Actually, this is what attracts me the most: " a new optical image stabilization system that stabilizes the camera up to six stops. That feature alone is massive because it lets you hand-hold the camera at much lower shutter speeds. There was no way I could have gotten sharp images hand-holding the X100V at 1/2 a second, but with the X100VI, that’s a reality."
I also would like the ability to move and pivot the rear screen. But most likely, I’ll just keep using what I’ve got.
I knew you were using an Apple display, but I always assumed it was the one that sells for around $5000. Thanks, you’ve moved this up to the top of my list of future purchases. The “nano-texture” glass raises the cost by $500 or so…
Regarding the flash, after several phone calls and a lot of searching, I haven’t yet found a description for how to use my SB-800 as a simple “fill flash”. I guess I need to do some testing. All I want is “fill flash” I assume I should set it for TTL, and probably TTL-BL (both through the lens and back lighting). In India, I would use that a LOT, for all the photos I take including hospital people, which is what they want from me. At least my Fuji has a flash, and my old D750 had a pop-up flash. I’d rather not buy a new flash, if I can make my old one do what I want, automatically.
You will enjoy the comparison between Adobe and DxO.
Do I “need” it? No.
Would I like to have it? Why not.
In practical terms, the pivoting screen would be far more useful to me much of the time.
If I do most of my editing at night, which seems to be the case lately, how will the nano-texture benefit me? I want to donate my second screen on my Mac mini (my old 2013 iMac) to the hospital in India, and getting the Apple display will not only give me 4K video, but probably a better display than my ten year old (or so) ASUS.
As to the flash, I called Nikon, and spent to a much better informed person than on my last call. She suggested changing the camera to (P) mode, or at least to (A) or (S) giving the camera more control over my image. She sent me the page from Nikon that explains this.
Thank you for contacting NIkon.
If overexposed try aperture priority and adjusting the settings. Here is the link to the settings for fill flash. Flash Modes
I’ll test this around sunset time, but this worked better than anything else I have yet tried.
The SB-800 is big, and heavy, and ancient - but maybe none of that matters, as long as I always have it with me.
I have regularly been shooting at 10,000 ISO and, sometimes up to 25,000 ISO for a long time, but because I use PhotoLab, I don’t even think about noise.
It sounds like suffer from GAS.
I’m more interested in turning out high quality large prints. My D850 can produce images that will print up to 10ft wide. Which makes me question why I am keeping my LF gear.
I used to think the way you wrote that; to me, the biggest problem with high ISO settings is the added noise.
Two things have changed that for me - in the Leica forum, with the new Leica cameras, they are shooting at astronomical ISO settings, but their sample images looked quite good. I have known, just as you write now, that (to my mind) image noise at high ISO settings has been tamed by DxO. I haven’t dared to shoot at those ultra-high settings, but I started to think I could.
I read what you just wrote about shooting at up to 25,000 ISO, which was very promising. I remember when anything over 1,000 resulted in “noise city”. Fantastic? Amazing? But I wondered if I was missing something.
Go to the above link from Ken Rockwell, and check his examples of what happens to fine detail as we go up in ISO. Scroll down to you see the photos of a clock face, starting at ISO 50, and going up to ISO 200,000. The fine detail starts to vanish, and eventually is all gone.
Seems to me that ‘noise’ is no longer the problem, but ‘detail’ has taken over as the main problem. Maybe I don’t want to go to anything more than ISO 800 in the future, but maybe I should set my own limit at 25,000. I’m very interested in how you feel about this. To me, a slightly less sharp image at 25,000 is better than nothing.
Because of your larger sensor, maybe your camera can go to 25,000 more easily, before you start to get annoyed.
I can see lots of other reasons for you to keep and use your LF gear, but image size is no longer the most important. You can do things with that camera, with the tilts, and shifts, that are almost impossible with our Nikons.
Cameras - I’ve already decided no Leica updates.
The D780 and D850 may be the last of their kind - so no new Nikons for me.
The Fuji X100F is close enough to the X100VI that unless I sell my F, I’m unlikely to update.
I don’t imagine updating PhotoLab in the future.
My computer - I really want a desktop Mac with an Apple M Chip, not the old “Intel” chip.
E.O.F.
P.S. - Good thing for me I don’t want to buy a new Fuji right now - they’re likely all spoken for!
You are missing the fact that Ken is shooting jpeg and that he is not using DeepPRIME. The beauty of DeepPRIME is that it acts on the RAW data and helps, not just with noise reduction, but also in preserving detail.
The D850 is the same sensor size as your D780.
But, for the work I do, 25k is not something I use often. Even 10k is mainly reserved for concert work. But, no matter what, I can assure you that you can quite easily use 10k on your D780 without much problem. Search for any of the jazz photos I have posted, like here…
Shot at 10k with no discernible noise and no loss of detail
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Stenis
(Sten-Åke Sändh (Sony, Win 11, PL 6, CO 16, PM Plus 6, XnView))
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@mikemyers
I totally agree with Joanna. I also have no worries about using higher ISO (up to 12 800 or so with A7 III and A7 IV). With Photolabs Deep Prime XD that is not very much of an issue.
Unlike many others I like Ken Rockwell for the work he is doing (there is a lot of snobbisms out there) but I mostly have a point of view on the images he uses as examples when he makes his high ISO testing. Often there are no problems at all at levels I personally would avoid and that is because these examples often are too well-lit up to reveal any noise to talk about. He often isn´t pushing his motifs to the limits where the noise starts to be a real problem and I think that is misleading.
I also think Joanna is a bit harsh here in her comments on your Indian images but I also think that you could justify some unfocused flat images sometimes if you provide them with an interesting context. I genuinely think that very few images manage to stand totally for themselves without any context at all…
So, if we ignore “noise” completely, and only concentrate on “detail”, how much difference in detail will there be, between one photo at 100 ISO, and an identical photo captured at 25,000 ISO, with processing done by PhotoLab of course.
I guess I will need to do this myself.
…however, I did a lot of searching for other viewpoints, and the below video seems to be telling me that what @Joanna wrote is correct - and one of the biggest things I can do, is reduce “noise”. Everyone seems to talk about how to do this in Adobe Lightroom, but the latest DxO software is at least as good, if not better, than the competition - and it all happens automatically. Check this video:
It doesn’t come right out and say what @Joanna said, but this video is full of ideas on how to make images “appear” more detailed - most of which I never considered. There are some excellent “tricks” that I never heard of before
Bottom line, as I see it, I was “wrong”, @Joanna was much more “right”, and there is a lot more to this discussion that we can use to our advantage, as people view our images… and I want to try to do that from now on. I guess I’ll start at 25,000 ISO, and see what I can do.
I set up a test to see if @Joanna’s suggestion works for me.
I put an old fixed 50mm f/1.8 lens on my D780, put it on a tripod, opened my balcony door, and took a photo of the condominium to the South of me. ISO was set to “fixed” (not Auto), and at 25,000 ISO. The other settings (aperture and shutter) were set by centering the exposure indicator on the camera, in “center weighted” mode, like I usually use.
Copied this to the computer, and saved two images - one, at the above settings, and the “Detail” setting not activated, and the other with that setting activated, using Deep Prime.
I will copy two photos here, the “original” image included only the default settings/corrections, and the .dop file for second image after I had selected Deep Prime.
A snippet of the same detail from the ISO 100 shot:
Either the D780 is better than I ever imagined, or I did something wrong. I know there is more detail in the railings of the ISO 100 shot, but at 25,000 I got MUCH better results than I expected.
Oops, wha’s a mere factor of ten?
Everything is still set up, will try tonight, using 25000. Maybe also 50000.
Good advice, but before I try “out of my box”, I first need to learn and get comfortable with “my box”.
…added later - my 25000 test will be done tonight, or tomorrow night.
…went to capture of the new “world’s largest cruise ship”, and I thought everything was going wrong, but it was as if some giant hand was guiding me. Everything I thought was “wrong” was really for the better. After many hours, I did get the image I was after. Need to download from camera - maybe later tonight. I should do my homework (25000) first, before move on to enjoying my new processing.
@platypus, can you please elaborate on what you wrote? My gut feeling is I should stay “inside the box” for a good long time, to understand it, before I move on to “out of my box”.
My Fuji now works the way I’ve hoped it would work.
My D780 is totally set in accordance with suggestions here, and U1 is set for normal ISO, while U2 is set for Auto-ISO. Otherwise they are identical.
I dug out my M10, had to charge the batteries, re-set the time and date, and was amazed at how few menu items it has. Hardly anything. I don’t want to leave it un-used for so long that it stops working correctly.
Last thought - I would have thought not all that long ago, that a Nikon could never be a substitute for a 4x5 view camera. Now I’m not so sure - but the appropriate lenses for all those adjustments are not only expensive, now that Nikon has gotten lost in mirrorless, all the technology will likely be lost as well.
Last, last thought. I went to take my cruise ship photos today, and my 20mm lens was invaluable! But in the future, I will always also bring a more “normal” lens in addition.
For those who can afford it, all the “old” photography books are now forever out of date. What used bo be known as “unobtanium” is now readily available - for those who can afford it. Between the new camera technology, and the new processing technology (DxO), the world I grew up into has vanished.
It’s as if I can use any aperture I want, to get the appropriate depth of field, and any shutter speed I want, to freeze or blur movement, and just select ISO and the camera will make it all work. Sounds silly, but auto-ISO now seems like "pick your shutter and aperture however you want, and auto-ISO will give you a properly exposed image.
(…although, much of the time, we might want our creative mind to push the image one way or another, to get the effect we want to see!)
This was my goal for the past three weeks, a phot of the world’s largest cruise ship, “Icon of the Seas”. In every way possible, it is NOT the photo I set out to take. I noticed how boring my ship photos looked, so I went walking for a crowd to include them in my photo. 20mm lens actually worked for me. I felt like I had “esp” telling me where to go, where to stand, and so on - but everything came together. The exposure was sort of a guesstimate. The sun was confusing me, and my camera, but I thought it was “close enough”.
Does it tell a story? Sure - saluting the new queen of the seas, and I was watching the crowd more than I was watching the ship!
At first glance, it doesn’t show what I wanted to emphasize, the size of the ship, and all the people on board waving and yelling at us, but all that is visible if you view the image full size.
Does it tell a story? Is it good composition? Did the 20mm lens help or hurt? I dunno. I do know that it matches my feelings, as I stood there, overwhelmed by this massive ship. I did take “detail photos” also, but they have no "feeling. I also love the water, and the waves, and the sounds that none of you will get to hear. Heck, I could say a lot more, but that’s from “me”. Part of why I like it so much, is because I put so much effort into capturing it. The bigger question is how will people “see” this image, and should I go back to taking photos of the ships, and ignore the “bigger story”…
I am now going to export the first (terribly noisy) shot using DeepPRIME XD.
(I don’t know what other options I might want to use, so I’ll stop here.)
This is the best image that I know how to achieve:
@mikemyers, you wrote/asked “how does one get past adequacy” and my answer means that one should try to do things differently - not “as I always did”.
One can start doing things differently right from the start or stick to one’s proven recipes before venturing “into the wild”. The risk of sticking (to proven recipes) is to get stuck (in adequacy) and leaving a trodden path early will help to discover new areas sooner. The point is to go to extremes without evaluating or judging the results, as they are no results yet, but mere stopovers on the way to push the envelope.
@mikemyers, you’ve been into documentary journalism for a long time and I feel that you sense the wear of adequacy. If you want to get out of “adequate”, get out of it now. It’s more a matter of mindset than of mastering a software (softwear ;-)). It’s also about seeing habits, perception, awareness. Remember my flipping of the goat image and your statement that in India, people drive on the left side? Flipping that image was easy from a “know the tools” point of view.
Except, as can be seen from your test shots, the WB is set to auto. Although not essential, manual WB at 5600°K gives you a “starting point”, where you can see just how off-white things are and correct accordingly in post.
Only if you are talking about film vs digital technicalities. Books like Ansel Adams “The Negative” talks about universal truths like pre-visualisation, which is more about “seeing”, rather than pressing buttons, are just as relevant today than they ever were.
Just as with film
Just as with film
Not always. It depends on how much noise you can bear and, without good NR software, you can still be as limited as you were with film, which you could push and pull.
I think you’d better get a new ESP, the old one doesn’t seem to work…
And there’s your problem. You have two subjects in a split image and you weren’t paying attention to the relationship between the two.
There’s the old journalist coming out again.
And you have to use a magnifier to see that the few pixels on the top deck are actually meant to be people. No eyes or other facial features to tell how they were reacting. You just don’t have enough megapixels even at full size.
I’m not sure that feeling transmits and, as a nit-picky photographer, I am too distracted by things like the woman’s finger to appreciate what you were trying to convey.
.See above.
I find myself in agreement. @mikemyers, until you can either let go of your journalistic past when making non-journalistic images, or you should go back to photo-journalism, taking JPEG shots with everything on automatic and hope that something is good enough for the journal of you choice with no need for post processing software.
I used to go to a photo club where we had such a photographer and he reminds me of you - never interested in advancing his photography or fixing up pictures - after all, that was the picture editor’s job
Like so many people, you tend to take pictures, rather than making images.
The difference is to know what you are going for before you press the shutter and not be distracted by things that “happen”. If something does happen, then don’t try to shoehorn that into the original vision, abandon the first idea and start again.
The subject is the sky and the context is the beach in the foreground, which lends a foundation to that “big sky” feeling. That’s what I wanted and that is what I got. But what about those folks that walked across the beach and that attracted my attention, I hear you ask? Simple. I ignored them and waited until they had disappeared from view. Had they not disappeared, I wouldn’t have hesitated in removing them in post. They were not part of my vision for this image. Ansel Adams did similar with some of his images in the days of printing film in the darkroom, so that’s good enough for me.
Actually, that is the wrong way around. There is more visible noise on the second shot, as can be seen on the wall to the left of the window.
Yes, I would say not to be afraid of high ISO, but you do need to be aware of what differences it makes. In this test, there is much more almost blocked shadow and almost blown highlights.
In the case of your D780, the dynamic range might be a stunning 14+ stops but, that is at 100 ISO. Go to 25k and you end up with only about 7 stops. This means that you have to be much more critical on getting the exposure right for both shadows, but especially highlights. You can forget automatic if you want the best results in camera, in order to get the best possible results in PL.
Look at the difference in shadow detail amongst the trees.
The relationship between the two? As I was continually taking photos, knowing the ship was where I wanted it to be, most of my attention was on the crowd, reacting to the ship. Not sure what you think of as a problem with the lady’s finger pointing at the bridge of the ship, to me, that added to the photo, just like the fellow with the phone at the right, and the other people with phones photographing the ship.
The small part of the image you cropped to was just a tiny part of what I wanted to capture, and for better or worse, I did capture everything I wanted.
I guess this was more of a “photojournalist” type photo, as my intention was to take the best photo I could capture of this new ship - the reaction of the crowd added to the photo. In fact, that was a good part of the reason why I picked this specific spot to shoot from. I was standing earlier in a spot that gave me a great view of the ship, but no people. It made for a nice ship photo, but there was no… excitement.
Anyway, thanks for your reactions. I’m curious what kind of photo you might have taken, had you been at this location, and if you wanted to take a photo “of the ship”… but from what you write, the ship might have just been a small part of the photo you would want to take.
My goal - take a photo of this huge new ship sailing out of Miami.
That was my goal from the moment I left home.
Anything more was icing on the cake.
I’m very curious though - had you been in Miami on vacation, and had you been near the Port of Miami, and had you seen all these cruise ships sailing out into the ocean, what kind of photo might you have wanted to take?
