photography

Nikkor fisheye lens

Now I’m back from my trip I can return to geekery. My lens collection for my camera is growing. I have just got a fisheye lens. I bought it on Ebay on an impulse. When I won it I wished I hadn’t bid on it, however, now its here I intend to make the most of it. Its a Nikkor 16mm AF D lens for those in the know. Unlike the ghastly gimmicky 1970s fish eyes, this lens fills the whole frame with an image, not just a circle in the middle. The question then is how to convert what should be projected onto a curved surface onto a flat film – or rather computer screen. As with maps of the world there is more than one way of doing it. And in fact, some come free(ish) and some you have to shell out for.

Here is pretty much what comes out of the camera:
front-room-before

Its a reasonably sharp lens though has noticeable chromatic aberration (corrected I think in this shot) but I find the curved uprights quite nightmarish. Its amazing, for such a physically small lens it really sees 180 degrees.

Adobe Lightroom comes with a vast database of lens characteristics built in that can correct their characteristic distortion. For most lenses this is mild and it works well. This is what it does for this lens.
front-room-lightroom-correction2

Its ok. Its a real relief to not be living in the LSD world of the first picture but the corners are really stretched and lose definition. Also it crops out quite a lot of the image, so the wide view is rather wasted.

Now here is what the hemi fisheye plug in produces:
front-room-hemi
Its an odd perspective. You can tell that the way it remaps the image varies across it. But it produces the best image. It is much sharper at the corners and does not lose any of the image. So, the £25 that it cost – the plug in that is, not the lens – is worth it. It makes the lens a useable ultra-wide angle lens rather than a novelty that you quickly tire of.

This is what it looks like, courtesy of Mr Rockwell:
Screen Shot 2015-08-15 at 21.33.20

Before this, I bought, also on Ebay, a more conventional lens, Nikon’s 35mm f1.4 lens, which is much easier to use. this is what it does:
DSC_6425

Flickr, 500px: photosharing communities

Since about 2006 I have been using Flickr. It is a good way to share pictures I’ve taken at a party or other event with the people who were there just by emailing a link to a group of photos instead of sending hefty attachments. But there is another aspect to photosharing sites like Flickr. That is something to do with the search for a community of people with the same interest (so much of the Internet offers this). So there are a number of similar sites that have the reputation of something a little more serious than Flickr where the vast majority of images are taken on smart phones. 500px is one of these that has caught my eye. Some of the photographs posted on 500px, as on Flickr, are impressive. Many though, to my eye, seem more like exercises in achieving some kind of photographic cliche and there are a small number of types of photographs that many seem to aim at – the sunset taken with an extreme wide angle lens to take one example. Many shots on 500px have attracted a number of comments, including a few to some of mine. So while I am touched that anyone would bother to write something, even a few words (most are), about my uploaded images, I think that overall the comments made on photography sharing sites are extremely banal. I have never seen critique for example. In fact it is easy to wonder whether most of the commenting is little more than a crude attempt to drive more viewers to commenters’ own images (some posters recommend just this to neophytes). And, as with much of the Internet, many contributors seem to be far more interested in the number of apparent visitors they get than in doing anything creative or interesting.

To many this will be obvious but what is interesting to me is the way it is possible to unconsciously adjust expectations, and the type of subjectivity you present, when on the Internet. And I wonder whether there is a rather desperate attempt at community at work here that, in my view, rarely delivers anything remotely like it. There must be other places to find dialogue and critique.

One review of 500px is here, along with reviews of some similar sites.

More talk about cameras

I have treated myself to a(nother) camera from Ebay, a Nikon D610 and from another source, a slightly old school 50mm f/1.4 lens. I only ever dreamed about lenses like that as a young teenage photographer with an East German SLR bought for me by my parents. At last, a full-frame camera again, the first since my faithful Pentax purchased in 1983 at the airport in Singapore on the way to my first visit to Australia which still mostly works (I mean the camera still mostly works – not Australia). The lens produces beautiful shallow depth of focus shots like this one:

D610-pics1

and it is almost indistinguishable in bulk from my current and soon to be sold small frame camera:

two-cameras

 

Trying a Canon DSLR

Intrepid cyclist and technology guru Geoff has lent me his ‘spare’ Canon EOS550D camera while he is away dodging people with iron bars trying to mug him in Vietnam. As my latest distraction I have been bidding on mid range DSLRs on Ebay and luckily being unsuccessful. I’ve also got out my old Pentax ME Super that I bought duty free in Singapore on my way to my first visit to Australia in 1983 and have been shooting B&W film. In the meantime I’ve borrowed a Canon zoom (18-55mm) for Geoff’s camera and been trying to work out how good the photos are that these cheapish DSLRs take, comparing it with H’s Sony Alpha that seems to live permanently in a drawer here where its battery seems to go flat without so much as a click of the shutter (as one reviewer has noted).

The Sony is cute alongside a conventional DSLR but it is actually rather weird to hold and use as the lens is so heavy compared to the body and, of course, you end up holding it away from yourself to compose pictures on the back screen.

photo

the quality of the pictures that both produce are very similar. The Canon tends to give more exposure. Its on the left at the top but on the right in the photographs of the studio here:

exposure-canon left

exposure-canon-right

Both lenses show colour fringing, which I think looks tacky. On the Canon it is orange and on the Sony, purple as below:

Colour fringing

and both show some barrel distortion when on the most wide angle setting. Canon is on the right. The two pictures were composed identically and the Canon viewfinder shows less than 100% of what the camera takes:

barrel distortion

Finally, both have some distortion with detail. These shots are taken at the lenses’ longest focal length.
detail-canon left

Overall, I expected better from this £500-600 price range.

Actually, the Canon is better than expected at low light. The first shot has only one 60w bulb lighting the kitchen, the exposure is 1/4 second:
one-quarter-second

Here all the lights apart from the light in the oven hood are off and the exposure is 2.5 seconds, hand held, obviously.
two-point-five