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California's Eastern Sierra
04 and 05 October 2010

These are snaps from a short trip to California's Eastern Sierra to run some of Canon and Nikon's newest gear through its paces.

Click any image to make it bigger, or to get the original file.

All are exactly as shot in JPG unless otherwise noted. All the colors you see are exactly what came out of the camera. A couple were shot in NEF, as noted, and these of course will open differently depending on how you open them and which software you use. For the NEF shots, the in-camera JPGs are what I show on this page, and the full-resolution files created from the NEFs are at the links.

Everything is shot hand-held; I don't need no stinking tripod. With VR, why bother? No one wants to carry any more junk.

My D3 is set to VIVID Picture Control and +3 saturation to get these wild colors. I usually shoot in Professional (P) exposure mode, with AUTO ISO set to ISO 200 normal, ISO 6,400 max. I set Auto ISO to 1/8 second at shorter zoom settings, and 1/125 at the 300mm end.

I shoot in Auto white Balance, with the trim set to A3.

 

04 October 2010, Monday

Today I left La Jolla and headed north on Old Route 395.

I saw this parked outside my condo:

Blue Dodge Avenger

Blue. original © file.

I shot this with my Canon S95, in its macro mode. If you'd like to see the original © file, remember that this car had a curved trunk and thus the top is out of focus.

 

Del Taco

Del Taco. bigger.

First stop: Lunch in Adelanto.

This snapped on my Nikon D3 with Nikon's new 28-300mm VR set to 58mm.

 

Storm over the Sierra, Old Route 395.

Storm over the Sierra, Old Route 395. bigger.

This snapped on my Nikon D3 with Nikon's new 28-300mm VR set to 72mm; f/11 at 1/500. bigger.

This is as bad as the distortion of the 28-300mm gets. Look at the Earth: it's supposed to be flat, not round as is is here. It's trivial to fix in Photoshop if I cared.

 

Chiaroscuro in Chocolate, East from Route 395

Chiaroscuro in Chocolate, East from Route 395. bigger.

Shot on Fuji Velvia 50 in a Nikon F6 through the 28-300mm VR and Nikon A2 filter at 180mm; f/6.3 at 1/200, hand-held (frame 09, F6 EXIF file), NCPS process and scan.

 

Yellow Truck, Lee Vining.

Yellow Truck, Lee Vining. bigger.

Snapped on my Nikon D3 with the 28-300mm VR set to 250mm; f/5.6 at 1/125. bigger.

VR easily let me shoot at 300mm at 1/125. The lens' natural falloff, seen here at its worst, helped emphasize the yellow truck and keep our eyes from wandering off into the corners.

How do I see this stuff? I made this shot off the balcony of my motel. I just keep my eyes open, which I can do, because my little brain ins' t clogged with unnecessary thoughts like NEF algorithms or changing lenses, and my body is relaxed from not carrying all the junk others still do.

 

Yellow Red, Lee Vining.

Red. bigger.

Snapped on my Nikon D3 with the 28-300mm VR set to 34mm; f/3.8 at 1/60. bigger.

Even though the 28-300mm is loaded with severe distortion, it goes away around 34mm. If you want to shoot brick walls, shoot it this way and the problem goes away all by itself.

 

Virginia Creek Settlement.

Virginia Creek Settlement. original © file.

Snapped on my hand-held Nikon D3 with the 28-300mm VR set to 28mm; aperture-priority set to f/5.6 and the D3 chose 1/8 at ISO 1,000.

Focus is on the left window. Looking at the original © file, note that the pole to the left isn't in focus, and the restaurant interior seen on the left is sharp and in focus.

The image above is exactly as the JPG came out of the camera for exposure and color. I cropped it to vertical from a more boring horizontal. Focus is on the left window.

I also corrected the 28-300's distortion and my crooked hand-holding, which really was only visible on the pole not shown after my crop.

Here's the full corrected image before I cropped:

Virginia Creek Settlement

Virginia Creek Settlement, corrected but uncropped.

Notice my deliberate crop, which when published here with a constant width, lets me publish an image with a greater height than the uncropped image.

Virginia Creek Settlement

Virginia Creek Settlement, distortion and slight tilt uncorrected.

Even as-shot, a perfectly swell image.

The 28-300's VR let me shoot hand-held at 1/8 of a second as I walked in for dinner. Since I easily got perfectly sharp shots at 1/8, I could stop down to f/5.6 for more depth-of-field than the default f/3.5 that I would have usually gotten in Pro (P) exposure mode. Since I chose f/5.6 and 1/8, AUTO ISO obliged by choosing ISO 1,000 for me faster than I blink an eye.

 

Virginia Creek Settlement.

Virginia Creek Settlement. original © file.

Snapped on my hand-held Nikon D3 with the 28-300mm VR set to 38mm; aperture-priority set to f/5.6 and the D3 chose 1/8 at ISO 1,250. original © file.

Realize that the focus is on the far wall; closer objects aren't softer due to the lens, they are simply out-of-focus. The VR of the 28-300mm lets me stop down a bit in these dark conditions; the 35mm f/1.4G would have been softer shot at a larger aperture due to less in-focus, or a lack of VR if I tried to stop it down to f/5.6.

 

Virginia Creek Settlement.

The Nikon 28-300mm VR: an open and closed case for the end-of-the-camera-bag. original © file.

Snapped on my hand-held Nikon D3 with the 28-300mm VR set to 100mm; f/5.6 at 1/8 at ISO 720. original © file.

I love that the 28-300mm focuses as close as I'd ever want. This is at 100mm at a foot or two, hand-held at 1/8 of a second!

 

05 October 2010, Tuesday

I woke up, and the weather was still sad. I decided to abort the mission and bail for home, since the babies missed me.

 

The Star

Isolated Excellence. bigger.

Snapped with my Nikon D3 with the 28-300mm VR set to 300mm; f/8 at 1/250 at ISO 200. bigger.

I shot this in Pro (P) mode and everything set as I leave it. I lightened it a bit later, probably too much. If I was paying attention I'd instead have simply dodged just The Star so the white hood doesn't distract as much as it does here.

Note how the 28-300mm, at 300mm, isolates a subject, even at f/8. All 300mm lenses do this, but you have to know to set a zoom to 300mm if you want this much isolation.

I paid less for this used Mercedes four years ago than I could have spent for a brand-new Toyota Camry or Ford Taurus. See How to Afford Anything for how I afford all this — for less.

 

Red Receding

Red Receding. bigger.

Snapped with my Nikon D3 with the 28-300mm VR set to 28mm; A mode at f/8 at 1/15 hand-held at ISO 200.

VR let me to shoot at 1/15 at ISO 200 so I could stop-down to get more in focus.

The strong distortion at 28mm is effectively invisible here.

 

Mono lake

Layers and Lines.

Snapped with my Nikon D3 with the 28-300mm VR set to 300mm; f/11 at 1/500 at ISO 200.

 

Mono lake

Light, Layers and Lines. bigger.

Just about the same thing, except shot with a Nikon Reflex-NIKKOR 500mm f/8 N at 1/2,000 at ISO 800, hand-held.

 

Rt 6

Earth and Clouds, Route 6. bigger.

Shot on Fuji Velvia 50 in a Nikon F6 through a Nikon NIKKOR 18mm f/3.5 AI-s and Nikon A2 filter (frame 10, F6 EXIF file), NCPS process and scan.

 

The Road to Benton.

The Road to Benton. bigger.

Shot with a hand-held Nikon D3 a foot off the ground with a NIKKOR 18mm f/3.5 AI-s, Nikon 72mm A2 filter (since I was also shooting the F6 and was too lazy to pull off the filter), A mode at f/11 at 1/500 at ISO 200. bigger.

It was easy to calculate f/11 and a focus setting of 6' as giving me the sharpest image for everything from 3 feet to infinity as seen in this shot. I simply used the depth-of-field scale of the 18mm f/3.5, and since it read f/5.6, my secret formula told me that f/11 would therefore give the best sharpness. On a zoom, I'd be clueless, since they have no depth-of-field scales, so screw the otherwise spectacular 16-35mm VR.

Every millimeter matters with camera position. I deliberately moved my camera so that the center line was vertical. I deliberately went out of my way to hold the camera inches off the tarmac. I deliberately chose a position to give a big lower-case "h" at the bottom of the image. The big "h" gives our eyes something to explore and keep them in the center of the image; otherwise, the bottom half of the picture is boring.

The orange blobs on the bottom left are ghosts in the lens, excited by the disc of the sun. They are trivially easy to remove with Photoshop CS5's Spot Healing Brush. I left them in because they accentuate the sun's brilliance, and add excitement to the image. Newer lenses, like the 16-35mm VR, don't have these, and sometimes people use special software to put them back in! The smaller blobs running through the center of the image are the same thing. The little white blobs to the right of the sun are probably dirt on the lens. I leave these in because they help communicate the blinding brightness of this direct view of the sun's disc.

If I wasn't careful, I got weaker images like this shot from eye level that had the line placed at random, without the "h." This is the sort of drivel people shoot with tripods, always at eye level:

 

Benton clouds

Poor camera position: boring line and empty bottom of frame.

 

I chose the 18mm f/3.5 AI-s, even though the 16-35mm was in my bag 12 feet away, not only because its depth-of-field scale allowed me to create the sharpest possible image from here to eternity, but also because its traditional straight-bladed diaphragm let me create a great 14-pointed sunstar, while the round diaphragm blades of the 16-35mm instead turn the sun into just one big blob, like this:

 

clouds

Boring Sun blob: 16-35mm at f/22 and 25mm.

With the 16-35mm VR's optical perfection, instead of sunstars and just the right amount of ghosts, all we get is an annoying white circle where the sun ought to be.

 

West of Benton.

West of Benton. full-resolution JPG from NEF via ACR and CS5.

This snapped on my Nikon D3 with Nikon 28-300mm VR set to 145mm; f/11 at 1/500 at ISO 200.

Ugly colors here are because this isn't from the camera's JPG as are the other shots; this is from the NEF with its saturation rudely cranked-up in Adobe Camera Raw. Nikon does a fantastic job in-camera of getting the luscious colors I want; ACR doesn't. I suspect if I dared run Nikon's own buggy software to read NEFs that I could get the same great colors, as well as the lateral color fringe correction also provided in-camera. Other software doesn't correct lateral color automatically.

This is a boring photo; I'm showing it as an example of the sharpness of the 28-300mm at 145mm.

Here is a full-resolution JPG as created from an NEF opened with Adobe Camera Raw and optimized briefly in Photoshop CS5. You'll get different results, and get different results with different software.

 

West of Benton.

West of Benton, at 300mm. full-resolution JPG from NEF via ACR and CS5.

This snapped on my Nikon D3 with Nikon 28-300mm VR set to 300mm; f/11 at 1/500 at ISO 200. Color again from the NEF conversion, not the camera's JPG.

This is a boring photo; I'm showing it as an example of the sharpness of the 28-300mm at 300mm.

Any lateral color fringes seen in the full-resolution JPG as created from an NEF opened with Adobe Camera Raw and optimized briefly in Photoshop CS5 are because non-Nikon software doesn't correct it automatically. You'll get different results, and get different results with different software.

 

East from Benton.

East from Benton. full-resolution JPG from NEF via ACR and CS5.

This snapped on my Nikon D3 with Nikon 28-300mm VR set to 62mm; f/11 at 1/500 at ISO 200.

This is an example of the sharpness of the 28-300mm at 62mm. Focus is essentially at infinity; the weeds at the bottom aren't in focus; it's not a lack of lens performance.

 

Warm Yellow and Blue.

Warm Yellow and Blue Clichée. full-resolution JPG from NEF via ACR and CS5.

This from an in-camera JPG from my Nikon D3 with Nikon 28-300mm VR set to 78mm; f/11 at 1/500 at ISO 200.

Even though the 28-300mm is loaded with distortion at 78mm, it's invisible here because the pole isn't that long, isn't that far away from the center, and only runs for a short distance across the image.

Here is a full-resolution JPG as created from an NEF opened with Adobe Camera Raw and optimized briefly in Photoshop CS5. You'll get different results, and get different results with different software. Know that only the sign is in focus; everything else is either closer or farther away and therefore progressively out-of-focus.

 

Warm Yellow.

Warm Yellow Clichée. full-resolution JPG from NEF via ACR and CS5.

This from an in-camera JPG from my Nikon D3 with Nikon 28-300mm VR set to 230mm; f/11 at 1/500 at ISO 200.

Here is a full-resolution JPG as created from the NEF opened with Adobe Camera Raw and optimized briefly in Photoshop CS5. You'll get different results, and get different results with different software.

Focus is on the windshield; everything else is either closer or farther away and therefore progressively out-of-focus.

 

Zenith TV, Bishop.

Zenith TV, Bishop. bigger.

This snapped on my Nikon D3 with Nikon 28-300mm VR set to 230mm; f/11 at 1/500 at ISO 200. bigger.

Since the horizontal lines of the sign along the top and bottom were visibly distorted, it was trivial to straighten them in Photoshop's Lens Filter using the values I share in my Nikon 28-300mm Review.

 

La Casita, Bishop.

Green, Yellow and Blue. full-resolution JPG from NEF via ACR and CS5.

From an in-camera JPG from my Nikon D3 with Nikon 28-300mm VR set to 68mm; f/11 at 1/500 at ISO 200.

Full-resolution JPG as created from an NEF opened with Adobe Camera Raw and optimized briefly in Photoshop CS5.

 

Fingal's Hump.

Blue, Tan and Green. bigger.

This snapped on my hand-held Nikon D3 with Nikon 28-300mm VR set to 116mm; f/8 at 1/250 at ISO 200. bigger.

This shot is about simplicity. I saw the sky and the light on the hump and the grass, and knew the photo could simplify it into three bands of simple, soothing color. It's the same colors as the sign above!

 

Clouds and Clichée, at 48mm.

Clouds and Clichée, at 48mm. full-resolution JPG.

This snapped on my Nikon D3 with Nikon 28-300mm VR set to 48mm; f/11 at 1/500 at ISO 200.

This is a dull photo offered as an example of the sharpness of the 28-300mm at 48mm.

Here is a full-resolution JPG as created from an NEF opened with Adobe Camera Raw and optimized briefly in Photoshop CS5. You'll get different results, and get different results with different software.

 

Sierra and Clouds.

Sierra and Clouds, 112mm. full-resolution JPG.

This snapped on my Nikon D3 with Nikon 28-300mm VR set to 112mm; f/11 at 1/500 at ISO 200.

This is an example of the sharpness of the 28-300mm at 112mm.

Here is a full-resolution JPG as created from an NEF opened with Adobe Camera Raw and optimized briefly in Photoshop CS5. You'll get different results, and get different results with different software.

 

Clouds and Clichée, at 48mm.

Cloud Clichée.

This snapped on my Nikon D3 with Nikon 16-35mm VR set to 26mm; f/16 at 1/1,000 at ISO 200.

This is an example of the lack of sunstars when shot with the 16-35mm. Boring. Bring back the straight-bladed diaphragm, or shoot this with the Nikon Zoom-NIKKOR 25-50mm f/4 if you need sunstars at 26mm.

 

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