Hasta La Gadget!

Lenses are arguably the most important part of a photographer’s setup. Sure, you might have twenty-something megapixels inside your camera, but if you have junky glass in front of it, every single one of those pixels will look awful. Before you upgrade your camera, upgrade the lenses.

And think about fixed focal length lenses. They’re not as flexible as zooms, for sure, and these days modern lens design means that a good (read: expensive) zoom will be as good as a prime, or fixed, lens. So why bother? It’s all about the depth of field, baby. Zooms rarely have a maximum aperture of less than ƒ2.8. This is ok, but when you pop a prime with a bigger opening on your camera, say ƒ1.8 or ƒ1.4, you not only get more light (useful for night shooting) but you also get a very shallow depth of field. This means that you can keep your subject’s eyes sharp, but their ears, hair and everything behind them will be thrown into a distraction-free blur. The effect can be stunning.

I picked up a Nikon 85mm ƒ1.8D lens about a month ago. These lenses are a bargain at around $430 in the US. There is a more expensive ƒ1.4 model available, but it costs three times the price (although it has something of a cult following). The following is a short review, but instead of the usual product shots we take for these pieces, I’m posting a lot of images actually taken with the lens. Keep reading for the lowdown.

The photo above shows the Empire State Building in New York. It was shot wide open at 1/60th sec and ISO 1600 on a Nikon D700. Almost nothing has been done in post other than some sharpening for the screen. On the lights of both buildings you can see the beginnings of the modern amateur’s obsession, bokeh. It’s a Japanese word referring to the rendering of out of focus highlights by a lens, and discussion often gets rather flowery, with words like “creamy” being used. Despite this nonsense, the quality of these highlights makes a big difference to an image (and is one reason that Leica’s M lenses are so damn amazing).

This lens handles it well, but there are some odd color shifts in the highlights – to magenta in the foreground and to green in the background. This picture shows it better:

It’s a street in Barcelona, again shot wide open, this time at 1/125th sec at ISO 3200 and straight out of the camera (no post processing). Here you can see colored halos around the highlights, although the fact that the lights themselves are colored doesn’t help. The main thing affecting the shape of these highlights is the shape of the aperture itself. This lens has nine blades to form the aperture, so it has a pretty round shape.

This photo shows how dramatic the fall-off of focus can be. As lenses get longer, they already have a smaller depth-of-field. They also appear to compress the image, front-to-back, which makes for very flattering portraits (more on that in a moment). Here is a poster I saw on a lamppost in Brooklyn. You can clearly see that not even the entire piece of paper is in focus.

Speaking of portraits, this is my friend Whisky Tom. The long-ish lens is very flattering to the features and doesn’t distort them much (yes, his eyes really are that big). Remember how people’s faces change when you shoot with a wideangle lens? Their noses look huge, their faces distorted. The opposite happens at 85mm, and anything between around 70mm and 110mm is considered a “portrait lens”. See how the wide aperture throws his nose out of focus and completely blurs an otherwise busy background, drawing attention to the eyes which are pin-sharp (thanks to modern autofocus and the fact that I took these shots before we started on the inevitable whisky).

So how does it perform? Plastic construction means that is very light, and actually quite small. The lens comes with a large metal lens-hood (model number HN-23) which can be left on all the time to keep fingers away from the large front element. Internally, the lens uses rear-focussing, which means only a single group of elements at the back move when focusing. Combine this with a fast camera like the D700 and the thing focusses in a New York Second, letting you grab moving street-shots like the one above while walking. It really is fast, and very positive.

Most of the time, that is. Sometimes, when focusing on far away objects, the lens appears not to lock on. In fact, it doesn’t always seem to actually notice you have pressed the focus button. I am looking into this — focusing quickly on something nearby clears things up in the meantime.

In short, there’s no reason not to buy this lens. I totally love using it, and it seems that I’m not the only one who likes it. I was stuck on a Manhattan street corner, unable to leave because the light was so amazing, and a nice chap spoke to me. “Excuse me, that’s the 85mm ƒ1.8, right?” We had a camera-nerd conversation for a few minutes, and he loved the pictures I showed him on the back of the camera. If you’re rich, you could go for the highly recommended 85mm ƒ1.4. If you aren’t and you’re looking for something both fun and which will bring some interesting new elements to your pictures, try this one.

It’ll work on any 35mm Nikon, and full-frame digital Nikon, and on any crop-frame Nikon, although in the last case it’ll turn into a rather long 128mm lens. And if you have a Nikon D40, D40X or D60, you’ll have to focus it manually, as these cameras don’t have an internal focusing motor.

Product page [Nikon]

If you take more than a few snaps a month, you’ll eventually end up buying a memory card reader. There are many advantages. First, even a junky dime store card reader will be make quicker transfers than hooking the camera up via a cable. Second, all the time your camera is talking to your computer it is switched on, and this drains batteries fast. Way faster than shooting actual pictures, in fact. Third, it’s a lot easier to just plug the card into a reader.

If you have a netbook and a camera that shoots SD cards, it’s even easier — you just slide the card into the slot in the side of the computer. But for anyone else, or people using DSLRs with Compact Flash cards, a reader is the way to go. But are they all equal?

The short answer? No way. I have a cheap, no-brand unit I bought for less than €10 ($15). I also have a swanky Lexar “professional” reader that I paid over €50 ($70) for (although in the US you can get one for just $45). And guess which one is already broken?

The long answer:

I tested both readers with 500MB of RAW photos on the same SanDisk Ultra III SD card (4GB). I would have tried with CF, too, but one of the pins inside the cheap card has already broken. Both cards are USB 2.0 and were connected by a cable directly to the USB port on a MacBook. Transfer was drag and drop via the Finder to test transfer time without the image-processing overhead of Lightroom or Aperture. Here are the numbers.

• Lexar: 23 seconds
• No-Name: 27 seconds

I was surprised that they’re so close. Scale this up, though, to the full four gigs, and you’re looking over a half minute difference. Small, but significant for some professionals. Of course, those same pros would probably be using an even faster FireWire reader (assuming they have a computer with a FireWire port. Are you listening, Apple?) Remember too that if you are using SDHC cards, or UDMA Compact Flash, the cheap reader can’t handle them.

So, read and write speeds aren’t that much different. Is there really a reason to spend five times the price of the commodity reader? For me, yes. First, as I mentioned, the cheap-o unit is already broken. It lasted a few weeks before a pin bent. Thankfully it didn’t damage the CF card (itself pretty expensive). The Lexar, on the other hand, is solid, closes down into its own case to protect the slots from dust and, most importantly, has proper guide-rails for locating a CF card, making it almost impossible to jam it in at an angle. It also comes with a two-year warranty.

The bottom line is that, while the performance differences are small, the build quality differs hugely. I expect to be using the Lexar reader for many years. If I stuck with the cheap, non-name readers, I’d be dropping $10 a month to replace them. Which of those sounds cheaper to you?

Product page [Lexar]

When I first fiddled with the DP2, I was like “Who would ever want this?” Then I shot some of the most amazing photos I’ve ever taken.

The Set Up: Sigma calls this camera a DSLR in the body of a point and shoot, and they’re kinda right. It’s got the Foveon X3 sensor, which is just a hair smaller than the Nikon and Canon APS-C sensors. Sigma has carefully paired a fixed 24.2mm F2.8 lens in order, they told me, to maximize the benefits of that larger sensor. No zoom lens would do, they said, because picture quality would likely suffer.

To make things even more complicated, for these same reasons, they could only build in contrast-based autofocus. Though more accurate, it takes a lot longer to focus, and, in this camera, tends to give up easily when it can’t quite do it. It was often hard to get a satisfied chirp that meant focus was locked, especially in lower light conditions. Many hastily shot shots are blurry beyond help.

As you can see, this camera is low in the frills department, with greater reward going to those who can shoot manually, and most certainly in RAW. Meaning my first shots were hideous things, and it took a few days for me to become worthy enough to even hold the bastard. Eventually, slowly, I learned what it could—and could not—do.

The Bad News: Let’s repeat: There’s just the one fixed lens, which isn’t much of a wide angle, isn’t much of a macro, isn’t exactly “fast” by today’s DSLR standards, and does not zoom. You have to get in the habit of going to your subjects, then making them stay still long enough to get a decent focus, then a decent shot. To add to the troubles, the sensor that is pristine at ISO 200 is noisy as crap at ISO 800, which means you also have to shoot longer at times to make up for it.

Sigma people said that the ISO should be compared to other point-and-shoots, and that shooting RAW and converting it to JPEG on the computer cuts down on the noise, but even so, check out how crazy the noise was at 1600 after RAW post-processing on the computer:

It’s a mess, you know? I did manage to make some artistic looking black-and-whites by just desaturating the grainy 1600 shots—frankly, they were pretty cool, but it’s something you’d want the option to do, not something you should be forced into.

Other dings the camera gets are a lack of RAW+JPEG mode—what I like to call “insurance+good enough”—some extremely abysmal QVGA video mode that probably should have been left out of the product altogether because it’s pointless, and poor battery life. When Sigma sent me the camera, they included a spare battery. I thought it odd at the time given how insanely great camera battery life is these days usually. Clearly they knew something I didn’t. On top of all that, it’s just not terrifically small—Olympus and Panasonic are pushing Micro Four Thirds cameras that aren’t much bigger. (Course, their sensors are actually smaller.)

The Good News: As I have alluded, I have come around on this camera. Push aside all of the uncool characteristics, focus on what it can do—shooting relatively still objects at relatively close range—and you get some seriously attractive photo work. I can’t show them all to you—the wife lays down a general rule of not posting family pics in Giz reviews—but what I can show you should give you a decent idea of the DP2’s capabilities, coupled with patience and some basic know-how, can deliver. I’ll let them speak for themselves (and yeah, I already know you can do better with your mom’s LG cameraphone, so let’s go easy on the qualitative judgments):

(Note: Wait for page to fully load before clicking on gallery thumbnails, otherwise you’re gonna have a bad time.)

The Rub: As much as I’d like to say it’s a great camera for photographically inclined people to stash somewhere for certain situations, it’s too damn expensive. It costs around $650 street price; for that money you can probably get a clearance-model DSLR model these days, maybe even with a kit lens. In the end, I’ve come to think of the Sigma DP2 as the Dogfish Head 120 Minute IPA of cameras: Beautiful in concept but complex, powerful and damn expensive—if you hit it everyday, it could well get the best of you. [Sigma]

In Brief
For a small-bodied camera, it has exceptional picture-taking capability and superior image quality

Its $650 cost can only be justified by a small percentage of wealthy photo enthusiasts

It’s tricky to use at first


Crap battery life


No zoom lens or any other obvious point-and-shoot frills

My quest for the perfect camera bag is well known, not least to the Lady, who just yesterday was buried under a deluge of canvas and ripstop nylon when she opened the hallway closet. The problem with carrying camera gear is that every situation needs a different solution. Sometimes you need to carry everything. Other times, just a camera and maybe a spare lens. The Lowepro Toploader series is designed to take just one camera and its attached lens, and the folks at Lowepro sent over the Pro 65AW for us to test out.

A lot of the time I want to go out shooting but I don’t want to take a big bag along. The Toploader fits a big DSLR and a short zoom. Here you see it with a Nikon D700 and an 85mm ƒ1.8 Nikkor, complete with rather large metal lens-hood, although it will actually accommodate a D3 or D700 with a battery grip, and of course any other brand of the same size.

The bag is meant to be worked out of. There’s a pair of zippers with cord loops to close it, but when in use you can just clip it shut with a plastic clasp for fast access. The entire top opens up to allow you to grab the camera, and the lip on the right side, where your camera’s grip will be, is slightly lower than the rest of the rim to allow easier grabbing.

You’ll also find an array of pockets. There are two zippered compartments, one on top with extra memory card slots in the lid, and one on the side. Both of these have a mesh pocket, too, for batteries or anything else that might easily tumble out. In addition there is one stretchy patch-pocket with no zipper. I used this for my cellphone. The pockets are big enough to be useful (filters, notebooks and a wallet all fit fine) but tight enough not to bulk up the bag too much.

This last is important, and for once Lowepro has struck the right balance between protection and size. Every Lowepro bag I have tested or bought has been amply padded and I have never worried when dropping one onto a hard floor. The problem, though, is that they can be bulky and heavy. The Toploader isn’t tiny, but it is small enough to stay out of the way.

The comfort extends to the straps, although if you are filling it with a couple of kilos of gear it’s going to hurt after a while, something no shoulder bag can fix. The shoulder strap uses two strong metal carabiner-style clips to fix onto two hoops. This also means you can remove the strap and put the Toploader into a bigger bag, say a rucksack.

The bit which really made me want to try this bag, though, is the additional waist strap. Anyone who has used a proper courier bag will be familiar with this. It joins to the shoulder strap (near the base) and also to the bag itself, looping around your middle. The extra strap stops the bag from swinging or even moving when you are on a bike, which makes this bag an ideal option if you’re cycling. It works, too. With it I can zip through traffic without constantly pushing it back behind me like I do with my regular stealth bag

If you are planning on working out of this bag all day, and you really don’t care what you look like, there is an optional chest harness. This hooks on to the ample loops of the Toploader to make a reverse backpack, and making you look like the biggest nerd in the world. Put it this way: When wearing this, a cellphone belt-clip will actually improve things. That said, it’s comfortable, if a little confusing to get into at first. Also, I don’t quite see the point of having a bag on your chest all the time, except perhaps if you are hiking or just trying to repel women.

Would I buy it? Sure. I wouldn’t use it all the time, especially here in Barcelona where such an obvious camera bag is a magnet to thieves, but its small and handy enough to be a very useful bag. This size costs $55, and is the baby of the range. There are two larger models, and the chest strap costs another $10 (plus the cost to your dignity).

Product page [Lowepro]

Canon’s 5D MkII is hot, hot, hot in the indie video world. Much cheaper than a similarly specced video camera and able to use pretty much any Canon lens made since the 1980s, it shoots some stunning footage.

The problem has been exposure control, or the lack of it. Up until now, you had to shoot in auto-exposure mode. It was possible to use exposure compensation to tweak the light, or to use exposure lock, but these were clunky workarounds. A new firmware update has been announced which will allow full manual control of the camera while shooting video. Here are the additions:

• Full aperture selection
• ISO speed: Auto, 100 – 6400 and H1
• Shutter speed: 1/30th – 1/4000th second

Curiously, the update will not be available for download until June 2nd, which makes this perhaps the first time ever that we’ve seen a teaser for a firmware update.

Press release [DP Review]