Jumped Ship

After three decades as a Nikon SLR shooter, I’m going to sell my Nikon gear and move into the Fuji system. Following some long Shakespearian soliloquies, I finally made the leap and bought a Fujifilm X-E2 mirrorless camera.

Holy smoke, what a little beauty. It has a classic rangefinder-style look, is very well-built, and offers a host of amazing electronic features (a couple of my favs: live histogram and focus scale with depth of field indicator in the electronic viewfinder). In combination with widely-admired high-quality Fuji X-series lenses, its innovative X-trans sensor (16mp APS-C) produces remarkable image quality with superb clarity and low noise even at higher ISOs (I was astounded at how good 6400 can look). It weighs very little compared to my up-armored DSLR kit, and will make carrying my camera gear much less arduous and the photography experience that much more joyful. In short, I’m very excited about exploring this new corner of the digital photography world and I’ll be posting useful resources as I find them.

For starters, Rico Pfirstinger is a photographer who writes guides to Fuji X-series cameras and blogs at the Fuji Rumors site. Rico’s blog is called X-pert Corner and he frequently offers very substantial and useful instruction on how to get the most from these particular cameras.

There are also several user forums in which Fuji X-series photographers share experiences, answer questions, brag and argue.

"The Fuji guys" offer a series of videos showing off the camera and its various features. Ben Jacobson also has a video introduction to the camera, as does Ralf the German dude, and these characters who are clearly too cool for school.

More later.

Lewis Hine on stamps

about time.

Camera quandaries

For the last 5 years or so, I’ve been happily shooting with a Nikon D300. Fine camera in its day, but sensor technology and camera processors have advanced a lot, and newer generations promise better image quality, wider tonal range, less noise, better low-light performance, etc.

Nikon has offered updates of much of its camera range, and a number of new models, without offering an updated version of the D300 incorporating comparable build quality and features in a more state-of-the-art and capable package. In essence, they have encouraged D300 owners to buy into the full-frame camera range formerly populated only by high-end professional cameras and utilizing some of the spectacular lenses used by the pros. However, the entry-level full-frame camera, with an appropriate kit lens, retails for somewhere around $3,000. Additional lenses for this class of camera are also much more expensive than the Nikon lenses I currently use, but would need to replace for use with a full-frame camera.

I’m an amateur photographer, which means that my photo equipment is not paying for itself every time I use it. Any photo gear I buy is not so much an investment as a net drain on family savings: lost opportunities to replace our scruffy old sofa, or remodel the 1960s-style kitchen counters, or help my kid pay for college. So a $3k camera, that requires a MUCH more expensive set of lenses than I currently own, is a non-starter for me. 1-800-DIVORCE COURT.

So I’m looking around at possible non-Nikon alternatives. Right now what appeals to me is the sleek, solid, capable, and relatively affordable  Fujifilm X-E2. A camera/lens combo would cost less than half of what I would need to pay for a full-frame Nikon camera + lens. And I doubt that I would actually notice a huge difference in image quality, especially since I’m not trying to sell my photos to hyper-critical image editors. I look forward to seeing actual test results of production models of this new X-E2 in the next few weeks, but it looks very promising. Its predecessor was highly thought of, and the updated model improves on that in significant ways while preserving the very appealing design & ergonomics. I am strongly attracted to the compact, retro rangefinder design, and doing away with the whole bulky & complicated SLR pentaprism/mirror assembly seems like a huge step in the right direction for electronic cameras. We’ll see, but I’m thinking about non-Nikon non-SLR alternatives much more seriously than any time in the past.

DxO Optics Pro 9: remarkable results from new PRIME noise reduction engine

I’ve been testing out the newest version of a raw conversion software I’ve had for several years, DxO Optics Pro, now in version 9. The new version includes their latest noise reduction engine which they call PRIME. It’s very computationally intensive and takes quite a long time to process each image (5 minutes or more on my 5-year-old iMac), but I’ve been very pleased with the results it achieved on some of my most difficult images.

I shot a series of photos of my daughter’s flamenco teacher performing at a tablau in Seville, Spain in 2009. Needless to say, this was a rare opportunity, so a re-shoot is not in the cards anytime soon. But to capture the dance I was obliged to shoot at very high ISO (5000) and, on top of that, something went horribly wrong with the color as the stage lights messed with the white balance. I was so disappointed, and feared these images were a total loss. But I never deleted them, and from time-to-time have tried to rescue them using various software tools. Until recently, none produced results that were very satisfactory.

But here is a before/after sequence showing the results I was able to get with DxO 9, using their new PRIME tool.

It’s not perfect, of course, and a more skilled user might have gotten better results than I did, but I was delighted to recover usable images from this series. I’ve printed at 8x10 and the output looks quite good to me, considering how these images started.

These images have great sentimental value for my family, and I’m really pleased that DxO enabled me to  recover them. 

Color Photos from the 1940s

A selection of historical color photos from the Library of Congress. The LOC Flickr page is here.

This is really an amazing window into 20th century history.

Here’s a sample:


 

Photographing the Klan

Photojournalist Anthony Karen has spent time with members of various Klan groups and photographed them in candid moments. While most of the folks photographed aren’t going out of their way to help me overcome my stereotypes of rednecks and crackers, I find the photos involving children especially poignant.

Photoshop snafus & silver linings

A few days ago, I had an unpleasant surprise when I opened PS. All of my PS actions had disappeared.  I had a very extensive collection from all kinds of sources, some of them I used rarely or never, but some I used all the time. I was unable to restore them using time machine so i resolved to reinstall the ones I most wanted to have available. At the same time, I decided to create new custom PS panels (using Adobe Configurator) to organize the actions I use most frequently and make them easily available when I want to use them. All of this took a while to do, but the results please me.

The most elaborate panel was the one I created for noise reduction and capture sharpening. I really like the sharpening actions created by Glenn Mitchell because they allow a wide range of choices about the kinds of edge masks to use (to confine sharpening to edge detail) and the kind of sharpening operations to perform. Glenn’s actions automatically generate smart filter layers so that if you don’t like his default settings you can open up the filter and change the settings at will, as well as the layer opacity, and so on. And Glenn incorporated “Blend If” settings which precent the sharpening from affecting contrast in either the brightest highlights or the darkest shadows. Pretty slick.

Glenn also has actions (or a PS script) to generate edge & surface masks, and I will use these to create surface masks when I want to run a noise reduction app (such as Nik Dfine or Topaz DeNoise) prior to capture sharpening. Surface masks confine the noise reduction effect to image surfaces and so avoid degrading edge contrast and apparent sharpness of detail in your image. Also slick.

So my new panel has a button to activate the edge/surface masking script, and then six sub-panels arranged accordion style on the main panel, one for each of the masking options Glenn used to create his actions (Edge, Surface, Edge and Surface, and then each of these again using his “enhanced” masks that incorporate color information). Within each sub-panel, there are four action buttons corresponding to various edge widths I might want to sharpen: extra narrow, narrow, medium, and wide.

I also made a separate panel for Glenn’s creative sharpening actions, since that comes later in my workflow. Again, these generate smart filter layers that are infinitely customizable. In addition to a basic creative sharpening action, he has actions tailored to portraits, landscapes, images with texture detail, and a high pass sharpening action for “clarity”. There is also a creative blur action.

So with a couple of clicks I can access over 30 different sophisticated PS actions, protect image edges from noise reduction, and target the kind of sharpening I want where I want it. Did I mention that this was slick?

Glenn’s blog has been inactive for a couple of years now, but he has left a wealth of information and an amazing array of sophisticated PS tools there for anyone to use. Thanks to Glenn, I was able to reload and reorganize some of the most important actions that I use on almost all my images. I’m grateful to Glenn for leaving this astonishing resource for other photographers to benefit from.

Oh, and I also saved copies of all my actions, scripts and panels in multiple locations, as well as using the PS actions panel “Save Action” function, so hopefully I won’t lose them again and, if I do, I can more easily restore them.