Tag Archives: cameras

A Quick Look through the 10-24mm Nikon Lens

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So far, so good.

Yesterday, the two lenses I rented from BorrowLenses.com arrived. This morning, Mike, @AnnTorrence, and I headed out for an early morning photo shoot to get a feel for them.

Nikon 10-24mm lensIt might seem odd, but I rented two almost identical lenses: the Nikon 10-24mm f/3.5-4.5G AF-S DX ED (shown here) and the Sigma 10-20mm f/4-5.6 EX DC HSM for Nikon. Lately, I’ve been enjoying the challenge of wide angle photography and want the ability to get up close and personal with my subject matter while still fitting much of it in the frame. I like the oddness introduced by a wide angle lens — the way a wide angle photo makes you look closer to see what’s not quite right. I’ve had a lot of fun over the past two years with my 10.5mm f/2.8G ED AF DX Fisheye Nikkor Lens, but that introduces too much distortion. The photos I take with that lens look downright weird. I want a lens without that much distortion that still has the ability to frame big landscape backdrops to my foreground subjects.

This could be just a stage I’m going through, but I feel a need to explore it fully to see where it takes me as a photographer.

I want to buy the Nikon 10-24mm lens. I wanted to buy it before I rented it. It has the kind of range I’m looking for to complement the 16-85mm f/3.5-5.6G AF-S DX ED VR Nikkor lens I keep on my camera most of the time. But it’s a costly lens and it wasn’t readily available from my first choice supplier. With an upcoming photo shoot, I figured renting it was a good alternative. And since my husband would also be shooting with his Nikon, it made sense to rent the Sigma so we could compare that lower-cost alternative.

The photo shoot is in Tucson, at the San Xavier Mission. About 15 members of the Arizona West Shutterbugs “Meetup” Group will be gathering there on Saturday to shoot the mission and then head into Tucson for a museum with an Ansel Adams exhibit. I’m looking forward to trying the lenses at the mission, although I am a bit concerned that my up-front-and-personal approach might put me in front of the other shooter’s lenses. I hope not. If the group shoot turns out to be a bust but the location has potential, I’ll likely return on a weekday when there will be fewer people around.

This morning, we headed out before dawn to nearby Rancho de los Caballeros, a local guest ranch. At night, their horses — all 93 of them — are kept in a big fenced in area at the south end of the property. At about 7:30 AM, the wranglers herd them all into a smaller enclosure closer to the ranch’s main buildings. They return the horses to their nighttime enclosure at around 5 PM. This movement is referred to as the “running of the horses” (even though they don’t actually run the entire mile or so). I thought it would be interesting for Ann and she did seem to enjoy it, although I don’t think any of us got any good photos. (I’ll try again another morning, perhaps from a different vantage point.)

Vulture Peak Near Wickenburg, AZ

The east side of Vulture Peak, shot at 10mm with the Nikon 10-24mm lens.

Afterwards, I took us all by Jeep down a few of the more rugged Jeep roads on the east side of Vulture Peak. The light was still good, at least for a while. We all made lots of photos from the two or three places I stopped and we got out. Then the light got too harsh and we headed back to my house.

Mike and I each tried each of the 10-24mm lenses. Mike thinks the Nikon may be better, although we really don’t have a good test yet. He’s in love with the lens and it’s very likely that we’ll buy one. But not yet. We still have 6 days with these rentals and we plan to shoot a lot of photos.

A Gathering of Nikons

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When photographers get together, it’s time for show and tell.

One of my Twitter friends, @anntorrence, author of U.S. Highway 89: The Scenic Route to Seven Western National Parks, rolled into town yesterday on a book signing tour. Highway 89 runs right through Wickenburg and that’s where we first met, in person, about two years ago. Ann stayed overnight; later today she’ll visit a few local shops and then continue her trip down to Phoenix and beyond.

A bevy of NikonsLast night, after dinner, we started pulling out our camera equipment and playing with each other’s cameras and lenses. Ann told us some things about our Nikons that we didn’t know. We played with her flash in “commander mode.” We discovered that she and I each had the same old 50mm autofocus lens and it worked on all our cameras: my lowly D80, my husband’s newer D90, and Ann’s far superior D700. We also played around a bit with the two lenses I’m renting for a week from BorrowLenses.com, both of which arrived yesterday afternoon.

I snapped this photo with my Nikon Coolpix point-and-shoot to document the mess of equipment on my kitchen table. Fun stuff!

Faking Tilt-Shift Photography

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It works!

The other day, I got my first exposure (pun intended) to the world of tilt-shift photography. It was a link tweeted by one of my Twitter friends, @jebro, to a series of videos by Keith Loutit on Vimeo. These videos used time-lapse tilt-shift photography. The result were videos that looked as if they were created painstakingly with miniature models.

Take a minute right now and check out Keith’s video, “The North Wind Blew South.”

I’ve heard of time-lapse photography, of course. In fact, I used to play around with it using my Webcam software. You can see some examples here, here, and here.

But I’d never heard of tilt-shift photography. I did some research and found an excellent article on Wikipedia (of course) that included photos of camera equipment used to make the images. Per Wikipedia, the basic explanation is as follows:

Tilt-shift photography refers to the use of camera movements on small- and medium format cameras. In many cases, it refers to tilting the lens relative to the image plane and using a large aperture to achieve a very shallow depth of field.

The end result is that only a small portion of the image is in focus. This became popular in portrait photography. But it also has become popular as a technique to make fake miniatures — in other words, photos of full-size, real-life objects or people made to look as if they are miniature models. Wikipedia has a separate page about tilt-shift miniature faking that includes sample images.

You can also find plenty of sample images and videos on Smashing Magazine’s article, “50 Beautiful Examples Of Tilt-Shift Photography.”

Photography is one of my hobbies and I was extremely interested in this technique. I think the photos look kind of silly and cool. But I wasn’t interested in buying special lenses just to give it a try. Fortunately, I didn’t have to. The Smashing Magazine article included a link to a tutorial on the Tilt-Shift Photography Web site titled “Tilt-Shift Photography Photoshop Tutorial.” It explains how you can use Photoshop to create a fake tilt-shift photograph.

I tried it today with a number of photos that happen to be with me on my laptop. The one shown below is my fifth try. It’s a photo of Juneau, AK (I think; forgive me if I got the wrong port city), taken from an upper deck on a cruise ship. In the original photo, the entire image is in focus; for this fake miniature, I focused on a boat and two buildings in the foreground. The color is saturated and the contrast is increased as recommended to give it that painted model feel. I think this photo is a pretty good example of the tilt-shift photography effect. What do you think?

Tilt-Shift Example

My first four tries simply didn’t look right. I think it was a combination of the image I chose and the lens blur mask I used. The photo here uses a radial gradient mask rather than the reflected gradient recommended by the tutorial. That makes it possible to pinpoint the in-focus area, which worked for this image. The example image in the tutorial had a horizontal strip of the photo in focus; that simply doesn’t work for all photos.

But I apparently did get the hang of it. Here’s my next try, with another Alaska port city:

Fake Tilt-Shift Example

San Francisco in MiniatureAnd here’s a shot from last January’s visit to San Francisco. That’s the dome of City Hall with Sutro Tower in the background. I took the photo from my hotel room at the Nikko. I think it comes across pretty well as a fake miniature.

And here’s a shot my husband Mike took on a helicopter trip up the Colorado River last year. It’s the Hoover Dam with the new bridge under construction:

Hover Dam Miniature

And one more…this is the power house downstream from Lake Chelan in Washington State. It’s another aerial photo — they certainly do make good subjects for this kind of exercise. The heavy equipment looks like Tonka trucks!

Lake Chelan Pumphouse Miniature

Anyway, now that I’ve tried this with a certain amount of success, I think I can get it out of my system. If anyone out there has experimented with this kind of photography — especially using a camera and lens rather than cheating with Photoshop — please use the Comments link or form for this post to link to examples of your work. And feel free to share any tips you might have for folks who are interested in giving this a try.