Away to Death Valley

I’m hoping for the usual pleasant weather in Death Valley (80 - 85°F) and also some thunderstorms thrown in for good measure. See the Feb 15 entry for more. I’ll be shooting the 12.1MP Nikon D3 and 21.1MP Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III with all the Zeiss ZF Lenses as well as the Coastal Optics 60/4 APO UV-VIS-IR.

Any paid reviews purchased made before Saturday morning March 1 will be delivered prior to my departure, otherwise upon my return (details).

The image below is one of my favorite Death Valley images, taken in Titus Canyon of two horses (one grazing and one running). I actively look for such images, waiting for them to appear out of patterns, in this case white and blue marble. And sometimes I make them without seeing them first, knowing there is a latent form, but waiting for it to “develop”.

Titus Canyon Horses

Best boot drive for a Mac Pro

Barefeats.com has a nice review of hard drives in Shootout: Potential Boot Drives for the 2008 Mac Pro, including the Samsung Spinpoint F1 and Seagate 7200.11. I recommend barefeats.com for your bookmark list—they offer useful and timely reviews.

But in terms of boot drives, consider this: my Mac Pro boots from an external Firewire 800 drive containing an older and not very fast hard drive. Here’s why:

• With Mac OS X, I hardly ever reboot, so boot time is irrelevant (and quite fast anyway).
• With ample memory, virtual memory “paging” off the boot drive never occurs.
• Scratch files don’t go on my boot drive, so boot drive speed is irrelevant there also.
• By booting off an external drive, all four internal drive bays are available for data only (it is good computer hygiene to separate system/applications from data files).

So save your money on a fast boot drive (unless you’ll use one and only one drive)—use any basic hard drive in an external case; populate your Mac Pro with ample memory and fast hard drives for data (in the internal bays). For example:

• buy the Mac Pro with the cheapest hard drive available;
• remove the drive from the Mac Pro, and install it into a Firewire 800 case that accepts SATA drives. Boot off that (no reformatting or reinstall needed).
• Install one or more fast SATA II hard drives in the internal drive bays of the Mac Pro (trivial to do).

See also: Six Hard Drives in a Mac Pro and Hard Drives

Looking for a Nikon D3?

As of this morning, the Nikon D3 was in stock at B&H Photo.com—search for “NID3” once at B&H.

Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III

Here’s a piece of advice that is sure to be controversial—the 21MP Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III is no match on a per-pixel quality basis to the 10.1MP Canon EOS 1D Mark III, which I raved about throughout 2007. That’s a pity; scaling up the 1DM3 sensor to full frame would have yielded 17MP, ample resolution. Instead, Canon chose an inferior sensor technology at 21MP.

Update: one reader wrote to say this should not be controversial at all. I agree, but there are plenty of dilettantes out there who favor a camera because it’s the brand they own (or just like for whatever reason). A camera is simply a tool—and so I have both Nikon and Canon, a requirement for what I want to do with this site, but also because different kinds of shooting call for different cameras. I have 4 kinds of hammers in my tool chest, but no one argues I should only own a ballpeen hammer. (Tip: apply one to your PC and get a Mac).

Better yet, if you want terrific color and low noise without the bloated file size of the 1DsM3, get a Nikon D3! I’ll be reporting more on the 1DsM3 in the next few months, but (literally) when I look at the 1DsM3 and the Nikon D3 sitting on my desk, my hand always reaches for the D3 first when heading out for a shoot. But perhaps the 1DsM3 will prove itself in Death Valley when I go in 7-10 days (other work demands have delayed my trip). On the negative side, its disappointing that I can’t shoot lenses like the Leica 180/2.8 APO (see review) on the D3—Nikon’s flange focal offset distance precludes lens adapters, whereas Canon’s does not.

Bottom line: consider very carefully whether megapixels alone “floats your boat”. There are so many other reasons to choose a camera. The same principle applies to lenses, and of course technique and tripods matter too.

Nikon fixes Capture NX sharpening bug

The sharpening bug I reported here on Dec 04 2007 has allegedly been fixed in the Nikon Capture NX 1.3.2 update.

Now running Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard

Back in October I explained why waiting to switch to Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard would be a good idea. With at least two updates (it’s now at 10.5.2), Leopard looks reasonably stable.

So after first installing and running Leopard on my MacBook Pro for a few days, I was satisfied that things worked reasonably well. And with Nikon finally fixing Capture NX for Leopard in early January, I decided to take the plunge with my “production” Mac Pro. So far, the following are working fine:

• Photoshop CS3
• Dreamweaver CS3
• Apple Mail upgraded perfectly, mailboxes intact (but SpamSieve needed to be turned back on)
• printing to Epson 3800 (but Epson’s new “public beta” printer drivers are needed)
• Microsoft Excel 2004 (launches really slowly however), Word 2004
• Canon Digital Photo Professional 3.2.0.6
• TextWrangler 2.3

I’ll post any issues as I encounter them. But at least for now, it looks like Leopard is safe for use.

San Francisco zoo

A big disappointment at the San Francisco zoo today was that the tiger exhibit area was entirely blocked off, due to the mauling by a Siberian tiger of three youths (one fatality). (For me at least, it strains credulity that the tiger leapt the huge gap to attack the three victims with no provocation, seems more probable that an episode of “Jackass” occurred). Other exhibits for carnivores now have newly-installed heavy-duty chain-link style fences that preclude photography (unless perhaps you’re NBA-tall). What a downgrade...oh well.

On the plus side, if you’re in San Francisco, the new grizzly bear exhibit is the best at the zoo, and a really fun show with the two “twins” eating apples and carrots thrown to them today, and rubbing their heads inches away from visitors (on heavy duty plexiglass).

One of the twins enjoying an apple

Simple pleasures

Cross-eyed

Legs

Canon EOS auto-exposure “brain fart”

The 21.1MP Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III apparently has the same auto-exposure bug I see sporadically on its 10.1MP sibling, the EOS 1D Mark III. I don’t have an explanation as of yet, but in some cases (with the 1DM3) I’ve even been able to reproduce the problem—it is not user error. In this case, I had even dialed in -1/3 stop exposure compensation.

Gross auto-exposure error—Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III

Proper exposure—Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III
(Sumatran tiger)

Seagate 1 terabyte (1000GB/1TB) ES.1 hard drives

Following up on Friday’s entry, I’ve cycled my internal hard drives to use four Seagate 1TB (terabyte) hard drives, model ST31000340NS. These are the fastest, quietest units I’ve used so far. Incredible performance; just one of these drives yields 70% of the performance of two of the Maxtor drives I had been using.

1.4TB 4-drive striped RAID “master data” volume

See my mini review in Hard Drives.

Article delivery and problem email accounts

When you purchase a paid article, be sure your email account is working. When an email is rejected or can’t be delivered it bounces back, but of course there’s little I can do except post the problem on the Delivery Problems page.

Should this blog be “value ware”?

The band RadioHead last year sold their music at whatever price listeners thought was worth paying. Oddly enough, they did quite well for themselves.

I’m considering whether this blog should be “value ware”—pay whatever you think it’s worth (on a yearly basis). That includes $0.00, but anyone who concludes it’s worth their time to read it yet worth no money has an impressive ability to avoid cognitive dissonance...but I digress. The “hitch” would be that it would continue to be free—on the honor system. Would it work? Maybe it’s the wave of the future.

We all get old

Youth is wasted on the young. But at least I don’t feel this decrepit yet, most days!!!

Nikon D3 and backfocus

I think this problem might well explain the confounding results I saw initially with the D3; I was using manual focus and not getting the sharpness I expected.

No I’m not talking about the backfocus problem seen with autofocus lenses. I’m talking about consistent backfocus using manual (eye) focus with any lens I try. My left eye agrees with the focus confirmation indicator inside the Nikon D3 viewfinder (at least when the focused area is unambiguous). The error is such that it results in throw-away results, very frustrating because I often shoot wide open, especially with Zeiss ZF Lenses, which offer outstanding performance there.

The Nikon D3 thinks the image at top is in focus, according to the focus confirmation indicator inside the viewfinder. And so does my left eye. The image at bottom was focused with Live View.

Nikon D3—eye focus (top), Live View (bottom), 100mm @ f/2, 1/4000 sec

I’m beginning to wonder if there can be some internal oddity, say a loose part that moves a few microns when the camera is tilted up or down, because in the field I can reproduce the problem at will with a wide variety of subjects (dozens) with different lenses of different focal lengths. This is no focus shift (spherical aberration) issue; the lenses are focused and shot wide open. Under controlled conditions with a high contrast target (limited testing) focus is accurate sometimes, but when an error occurs (frequently), it’s always backfocus.

I shot the same lenses on the Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III (using an adapter) and could not produce the problem—not once, establishing that the problem lies with the camera body, not my eyes. I’m left to conclude that my Nikon D3 is defective somehow (eg out of alignment). If the optical path from the lens to the sensor were not identical as the one from the lens to the viewfinder, that would explain things. The D3 might have to go into Nikon for a checkup.

Zeiss ZF 100/2 Makro-Planar @ f/2

Perfect time of year for Death Valley

Late February is the best time of year to visit Death Valley National Park (southern California). Temperatures are extremely pleasant from sea level to 1000 feet or so. And this year just might offer spectacular flowers over the next 2-3 weeks, due to heavy rains. But do beware of extreme weather and closed roads and snowy passes—check park road conditions first.

I will be visiting Death Valley very soon should my workload allow it, and I hope to do my first serious “in the wild” comparison of the 12MP Nikon D3 to the 21MP Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III. Check out my images from last year’s trip.

Zeiss ZF Lenses

I eagerly await future offerings from Zeiss in the ZF line—the fact is that I shoot the ZF line most of the time now on both the Nikon D3 and Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III. Find out why in Zeiss ZF Lenses. (And if you don’t think manual focus lenses are for you, get the review anyway, just to learn a huge amount about lenses in general—well worth when considering the N or C brands).

Of course, the lens(es) one shoots are strongly influenced by subject matter (eg moving kids*). I do shoot Canon and Nikon lenses (Nikon’s new zooms are superb), but more and more I find that I prefer to work with a fixed focal length (non-zoom) lens—fast shooting != best results for many subjects. And autofocus often gets in the way of the precision focus I demand, especially at f/2.

* “kids” seems oddly inaccurate—“monkeys on speed” seems more apt

Lens distortion

Lens distortion is something I often ignore, but for some subjects such as architecture, low distortion outweighs other considerations. Shown below is the view from one of my favorite places (on my back about to take a nap). While not perfectly framed (it was taken handheld), the distortion is evident, and quite inappropriate for this particular image. Yet it’s an amount of distortion not at all unreasonable in a 50mm f/1.4 lens design. (Here the Zeiss ZF 50/2 Makro-Planar would have been a better choice for its lower distortion).

Evident distortion — Zeiss ZF 50/1.4 Planar

Distortion that is more or less linear is easy to correct in software and indeed the ZF 50/1.4 Planar offers that possibility. Zoom lenses and other specialty designs might have a “wave” or “moustache” distortion that is much more problematic.

Evident distortion — Zeiss ZF 50/1.4 Planar

The bottom line is that every lens is optimized to best satisfy a particular set of design constraints. The ever-popular delusion of judging lenses on test-chart sharpness is sure to disappoint when artistic images are to be made, and/or real scenes with widely-varying color and lighting and contrast are photographed. Find out more about the salient differences between lenses in Zeiss ZF Lenses as well as Canon EF 14/2.8L II.

One terabyte drives

The time has come—with only 20-30GB of storage left on my multiple redundant backup volumes* (several 3X300GB RAID stripes and a few 2X500GB stripes), it’s time to rotate out three of the internal 500GB Maxtors, replacing them with 1TB (1000MB) internal drives. (Perhaps when writeable 30GB DVDs are available it will be practical to use optical media). I chose the Seagate models, and I’ll report on their performance after they arrive and I’ve had a chance to test them thoroughly with DiskTester.

The 1TB Seagate drives are a steal at $259 each at zipzoomfly.com. I bought the “SEAGATE ST31000340AS 1TB SATA 7200 RPM 32MB Hard Drive Bulk” ones, which showed the best test results at barefeats.com. Update: Reader Martin D points out that it might be worth paying another $40 for the ST31000340NS, which has beefier specifications, but the warranty appears to be 5 years in both cases. Using “enterprise grade” drives is the approach I’ve taken in the past with Maxtor, given the modest cost premium and day-long hassle should a drive fail. So I’ve cancelled and reordered with the Barracuda ES.2 ST31000340NS. See Feb 20 entry for more.

* A “volume” is composed of one or more hard drive partitions (or whole drives). An N-way “striped” volume means that N physical hard drives are involved. A single hard drive typically is presented as a single volume, but can have 2 or 3 or 10 or N volumes, each occupying some portion of the storage area, sort of like cubicles for data. (And preferable to the sound of cuticle grooming I once endured in a cubicle!)

Subscription service—need technical pointers

I’m researching software packages for setting up a paid subscription service so as to offer more in-depth content (in addition to this blog). There are a number of packages out there, most of which are PHP-based and use the (annoying) IonCube loader, which caused some demo installation headaches. The software needs to run on Mac OS X Server, use MySQL database and Apache. If any readers have expertise in this area, I’d certainly like to hear from you!

I’ve been looking at CGI Central aMember Professional, which has a nice feature set, but those guys won’t respond to email in less than 3 days, and so far have failed to explain basic questions, like whether authentication can be done through a SQL database. I’ve set up a demo of the software on a “test mule” server and it looks like it will do the job nicely. But one wonders about post-sale support if pre-sale questions go unanswered.

I’ve also been looking at i2 Services PHP Membership Manager, whose interface looks somewhat less appealing, but support has been quite responsive. I’ll need to set up the demo and study it further.

Needless to say, I want a system with a good feature set that can support a large number of users. As a software engineer, I could roll my own, but that would take significant time not really available to me right now.

Sorry, no Fuji IS Pro review for now

An experience report on the Fujifilm IS Pro (a “full-spectrum” camera) using the Coastal Optics 60/4 UV-VIS-IR APO macro was on the agenda, but Fuji’s response (retracting an initial “yes”) was that unless all resulting material was free, they would not loan diglloyd.com an evaluation unit.

Since at least a few pictures and commentary would need to end up in my diglloyd Guide to Digital Infrared Photography, this was hardly an acceptable agreement. And given the more than modest coverage I gave to the Leica M8 (free) and Fuji S3 UVIR, this came as a bit of a surprise too (or perhaps not, given Fuji’s bizarre license).

But it should be clear that I never accept restrictions from any manufacturer on what I write, how much I write, or where it gets published. Nor do I ever allow manufacturers to “review” or “preview” my work before publication. One does wonder if this means that Fuji won’t loan evaluation units to magazines, which require paid subscriptions!

At any rate, I’m sorry that I cannot Serve my readers with coverage of the IS Pro, but perhaps you’re better off heading over to maxmax.com and converting a plain Fuji S5 at a lower cost than purchasing the IS Pro. Or perhaps a Canon EOS 5D, my own “bread and butter” infrared camera. See also my comparative review of the Fuji S3 UVIR.

For sale: Canon EOS 1D Mark III

Up for sale is my 10.1-megapixel Canon EOS 1D Mark III, back from Canon USA Service for the focus correction “recall”. Canon has extended the warranty for a full year. Readers of this blog know that I have been thrilled with the stellar image quality from the 1D Mark III, beginning with my May 24 comments in late May, 2007 and continuing on for many months. It was also used for reviewing the Zeiss ZF Lenses. I never used the 1DM3 for sports shooting, so whether or not it had the focus issue the recall was designed to address is unclear.

10.1-megapixel Canon EOS 1D Mark III

So why am I selling it? Well, I can only use so many cameras, and I intend to focus my efforts on the Nikon D3 and 21.1-megapixel Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III going forward. Also, lens reviews are best done on full frame cameras, now that both Nikon and Canon have them.

I’m very comfortable saying that the per-pixel image quality of the 10.1-megapixel 1DM3 is superior to that of the 21.1-megapixel 1DsM3, so anyone looking for the best image quality from Canon EOS, but who doesn’t need (or can’t afford) 21 megapixels should really consider the EOS 1D Mark III.

My for-sale EOS 1D Mark III has (obviously) just been serviced by Canon, has the 1 year warranty extension, and is in near-mint condition. The original box, manual, USA warranty card, Canon service documents are included. I’m asking $3500. This is a great camera in great condition—buy from someone you can trust!

Hoodman “HoodLoupe Professional”

I’ve been using a Hoodman USA “HoodLoupe Professional” for a few weeks now. It’s very helpful when using the “Live View” feature found on the latest Nikon and Canon DSLRs, providing a slightly magnified view free of any extraneous light. It delivers a clear and sharp image while eliminating all ambient light, which makes the LCD usable under difficult lighting conditions, and is especially helpful when trying to achieve critical focus.

While it doesn’t show an entire 3" LCD screen, I haven’t found this to be on issue with the Nikon D3 or Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III (both of which have 3" LCD screens)—nor is it clear that a larger and bulkier unit that would cover 3" screens would be desirable.

Up to 3 diopters of optical correction can be dialed in. It can be carried around the neck on a lanyard for convenience. I recommend it for any kind of tripod work with a Live View camera, but it could also be useful for evaluating images on cameras that lack Live View, for the same reasons (difficulty seeing the LCD under bright lighting).

The HoodLoupe is available directly from Hoodman USA or from amazon.com.

Hoodman HoodLoupe in use

Zeiss ZF Lenses update now available

The update to Zeiss ZF Lenses is now available. It includes the latest addition to the ZF line, the ZF 28/2 Distagon. Also added are examples from full-frame cameras (Nikon D3, Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III) for the models of the ZF line (25/2.8, 28/2, 35/2, 50/1.4, 50/2, 85/1.4, 100/2), as well as various updates on MTF, field curvature and comments from the Zeiss factory.

Even if you have no intention of buying one of the Zeiss ZF lenses, the review contains such a wealth of information that it’s a worthwhile read to learn about lenses in general. I unabashedly claim that its a a lens review like no other, a tremendous bargain. If you’ve been reading this free blog for a while now, show your support and buy Zeiss ZF Lenses (thank you!).

Zeiss ZF Lenses update—nearly ready

I’m nearly done with the update to Zeiss ZF Lenses, which includes the latest addition to the ZF line, the ZF 28/2 Distagon. Also added are a mix of examples from full frame cameras (Nikon D3, Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III) for the models of the ZF line. (25/2.8, 35/2, 50/1.4, 50/2, 85/1.4, 100/2).