when I'm with her (currently only have one kit lens between them, ended up buying the g1 from my dad's friend as he bought a X100).

Am now in the odd position of having nothing to save for, which is new for me, the 35mm is on the D300 90% of the time as the 30mm will be on the G1 - which I won't be upgrading because the newest Panasonic lack the astonishing black and white shooting modes.

we went into jessops to fondle the gf3 and nex3n and nex5n. She doesn't seem convinced by any of them, partly because she thinks a full DSLR would be better, even though the extra money just buys bulk and weight at her level. I said I'd get the gf3 if I were buying now, but as she's not bothered about money she should go for the 5n. She'll be doing this until about a day before we leave for Japan. HM, maybe she should just get one in Japan.

I believe camera gear is cheaper in Japan. Probably worth looking into.

only £470 for a nex5n with both pancake and zoom lenses from amazon Japan. Helen's determined to order one next week though, she just wants to read up first.

Cracking camera you can't really go wrong with it, but to throw this in there - if money isn't a thing for her then she might want to look at the NEX-7. There are still supply problems in the UK and you are looking at £1100 for one with the 18-55 kit, compared to £890 on Amazon Japan. http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/sonynex7/2
If I were buying into a new system right now that that's the camera I would get. Now the ISO wars are at an end I would expect them to spend the next X number of generations just tweaking and increasing focus points (seems to be the new thing), they nailed the EVF this time which was one of the niggles people had with NEX in the past, so you can expect to happily use it till the shutter blows without it being remotely out of date.

turns out money isn't THAT much not an object the 5 and 7 Ns are the ones with the slr-ish m4/3 sensor and mirrorless right?

Narp, the NEX all have APS-C sensors (like a Canon 650D or a Nikon D5100) but they are mirror less and have a Electronic Viewfinder - there was a lot of complaining about EVF in the past but the latest generation's are extremely good, I had a play with the Sony A65 which has the latest one and it's astonishing. Remember the 5n does not have a built in viewfinder and you would have to buy one separately for another £245 if that's a thing for you.

Viewfinder is unlikely to be an issue. So it's a proper dslr sensor then? Still don't really know what I'm talking about to be honest, I just believe it's a good one, but there are various sub versions of nex 3 and 5 - n, abk and at least one more.

Yup it's the sensor found in all of sony's newest DSLRs. Did you look at the NEX-C3 as well btw? Right now the Sony pecking order goes NEX-7, NEX-5N, NEX-C3, NEX-5.

I love the EVF on the G3 and (back of) the GF3 for one major reason, (and it's the same with NEX) if the light meter is reading things wrongly then you can see right away and when you use exposer compensation to fix it you can see the results in real time.

The sonys were really laggy and totally saturated in jessops where the gf3 was fluid and anything but what white was visible. But that's a shop with tonnes of horrible fluorescents. I'm sticking by 5n at the mo I think. whats the c3? Ta for the advice.

C3 is the equivalent of the gf3, only the screen swivels, it has a larger sensor and better iso, but no touch screen. http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/SonyNexC3.

I have the GF3 and it's iAuto setting is like voodoo. In actual fact I found out why the other day, there is a setting that comes into play with iA that finds blown highlights and ruined darks and auto adjusts them in the raw. I did a set of tests in harsh light with iA vs Aperture mode - I set them to the same F stop (you can manual do this in iA) and found that iA had blown highlights 1 out of 10 times and Aperture had blown highlights 8 out of 10 times.

Sigma 30mm 2.8 is here half way though testing it on the G1 and GF3. First impressions are that people are correct about the odd design making the shutter speed faster. I checked using the nikon and 50mm, and at 2.8 the sigma gives the same shutter speed as a dslr lens set at f/2. It also focuses at about 20cm not 30cm as the specs say. I did have problems with taking photos of flowers and the G1 as it wanted to hunt and go behind what I was taking, but that's more of a camera issue than a lens issue, the GF3 will be different. Size wise it's about the same length as the 35mm 1.8. It fits on the GF3 lovely, it's just the right size to make the camera wonderful to hold. I'm thinking that it will sit on the GF3 permanently (note: I have a very very good copy of the 14-42 kit lens so I'm not contemplating selling it and getting a third m4/3 lens) as this focal length is bang on for me. I'll do a image comparison next but I'm liking what I'm seeing coming out of the G1, colours, sharpness and contrast all look spot on in the jpeg.

Disclaimer; this lens is not a macro lens, you want the oly 45mm macro for that.


edit if anyone is wondering why I need the two cameras


charity cake stand by Rebecca by Learnin' Curve, on Flickr


tools man by Rebecca by Learnin' Curve, on Flickr


cupcake by Rebecca by Learnin' Curve, on Flickr

She's 8, depressing isn't it.

Only had time to do a quick and dirty but this is a 100% crop taken with the GF3 (click to go to largest)


sigma 30mm 2.8 test 100% crop by Learnin' Curve, on Flickr

edit: context


sigma 30mm 2.8 non-cropped by Learnin' Curve, on Flickr

I'm already super-jealous of Helen's Nex 5, and she's not even bought it yet.





Shit.

Amazon's NEX5 page - which is wrong, the product review or description/specs? The former is the 5N, the latter are the older 5. The price is definitely 5N! Jessops "only" want £470 for the 18-55, the Amazon one is both (this one is the zoom-only kit, and expensive compared).

Everywhere seems to be running low or out of stock, I read something yesterday suggesting new ones are due this month, along with a new 22-200 lens. Seems unlikely to be a coincidence. We might buy the camera in the UK and the new lens in Japan.

Edit: No wait, here is the 5N version of the kit, for £600. Amazon are being very naughty putting the 5N review on the 5 page.

Get your camera now then you won't waste any holiday time traipsing around camera shops looking for the best deal.

Like I said she's going to buy a camera in the UK, but maybe the new high-zoom lens in Japan; my Lumix's 24x optical isn't enough for either of us and the 22mm seemed worse than that fiddling with the display model in Jessops. Though the fluorescent strip light immediately above made it almost impossible to see anything but total saturation.

Annoyingly, buying from Jessops would be a no-brainer because of price but they don't have one in-store closer than Stockport (presumably the website's excluding the demo one in the Trafford Centre) and state 'usually within 10 days' on delivery which is very much into a clenched-anus timeframe. That and the web price is much better than in-store so she can't just rock up on the off-chance.

She's probably put off by widespread reports of "clickers" still being sold, too.

Jessops home delivery tracking is absolute arse, unbelievably the tracking only shows up after it's been delivered.

The current plan is to get a NEX 5N kit with 18-55 and 55-210 lenses from Jessops on the way home tonight - they didn't have the "just the 18-55" kit in.

She said she can get it from "UK Digital" via Amazon for £40 less with 3-5 business day delivery but my argument was "when you're spending over £700, £40 to have it in your hands immediately with a real shop and not a faceless independent on the internet to deal with if parcel force kick it along the road to you is worth it, especially when we'll be in Japan in less than 5 weeks". I won.

I also won the "no integrated flash" concern based on how amazing the NEX (7 I think) our mate demonstrated is in low light, how useless the flash on mine tends to be for any low-light shots I want to take (eg landscape where it biases the foreground or close up enough that it saturates), and I only ever resorted to the flash because it's a consumer sensor.

No time to wait and see what the F3/F5 are like, later this month.

"Hopefully I'm right," I should have added

I've used the on-body flash on my GF1 less than 20 times, and in almost all of those cases, it ruined the shot. HTH.

(Although, the GF1 had a f/1.7 lens on it. I might feel differently if I had a lens with a smaller maximum aperture.)

Same experience as me, then.

Turns out it should have an accessory flash in the box anyway. And it's got a nifty "blend 6 shots" mode too, specifically for handheld use in low-light. It can do 10fps anyway, and if it only has to write a single shot to flash it could even take less than the 0.6s that implies.

I'm so jealous of it

Every camera should have a red sticker over the built-in flash that just says "DO NOT USE".

And another one on the "Facial recognition focussing technology" bullet point that says "does not work on Craster."

I don't understand what you are getting at here.

It can do 10fps in normal shooting, which implies 0.6 seconds to take the 6 shots in "Handheld Twilight" mode*. Since writing 10 shots to Flash is slow, but the super-dooper mode only writes a blend of the 6, it may take less.


* "Combines high-speed burst of six frames to create single low-noise image in low-light conditions"

0.6 seconds is an age if you are holding it by hand, although I guess the software crops and realigns as necessary when it does the stacking but there's surely not much it can do if your subjects are moving slightly.

Yeah, this. This is why I was confused. I work on wanting a shutter speed of 1/30th of a second for hand-held work, although with concentration and if I stand carefully I can get sharp pictures at 1/15th or (with luck) 1/10th.

It could easily be less, I suppose, if it cuts out all the processing that isn't "figure out how the camera and focal objects moved since a very short while ago". It has loads of stupid features that a tiny thing like a camera shouldn't be able to do in real time, like "shoot on smile" if it's tracking faces. Experiments will be done.

I usually aim for 1/60th or better. I'm a little to fond of coffee.

Not that the 10fps=0.6s isn't the shutter speed, it's the shutter speed plus the in-camera buffer write speed.

I can keep still much longer and take more pictures.

Even with the shitty D5000.

Get a Canon.

Aside from its useful ability to fire remote flashes held off camera as a master, I struggle to think why anybody would want an on-camera flash. But that ability is indeed admittedly useful.

Right, I've done some research. DPReview says the Sony sensor is fine up to ISO 6400 (golly) and good at 12,800. That's four or five stops better than my GF1 can manage (everything north of ISO 400 is rubbish).

The 18-55 kit lens for your camera is f/3.5-5.6 (and the 55-210 is f/4.5-6.3, but that's not what you'd be using to shoot indoors close-up anyway). So wide open, at f/3.5, that's two stops less than I get with my GF1 (assuming the same shutter speed). At f/5.6 it's 3.3 stops less.

The high ISO performance of your camera more than outweighs the advantage I get from my very fast prime lens, so even with that kit zoom lens, you'll have better low-light shots than I can get -- and my GF1 is really bloody good at low-light shots. I think you can be confident this camera's going to do bloody well in dim lighting.

Unless you get the bends.

Those numbers are exciting!

Can you express them in Scovilles for me?

f6.3 on the long end of the zoom is painful though. You'll not want to be using that in anything other than good lighting.

That's the 55-210. Not much call for low-light photos at 210mm, is there? Maybe some wildlife stuff but that's quite specialised and I wouldn't ding a kit lens for not being good at that.

Oh, I'm not really criticising it, just making pretty clear that if Bik has any intention of using the long end of that lens it had better be in broad daylight.

I should really try harder to get my head round these things.

It will all fall into place.

Then you'll want loads of other stuff.

From Reddit: The importance of Focal Length