In the comments of a recent post about GPS receivers, it was suggested that the GPS receiver in the iPhone was useful for keeping tracklogs. I had bad experiences with iPhone location services when I tested in 2009, but perhaps my test wasn't good, or perhaps the old iPhone 3 wasn't good, so I thought I'd give it another try.

So, the other day I took three GPS receivers with me while I did some errands. As I'm apt to do lately, I walked.

This post is a comparison of the resulting tracklogs.

Coming and Going
Garmin eTrex Legend HCx  ·  Garmin eTrex 20  ·  black is iPhone 4s

The three devices I took along on my unscientific test:

1. Garmin eTrex Legend HCx that I bought in 2007. It supports GPS with WAAS for increased accuracy. It has a slate-blue outer shell, so its tracklog gets a blue line on the plot.

2. Garmin eTrex 20 that I bought in Fall 2011 (product page at Garmin). Garmin has adjusted the hardware/software to make it even more troublesome to use than its predecessor, which is quite a feat, but on the plus side it not only contains a GPS/WAAS receiver, but also a GLONASS receiver, to tap in to Russia's own independent version of America's GPS. The theory is that more satellites in the sky means more satellites likely visible to the unit in any situation, and so better accuracy. I got the orange one, so its tracklog's plot is orange.

3. iPhone 4s with the MotionX GPS app. This is a GPS (update: and GLONASS!) receiver, likely(?) without WAAS. My iPhone is black, so its tracklog gets a black line.

The results from the iPhone was much better than I expected, and the others were worse than I expected. In the short plot segment above, which shows both the start and end of my walk, the iPhone is the closest to where I actually walked, including crossing the street toward the top of the image.

Garmin eTrex 20 is best along here
I walked along the north side of the street

All-Around Fail

iPhone Least Bad of the Three

I had planned to treat myself to the lunch delights at CHEZ LUC, but they were closed, so I wandered around until I found a place, at the center red dot in the next plot:

Lunch

While there, I sat about two yards from a floor-ceiling window, and the two Garmin units reported accuracy as good as 10 meters, but the scatterplot above shows that they had no clue.

The more modern eTrex 20 perhaps had a better clue, because while in the restaurant it generally reported less accuracy than the older eTrex Legend HCx:

±16m     ±10m
both wrong, but the eTrex 20 less so

Again the Legend HCx is off

Pause

I spent a few minutes inside a building where I had poor-to-no reception, but instead of realizing the lack of reception and pausing the tracklog, the Legend HCx gave incorrect readings scattered across a span of 310 meters. The iPhone mostly realized that it had no signal, and its scatter was limited to 80 meters. The eTrex 20's scatter was about 60 meters.

For while the Legend HCx just drifted off, at one point more than 200m off, as illustrated by the outward bow in the blue line at the left of the overall plot, which I'll repeat here:

Legend HCx Going Crazy

I've never seen it show a suspected accuracy that bad, so it wouldn't surprise me if it was showing its normal accuracy of 3m-10m while it was actually off by 200m, but unfortunately I wasn't looking at it while walking, so I don't know what it thought its accuracy was.

Pedestrian Overpass

In the plot above, I crossed the street from north to south, then doubled back a bit on the pedestrian overpass (just to the left of center), to check out the view from above the street. Again, the iPhone seems the most accurate here, though the eTrex 20 at least makes it look like I used the crosswalk.

Not Too Bad Down This Stretch
but again, the iPhone is best

Cutting Corners
again the iPhone is best

Leaving Yodobashi Camera
it all looks crazy, but the iPhone plot is by far the best

More iPhone Bestness
I walked along the south side of the street

Heading Down to the River
eTrex 20 seems best

Walking Under a Bridge

The iPhone track looks best, but in this case it might be a side effect of laying down a plot point less often. The two Garmin units were set to log locations every second, but the app I used on the iPhone seems to have logged a location every six or seven seconds, which is just about the time it took to pass under the bridge.

Pretty Tight
the iPhone's less frequent updates smooths out the jaggies

Just Crazy
iPhone wins again

Shopping

I don't know how far I actually walked, but I can tell you what each tracklog tells me about my three-hour stroll:

• The iPhone 4s tracklog contains 1,163 data points, and the distances add up to 11.8km.

• The eTrex 20 tracklog contains 9,973 data points, and the distances add up to 12km.

• The eTrex Legend HCx tracklog contains 10,428 data points, and the distances add up to 13.8km.

Remember, the older eTrex Legend HCx kept reporting a location even when it should have realized it had no idea where it was, jumping all over the place while I was in a building, and all that jumping added up to more “distance” and more data points. The other units were smarter in that they knew better when the accuracy was not good enough to count on.

Both Garmin units were powered on for the same amount of time and had the same 1-second logging frequency, so they should in theory contain the same number of data points, but the eTrex 20 recorded 455 fewer, representing seven and a half minutes where it choose to not record a location (because I was inside and it didn't have a good signal) while the Legend HCx continued recording its incorrect location.

Elevation

Due to the nature of its design, the GPS system is not as accurate with altitude as with latitude and longitude, and on some Garmin units this is exacerbated with a worthless barometric barometer. I've learned to avoid those, so none of my units now have that, so the altitude in today's three plots is all from GPS (or, in the case of the eTrex 20, GPS and GLONASS).

It's almost comical how random it seems. Here are the elevation plots from each tracklog, along with an extra one for the elevation that Google Earth has on file:

Google Earth

Garmin eTrex 20 (GPS + GLONASS, 2011)

Garmin eTrex HCx (GPS, circa 2007)

iPhone 4s (GPS, circa 2011)

The Google Earth data seems closest to reality, except for the odd hump in the center (Google thinks there's a hill just north of Kyoto Station). The elevation in Kyoto slopes down from the north, and you can see in the Google Earth plot that I'm mostly level as I walk east to west, then slopes down as I approach Kyoto Station, then at the end climbs steadily as I walk north along the river.

The other plots are just ridiculous. (According to the eTrex 20, at one point I was at 225m elevation, and according to the Legend HCx I was at one point walking 0.68 mach!)

In the end, I'm dismayed at how bad my old Legend HCx was, and how not-much-better the eTrex 20 is, especially for having twice satellites available to it.

But most of all I'm shocked at how good the iPhone 4s results are... even judging from this one simple test, it's clearly good enough in outdoor use for geoencoding photos.

This post is long, but here's the two-sentence summary for the “tl;dr” crowd:

As with most any technology release (hardware or software), folks tend to frame their personal whims and desires as “absolutely required!”, while features that they don't personally care about become unneeded fluff. Photographers who don't care about video, for example, lament the assumed cost of all the new video features.

This is human nature, and in this respect I am human (why on earth doesn't Lightroom have geoencoding built in!?), but my moral outrage at the omission of personally-desired features is tempered by many years of experience with product design, and a long-learned understanding that in practice things are much more complex than they might seem from the outside.

A feature not included in the D4 is built-in geoencoding, an omission that some people find unfathomable, as evidenced by a thread at DPReview started with this message:

This rant is clearly emotional, by someone who doesn't realize that it's emotional, nor that others may not share their particular emotions on this issue, so it's easy to dismiss. However, it started a long thread — one of many, I'm sure — where people debated the usefulness of having a GPS receiver in camera, and the business decision of having omitted it.

Of course, the responses included equally emotional rants on the other side of the aisle, such as this gem from Curtis Smith:

Personally, I've been geoencoding my photos for the better part of a decade (the ones I've posted, mostly in Kyoto, are mapped here) and would love to have it built into the camera.... but only if done well. I understand enough to know that it's not necessarily easy to do well, so I followed up the initial message with one of my own about some of the likely costs that came to mind — costs such as the physical space the GPS unit would add to an already bulky camera body, and how it would lower the value/cost benefit ratio (that is, the marktability) for those not interested in geoencoding their photos.

Each specific “cost” has its own level of impact, but the manufacture must weigh them as a whole against their benefits, and at this point in Nikon's product roadmap (at this point in the economy, at this point in their market research, perhaps in light of Mother Nature's harshness in 2011), built-in geoencoding didn't make the cut. Maybe it will when they reevaluated everything for the next camera. Or maybe not.

Anyway, as is common on faceless online discussions, some folks mix in a healthy dose of ignorance and antagonism with their emotion, such as this bit of arm-chair logic from Robin Casady replying to a “there are costs” post similar to my own:

Here, Robin is referring to a small add-on product that Nikon sells that includes a GPS antenna; when you plugin it in to the camera and it has any kind of satellite fix, photos are geoencoded automatically. This has been available for years, and if I were to use it with my current camera, it would replace what I actually do (which is carry a separate GPS receiver while out with the camera, then sync its tracklog to the photos in Lightroom, with my geoencoding-support plugin).

I don't choose to use Nikon's add-on because I feel it's an ugly wart on the camera, I worry about its speed and accuracy, and it lacks the ability to display its status beyond more detail than a blinking light. And even if I did use it, I'd still need a way to geoencode after the fact, for locations where I didn't have it with me, to geoencode the photos I get from others on the same outing with me, for locations it couldn't get a good signal, and for times where a depleting battery prompted me to turn it off.

Anyway, at first blush Robin's logic may seem reasonable... Nikon already has the hardware as a separate product, and the cameras have had for years the firmware needed to geoencode the photos, so the simple step to include the hardware inside the camera takes almost no work, so citing “engineering costs” seems unreasonable, Robin concludes.

But that's an exceptionally naïve, ignorant point of view, even when limiting the scope of “engineering costs” to the “software aspect” that Robin brings up. (Update: In light up the updates noted below, "exceptionally naïve, ignorant point of view" is a perhaps harsher characterization than Robin's statement merits. See more below...)

For example...

• If you move it from an external dongle to an internal component, you've lost all UI (“user interface”), so now you've got to come up with a way to interact with the user. You have to come up with a way for the user to turn the GPS feature on and off, and you have to come up with a way to indicate to the user whether the unit is on or off.

• Let's look at just that latter point for a moment, the oh-so-simple “indicate to the user whether the unit is on or off”. That might naturally go into the viewfinder display, but since that very-limited real estate has been staked out by other UI needs for years, you're forced to change or remove things that until now were considered critical. Maybe just make everything else slightly smaller to squeeze in one more indicator, but geez, that was done the last several iterations and now things are starting to get way too small....

  So that's not straightforward, and the same angst applies to the LCD displays.

  Update: In a touche!-worthy reply, Robin points out that there's already a GPS-related indicator in both the viewfinder and LCD-body displays, which flashes to indicate that it's on but has no position fix, and is solid if it has any kind of fix. This clearly makes this bullet point of mine completely moot and I have learned something, but I don't think removing one or two points removes the idea that there's a cost/benefit balance that most of us don't fully understand.

• Then you're faced with the fact that “on” and “off” are not really sufficient... you need to be able to communicate to the user whether the unit is actually getting a signal, and if so, how accurate. If I recall correctly, the hardware dongle uses a bi-color LED to indicate the difference between “on with good signal” or “on but no good signal”, and this is really very minimal because “good signal” means different things to different people (100m accuracy vs. 3m accuracy, for example). Also, “Not good signal” may really mean “warming up” or “can't see satellites”. So if you're going to bring it in house, you'll naturally want to tackle that issue to provide the user with a more-usable level of information, but maybe all of that doesn't need to go into the viewfinder, so now you've bifurcated the information (some in the viewfinder, and some somewhere else... likely in the menu system), so finding the balance there is another issue.

• Then you've got to consider the situation of when the battery is getting low... it makes no sense to run the battery into the ground just so the GPS receiver can keep its fix while the camera is idle.... what good is it to have had a good fix for the last hour if you now don't have enough battery to take a shot? So you've got to come up with some measures to handle this situation (perhaps GPS auto shutoff when battery is below X% full), and this means that you have to have a whole new UI to communicate to the user when this has happened, what the current status is, and perhaps to allow the user to make adjustments to the heuristics for their specific needs.

  Update: In the same reply noted above, Robin cites that there is already an option just as I postulated, that turns off the GPS receiver when the exposure meter turns off, some user-selected time (default: six seconds) after the shutter button is released. I offered the idea merely as an example of something that might be done, but I'm quite dismayed to find it's actually there in that form because one would generally want the GPS receiver to be active a lot longer than the exposure meter; the exposure meter comes back on instantly when you press the shutter button half way, but Nikon's GPS receiver takes a minimum of five seconds to get a fix when already hot, but is rated at 45 seconds when warm (unused for more than 15 minutes, I think). I'd like to the GPS unit remain on much longer than the exposure meter, and would like the ability to have it wake up every 14 minutes or so to keep itself "hot"...

• But we've forgotten the more common situation of power management... should the unit be on all the time, or should it auto-shutoff in the same way the image review shuts off, coming back up when the shutter button is half depressed? (I'm half depressed just thinking about this.) Both make a lot of sense, each applied to its own situation, but no one solution makes sense for everyone, so again you need to add UI to allow the user to indicate their wishes, and more UI to communicate to the user this additional status of the settings chosen and the current state within the context of those settings.

Notice how the “simple software aspect” immediately turned into a hardware aspect: both the viewfinder display and the LCD display require physical hardware manufacturing changes to update. There are other hardware aspects one could turn to (such as the LED seen in the external GPS unit), or one could keep it all software by burying everything into the menu system, but these are substantially less desirable.

Update: So, with my first viewfinder/LCD point having been completely wrong, the previous paragraph is pretty clearly unreasonable. You do still need to handle on/off for the GPS unit, but in my experience as a geoencoder I think it'd be sufficient to have it in the menu system.

All features have costs. The ones above are just what came to my imagination at first blush, but because I have no experience with embedding GPS receivers inside cameras, I'm sure there's a whole litany of additional problems I've neglected to consider.

Update: And it's because of this ignorance that we all have (at least those of us who are not camera-design engineers) that I characterized Robin's curt conclusion of "Bogus!" as I did. In light of my own ignorance on the viewfinder/LCD issue when I wrote it, my use of "exceptionally" seems overdramatic. Sorry about that, Robin.

Then there are the followup costs, such as the need to document all this in the user's manual, and translate that to all the languages that Nikon supports. (Of course, they'll have had to translate all the related UI in the camera menus.) Then there's the recurring need to provide support: more features mean more support calls, etc.

None of this is unsurmountable, and it's all certainly trivial compared to all the video features that did get added, so it wouldn't have surprised me in the least to have seen Nikon include this in the D4. But to do that they would have had to shift resources from something else, and if they had done that, we'd see these same online flamefests about whatever that “something else” was that got the short stick.

We'd also see additional flamefests about whatever GPS support did get built in and how lame it is...

This applies to pretty much every new hardware and software product you'll come across (I see it every time Adobe releases a new version of Lightroom, or Apple releases a new phone), so the next time something near and dear to your heart is released, realize that like everyone else you're talking to, you don't know it all, and take care to frame your wishes and opinions as just that, wishes and opinions.

(And as a matter of courtesy, don't point out my own advice to me when I don't follow it. )

By the way, several years ago I read an excellent writeup from a software developer about the extensive ripple of high-impact ramifications that he came across while trying to implement a "trivial" feature request from his users. I think it was about some kind of email-notification aspect of an online forum of some sort. My web-search kung-fu is weak on this one.... does anyone have a link for this article?

Anyway, I'm in the process of reading the D4 press release and am left in wonder by the ultra thick spread of marketing fluff that I don't recall in earlier Nikon releases. For example, talking about the low-light ability, they say:

which is just fine — the use of phrases like “sovereign” is strong when used in limited doses — but then they continue with:

“Excel in any situation”... what does that even mean? The entire sentence could have been replaced with “Pixel size is 7.3µ.” and it would have retained exactly the same information, while shedding the smarmy, fake feeling that makes me want to shower before moving on to the next paragraph.

I'd really love to chat with the person who wrote/approved this, to find out what beneficial effect they actually envision this kind of prose has on what kind of people? To me it's the textual equivalent of Tammy Fay Baker makeup.... I just don't see this kind of writing as anything other than a total failure in every respect. I'm not even half way through the press release, but already this kind of crap has been laid on so thick in paragraph after paragraph that my desire to vent about it actually eclipses my desire to know more about the camera (and hence I'm here writing this post instead of reading further). Bravo, Nikon Marketing, bravo... that's an amazing feat.

I'm excited to go on to find out more about the camera, but all I can do is hope that camera was designed by brighter minds than Nikon has in their marketing department.

Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — ¹/320 sec, f/2.5, ISO 400 — Exif — near pics

Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — ¹/500 sec, f/2.5, ISO 200 — Exif — near pics

With Polarizer      Without Polarizer

mouseover button to see that version

Since writing “A Few Polarization-Filter Examples” several years ago, I've been meaning to do a post on a polarization filter's effects when shooting fall foliage. Over the years I've mentioned some effect or other of a polarization filer on my blog (such as here, here, and here), but I'm only now getting to filling in a huge deficiency of my 2007 post on making the best of bright light in fall-color photography by demonstrating how useful a polarizing filter can be when shooting foliage.

While at the Yoshiminedera Temple south of Kyoto during various trips last year, I did something I do often: snapped some pairs of shots with and without a polarization filter. Today I'm doing something I don't often do: actually making use of them. As I mentioned last year in “Photo Shoot Among the Fall Colors at Shouzan”, I thought I'd get around to this post soon, but a year later, finally, here we are.

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 50mm f/1.4 — ¹/2500 sec, f/1.4, ISO 200 — Exif — near pics

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 50mm f/1.4 — ¹/3200 sec, f/1.4, ISO 200 — Exif — near pics

With Polarizer      Without Polarizer

As you can see in these examples, colors can be much richer, and shiny reflections reduced. Before I talk about why, I should mention a bit about how I made these shots....

First, I should have used a tripod, and perhaps sometime I'll go to that trouble, but these were all snapped freehand. Most often I'd find the rotational angle of the polarizer filter that maximized the effect, then snap a shot, quickly rotate it 90 degrees while trying not to move, and snap another shot. Later in Lightroom I attempted to compensate for slight camera movement by adjust one crop or the other, but otherwise each pair has identical, default “just loaded into Lightroom” processing. (I did subject the photos to my standard treatment via my bulk-develop plugin, but I don't think any of these photos would have been affected by it.)

So, to be clear, this means that the “without” is not really “without a filter”, but “with the filter at its least impact”.

So, what's happening when we use a polarizing filter? If light is polarized for whatever reason, a polarizing filter blocks most of the light, at least when the filter is rotated to “align” to the polarized light. Most light is not polarized, so the filter does not block much of that light, but some kinds of light are strongly polarized, and those can be strongly blocked while, again, leaving other kinds of light mostly alone.

Strong reflections from the sun on the leaves in the photo above cause the whole “Without Polarizer” version to be washed out a bit, and each individual area of reflection is washed out considerably, towards pure white. But for whatever reason, those reflections are mostly polarized, so when I use a polarization filter and rotate it to maximize the filtering of the reflections, the overall dynamic range of the scene is reduced to a sweeter spot for the camera sensor, resulting in richer colors and a more aesthetically-pleasing result. The non-polarized light is still there so we still see the leaves, but the blinding reflections are greatly reduced. It's the same effect for your eyes when you put on a pair of polarized sun glasses.

(By the way, a polarizing filter would be better called a “polarized-light filter” because it filters that kind of light; the term “polarizing filter” sounds to me as if it somehow turns non-polarized light into polarized light.)

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 50mm f/1.4 — ¹/4000 sec, f/1.4, ISO 200 — Exif — near pics

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 50mm f/1.4 — ¹/5000 sec, f/1.4, ISO 200 — Exif — near pics

With Polarizer      Without Polarizer

Light from a blue sky is often polarized, though it depends on the time of day and the direction you're facing relative to the sun. In this case, a polarizing filter tends to bring down the overall brightness of the sky relative to the rest of the scene, compressing the dynamic range, which allows a deeper blue.

You can read on Wikipedia all about polarized light if you're interested in the physics behind it.

Not all scenes are affected by a polarization filter. You can test the effect by holding the filter to your eye (have the part that would face the lens facing your eye) and rotating... you'll either see the effect clearly, or you won't. I've some experience using these under my belt, but I'm still not very good at predicting which lights will be polarized, and the overall effect of using a filter on them. But luckily, it's easy to test and experiment while out and about, so I generally keep a filter or two in my camera bag.

By the way, as a good test of your filter, try viewing a smartphone screen through the filter and rotating... my old iPhone 3G's screen becomes perfectly black at certain angles, though my new iPhone 4s's screen merely shifts colors, a technical advance sure to be a boon to sunglasses-wearing phone users.

Anyway,not all scenes look better with the filter. Both versions of the following photo are uninteresting:

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 50mm f/1.4 — ¹/800 sec, f/4, ISO 200 — Exif — near pics

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 50mm f/1.4 — ¹/1000 sec, f/4, ISO 200 — Exif — near pics

With Polarizer      Without Polarizer

Consider the water reflections in“Snowy Gardens of the Heian Shrine”... removing them would destroy those shots, so it was definitely a situation where one would not want a polarization filter.

Some more examples follow...

Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — ¹/500 sec, f/2.5, ISO 280 — Exif — near pics

Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — ¹/640 sec, f/2.5, ISO 200 — Exif — near pics

With Polarizer      Without Polarizer

Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — ¹/640 sec, f/2.5, ISO 200 — Exif — near pics

Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — ¹/800 sec, f/2.5, ISO 200 — Exif — near pics

With Polarizer      Without Polarizer

Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — ¹/1000 sec, f/2.5, ISO 200 — Exif — near pics

Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — ¹/1250 sec, f/2.5, ISO 200 — Exif — near pics

With Polarizer      Without Polarizer

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 24mm f/1.4 — ¹/400 sec, f/9, ISO 1100 — Exif — near pics

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 24mm f/1.4 — ¹/400 sec, f/9, ISO 800 — Exif — near pics

With Polarizer      Without Polarizer

Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — ¹/320 sec, f/4, ISO 560 — Exif — near pics

Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — ¹/320 sec, f/4, ISO 250 — Exif — near pics

With Polarizer      Without Polarizer

Having finally obtained a manual for the lens I got last week, I've learned a few things. One, it seems that it actually has a built-in slide-out lens hood in addition to the big detachable hood I'd been using. You're supposed to deploy both.

Also, for some reason, it says that proper focus can't be achieved without a filter installed in the filter holder. It can be simple optically-inert glass, but you've got to have something. I don't know how it could matter, but I'll trust the maker on this. Unfortunately, the only filter holder it came with is for gelatin filters, and it was empty, so I'd been using it improperly. Nobody seems to have the normal filter holders in stock, so for the time being I got a special polarizer filter that fits, as it was both in stock and something I'd want anyway.

So, armed with this new knowledge, I went out this afternoon to the Kamo river to give it a spin, also using for the first time its dedicated 1.4× teleconverter, making a 420mm f/2.8 manual-focus lens.

I'm really disappointed with the results. I don't know whether I was just bad at hitting focus, or whether I need to spend some time calibrating the focus, but none of the photos — none — were well focused.

A bunch of hawks (which I've realized is the normal word for what I've been referring to as “kites”) were swarming across the river as a pair of ladies threw hunks of bread, so I tried shooting that. The birds could catch bread in mid air, but unfortunately, I could not do the same with the focus.

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 300mm f/2 + 1.4X TC @ 420mm — ¹/4000 sec, f/2.8, ISO 1400 — full exif & map — nearby photos
Drawing A Bead
the bright spot immediately below the hawk's head is a chunk of bread, soon to be lunch

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 300mm f/2 + 1.4X TC @ 420mm — ¹/4000 sec, f/2.8, ISO 2500 — full exif & map — nearby photos
Sort of Pretty
but would have been better in focus

I was hoping for some shots like in “Feeding Frenzy on the Kamo River”, but these were the best I could come up with.

The water was quite high due to rain all week, though nowhere near where it was last year, but the stepping stones across the river (seen here and here) were mostly submerged...

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 300mm f/2 — ¹/2500 sec, f/2, ISO 280 — full exif & map — nearby photos
Sort of Funny
two unrelated folks build a seemingly-related scene

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 300mm f/2 — ¹/2500 sec, f/2, ISO 250 — full exif & map — nearby photos
Snacking on Dried Beans
focused better than most, but lacking in the not-off-kilter department

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 300mm f/2 — ¹/2500 sec, f/2, ISO 360 — full exif & map — nearby photos
Fisher of Photos

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 300mm f/2 — ¹/2500 sec, f/2, ISO 220 — full exif & map — nearby photos
Missed It By That Much
the white thing in the water in the lower-left is the baseball
that he dove to (try to) get before it rolled over the bank

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 300mm f/2 — ¹/2500 sec, f/2, ISO 280 — full exif & map — nearby photos
Second Team Off the Bench

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 300mm f/2 — ¹/2500 sec, f/2, ISO 320 — full exif & map — nearby photos
Still Trying

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 300mm f/2 — ¹/2500 sec, f/2, ISO 360 — full exif & map — nearby photos
Oh Well
there are other things we can do besides baseball

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 300mm f/2 — ¹/3200 sec, f/2, ISO 200 — full exif & map — nearby photos
Like a Boss
he carries himself well
while she carries his camera, his camera bag, her big bag, and his shoes

I'll need to practice.

So, as evidenced by “Street Photography (Sort of) In Roppongi Hills“ and its followups (parts two and three), I got a new lens last week. Some have asked to see a photo of me with it, so it's fortuitous that Kyoto friend Stéphane Barbery (he of the oft-different artistic sense and some killer Festival of the Ages shots, among much other) actually got a photo of me where I don't think I look horrible. He had been laughing at me for using the new lens, a circa 1983 Nikon 300mm f/2 (“Nikkor ED 300mm f/2 IF”), without a tripod, and I guess I was laughing back.

Normally I'm pretty pathetic in photos, which is why I prefer to be behind the camera.

The next day, Zak Braverman (of Shakuhachi bamboo flute and Gen's daddiness fame) took a shot of me where I had hoped to come across relaxed, with the lens cradled in my arm for loving safety, but instead I look like... I dunno... spaced out.

Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — ¹/400 sec, f/2.5, ISO 280 — full exif & map — nearby photos
Out to Lunch?
Photo by Zak Braverman
stupid look by me

But that's not the worst of it. After picking up the lens, I had my camera bag, a monopod that I didn't use much, a pouch with my wallet, iPad, etc., and the big heavy case for the lens, all in addition to the lens. It was so much to lug around that I was tempted to just head home, but I don't get to Tokyo much, so didn't want to waste the opportunity, so lugged it all around as I wandered the Roppongi area of Tokyo.

I felt ridiculous and self-conscious enough with the big lens, but lugging all that stuff around as well, strapped in various kludgy ways to my body.... wow, I had to just jettison all sense of shame and embarrassment. And it turns out my feelings were justified, as I see in some pics that the lady of this couple took, and the guy then sent to me...

PENTAX Optio I-10 — ¹/250 sec, f/3.5, ISO 80 — full exif & map — nearby photos
Behind Tokyo Midtown
trying to stand such that the big silver lens case is hidden behind me
Photo by Nice Lady in Tokyo

PENTAX Optio I-10 — ¹/640 sec, f/3.5, ISO 100 — full exif & map — nearby photos
Lens In Action
Photo by Nice Lady in Tokyo

Let me repay each of these kind folks for snapping my picture by offering one of each of them actually taken with the lens....

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 300mm f/2 — ¹/1600 sec, f/2, ISO 400 — full exif & map — nearby photos
Photogenic Couple in Tokyo

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 300mm f/2 — ¹/80 sec, f/2, ISO 6400 — full exif & map — nearby photos
Zak Braverman

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 300mm f/2 — ¹/3200 sec, f/2, ISO 450 — full exif & map — nearby photos
Stéphane Barbery

I processed Stéphane's photo in what I think his style might look like.

And for completeness, here's the photo I took moments after Stéphane took the photo that leads this post, in what turns out to be a boring picture of a fisherman with a very long fishing rod that you can't quite see...

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 300mm f/2 — ¹/4000 sec, f/2, ISO 200 — full exif & map — nearby photos

DEC 2011 UPDATE: the "v3" camera profiles mentioned below have now been supersceeded by "v4" profiles mentioned here, available with Lr3.6.

If you shoot with a Nikon D3, D700, or D300, and use Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop, you'll want to know about the “Camera v3” beta camera-calibration profiles described in this Adobe-forum thread. (The actual profiles are in this ZIP file.)

This is important because in some cases, the standard “Camera” profiles that come with Lightroom ACR fail miserably for these three cameras. For example, consider this crop from the photo above:

Mottled Yuck!
“Camera Standard” profile that comes with Lightroom 3

Those mottled magenta splotches are not on the flower; they're a bug in Lightroom's camera profiles for the D3/D700/D300.

(The rest of this post is written from a Lightroom perspective, but the concepts apply to Photoshop's Adobe Camera Raw module as well.)

Lightroom's “camera profiles” are internal recipes for how to convert the camera's raw hardware-specific sensor data into a color image. The camera itself has this built in as part of its JPEG engine, but that's not used if you shoot raw because the whole point of shooting raw is to give you control over the conversion process later. Thus, each raw converter (Lightroom, Aperture, ACR, Nikon View NX, etc.) has the latitude to make the conversion itself, as it sees fit.

In Lightroom's case, it gives you a choice from a number of “recipes” (profiles) for how the basic conversion to color image data is to be done. In the Develop module, at the bottom of the right-side panel, you'll find the Camera Calibration section, and a “Profile” selector that contains items such as “Adobe Standard”, “Camera Vivid”, “Camera Standard”, “Camera Portrait”, etc.

The ones with “Camera” in the name try to mimic the particular look and feel of the camera's own JPEG engine, with “Camera Standard” obviously being the profile to match what the camera does when it's not in any kind of special-look mode.

I think “Adobe Standard” is the one that Lightroom uses if you don't tell it otherwise, but it's so generic and its results so “blah” that as a matter of course I apply “Camera Standard” automatically to all my images as part of the Lightroom import process. This has worked great for me for years, but every so often... maybe every 5,000–10,000 photos or so, I'll come across a situation like that shown above, where there are clearly errors in how Lightroom is processing the image.

The magnitude of the problem seems closely tied to the white-balance setting, so sometimes it was easy enough to make go away.... but sometimes not, and the photo above is one such example. It happened so rarely that I didn't bother to investigate, but I really wanted to post this flower because it's a clear candidate for membership in the Voigtländer “Exploring the Edge of Creamy Macro Bokeh” club. I'd come across the flower by the side of the road during the “Mountain Play with Monet and Friends” outing a week ago.

So, I asked around and was directed to the Adobe forum linked above, and voila...

Smooth as a Baby's Bottom
with the new “Camera Standard” v3 Beta Profile

All the various “Camera” profiles (Camera Vivid, Camera Standard, etc.) could suffer from the mottled-color problem, at least for Nikon D3/D700/D300 hardware, but it seems it's been completely fixed with these v3 profiles.

All the images above are crops... here's the full frame, which might make a nice vertical desktop image...

Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — ¹/1000 sec, f/2.5, ISO 200 — full exif & map — nearby photos

Vertical Desktop-Background Versions
1050×1680  ·  1200×1920  ·  1600×2560

For context, here's a wider view, showing how the sun is shining directly on the rear of the blossom, thus causing it to glow from within when viewed from the top...

Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — ¹/500 sec, f/8, ISO 500 — full exif & map — nearby photos

I don't know what kind of tree it is, but it had a lot of buds in various stages...

Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — ¹/1000 sec, f/2.5, ISO 200 — full exif & map — nearby photos

Desktop-Background Versions
Standard: 1024×768  ·  1440×1080  ·  1600×1200      Widescreen:  1280×800  ·  1680×1050  ·  1920×1200  ·  2560×1600

I was very happy to get these profiles, but I'm not ready to switch to them for all my images. On the plus side they don't suffer from this rare-but-major splotch problem, but on the minus side, they seem too bright for my taste. The initial post in the Adobe thread says to set exposure to -½EV, but even when I do that, I feel details are lost in the highlights. This is just a gut feeling and I need to do more research, including reading the entire forum thread. However, it's important for D3/D700/D300 shooters to know these profiles are available, so I wanted to post about them right away.

This post is about the aftermarket GGS Glass LCD Screen Protector, and about the store I bought mine from. First about the protector itself...

Nikon cameras come with a cheap thick plastic LCD screen protector that easily scratches, scuffs, and just looks ugly. When it scuffs enough, it becomes cloudy and makes it worse than nothing. So a couple of years ago, I bought a GGS brand glass protector for my Nikon D200, and loved it. Along with a Katz Eye focus screen, they're the two must-have aftermarket changes to a new camera body.

When I got a D700, I immediately bought the same protector for it, and loved its clean looks and superior protection as before. A year later, my appreciation grew when I'd left the camera under a chair in a room frequented by a number of toddlers, and came back to find the protector cracked, but the underlying screen still in perfect condition.

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55mm f/2.8 @ 45 mm — ¹/25 sec, f/2.8, ISO 500 — full exif
Oops
the old one took one for the team

Off to my online store, and $12 later, I had a new one...

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 85mm f/1.4 — ¹/125 sec, f/4, ISO 1800 — full exif

(It includes a glass protector for the camera-top mini LCD screen, but I don't think that screen needs any kind of protection, so I don't use it.)

Here's an article giving more details. They're made for a lot of specific cameras (including Nikon, Canon, Panasonic, Pentax, Sony, Olympus, Leica), and a number of generic sizes for point-n-shoots.

GGS glass screen protectors: highly recommended.

And now about where I buy them: I buy them from the GreenLife Style store on eBay, where I've bought a number of things over the years. They're an eBay store with a stellar rating (positive feedback of 99.2%, though my personal experience has been 100% positive).

I've been meaning to write about them for two years; that I'm doing it now illustrates how far behind on stuff I am. Two years ago I posted about a Surreal (and exceedingly unpleasant) PayPal Experience where PayPal had approved a payment from me to a merchant, the merchant replied “got your payment; we'll ship your order soon”, and then half an hour later PayPal “un-approved” the payment and locked my account.

Anyway, it took a week for me to get the PayPal situation cleared up (and ended up getting an apologetic phone call from an executive at PayPal), but throughout the ordeal, the merchant, GreenLife Style, was 100% reasonable. All emails were answered within minutes, by a human. They were extremely accommodating to the situation, and they worked with me to get around the issue. Due to the PayPal silliness, at one point they had been paid twice for the same order, and immediately refunded the overpayment. PayPal wasted a lot of their time during this ordeal, but they were always cheerful and professional.

I've bought a bunch of small things from them over time... the screen protectors, Nikon MC-36 SLR remote-control knockoff ($30 instead of $150, and works just perfectly), rubber eyecups, etc.

They're an eBay store so they present their products in the form of auctions, and sometimes there are multiple auctions for the same product, with different prices (sometimes in different currencies), so if you want to buy from them, use their store's search feature and pick the result with the lowest price.

GreenLife Style's eBay Store: highly recommended.

The lens on the left is a new AF-S Nikkor 50mm f/1.4G lens, and on the right is a circa-1969 Nikkor-S Auto 50mm f/1.4.

The modern version has autofocus and a built-in CPU that communicates details about settings to the camera body, but is also made of plastic rather than the steel of the original, and comes completely devoid of character. Foremost a lens is a tool, but I wish it would at least aspire to look good.

Modern Nikon lenses may well be optically wonderful, but looks-wise, they look to me now the same way that 80s hairstyles look to me now. Ugh.

A couple of months ago I wrote about a new (for me) lens, a Cosina Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 that I introduced in this post. It was my intention to eventually write up a nice post all about it, with samples that I actually took time to take carefully, but free time is just not something I've had yet this year, so today's post will have to do.

Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — ¹/320 sec, f/2.5, ISO 1250 — full exif
Tube
of metal and glass: no plastic

Last fall's “Holy Cow, the Gardens at Kyoto's Eikando Temple are Gorgeous!” post represented an awakening for me to a whole class of lens that far exceeds Nikon's offerings, at least by some metrics. In it I had used a friend's manual-focus Carl Zeiss 100mm f/2, and was thrilled with both the joy of using it and the photos it allowed me to take. It's solid metal and glass, with a long focus pull that makes manual-focus photography a luxury of satin proportions. Modern SLRs tend not to be designed for manual-focus use, but I have a Katz Eye focusing screen, which makes manual focus a pleasure.

Not long after this experience with the Zeiss, in an exchange with a blog reader, I commented that I was looking for a nice macro (super close-up) lens, and that the Zeiss was nice, but that I longed for more close-up than its 1/2-full-macro abilities.

He replied:

(“Bjorn” refers to well-known lens geek Bjørn Rørslett, whose review of this lens is toward the bottom of this page.)

Something about this really struck a chord with me — the calm “just the best” or the vivid “exquisite to use”, perhaps — and I felt that intuitively, sight unseen, that I just had to have this lens.

After long months of watching Yahoo! Auctions (they're not only still alive in Japan, but the market leader... the “eBay of Japan”), I finally procured one, and was not disappointed.

Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — ¹/320 sec, f/2.5, ISO 2200 — full exif
SN 9120700
N/AI-S means Nikon “AI-S”-spec Mount

The “exquisite” that so aptly describes the Zeiss 100/2 is only a starting point for the Voigtländer, with a focus pull that takes almost two complete turns of the lens barrel to move from infinity to the minimum focus of 38cm. Two turns of the barrel! It exudes solid, velvety-smooth quality.

The numbers around the barrel in red are the focus distances in meters during the first turn, in white the distances during the second turn.

The lens extends considerably as you focus closer, as if it's reaching out to the subject being photographed, and by the time you're at the minimum focus distance, the length of the lens proper (sans hood) has almost doubled. That's a neat engineering trick in and of itself.

Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — ¹/320 sec, f/2.5, ISO 4000 — full exif
Focus At Infinity / Focus At 38cm
With funky square hood. The comparison would have been better sans hood.

It comes with a funky square lens hood of speckled metal, and a rubber square “hood cap” that seems to be the only thing not made of metal or glass.

Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — ¹/100 sec, f/11, ISO 4000 — full exif
Cosina Voigtländer Macro APO-Lanthar 125mm F2.5 SL

The official name is the long mouthful captioning the photo above. The Japanese company Cosina actually manufacturers the lens. Voigtländer is venerable names in cameras, being licensed by Cosina for the name's recognition and heritage, I guess.

Macro means that the image projected on the sensor by the lens can be made at least as big as the actual object being projected. The larger the projection, the more the object fills the frame, and so the more detail is rendered. This full-macro lens can project an image twice the size of the Zeiss (which is also manufactured by Cosina, the agreement with Zeiss likely being what caused Cosina to stop producing this Voigtländer lens in the first place).

APO refers to a type of lens construction that reduces color fringing, while Lanthar seems to be another name borrowed for its heritage. I'm not sure.

125mm F2.5 are the focal length and maximum aperture. SL seems to be a designator for a line or family of lenses at Cosina, but again, I'm not sure.

The maximum aperture of f/2.5 is sort of middle ground... not bad, but it's not f/1.4, either. Still, when combined with the D700's low-light capabilities I tend to want to push the limits, so I grabbed it on the way out one evening to check out fireflies with Anthony (and found none, where there had been a gazillion the previous day... odd), yielding not much but the photo that leads this post.

I haven't had much chance to use it since, but a few photos with it appeared on my Lightroom JPEG Quality writeup.

Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — ¹/160 sec, f/5.6, ISO 6400 — full exif
X4

Around the barrel in orange at various spots next to focus distances are “X2”, “X3”, and “X4”. I could not find any reference on the web to what these mean, so perhaps this will be the first: at very close focus distances (less than half a meter), the effective aperture starts to narrow, reducing the light by 2×, 3×, and 4× at the respective focus distances. Those with modern TTL metering just let the camera take care of the exposure, but those doing the exposure manually will need to adjust their exposure by 1, 1.6, and 2 stops, respectively.

Besides the square lens hood and hood cap, it comes with an all-metal screw-on lens cap. Here's a photo of the cap balanced on the hood at my living-room window:

Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 cropped — ¹/2500 sec, f/5.6, ISO 4000 — full exif
Lens Cap and Lens Hood

The lens cap is nicely machined, with a knurled ridge offset at an angle around the circumference. It's less convenient than a modern plastic clip-on lens cap, and it can't even be accessed when the lens hood is on, but I suspect it's meant only for when the lens is in storage.

Anyway, the lens cap doesn't look particularly interesting when you're holding it, but looking at it close up reveals all kinds of interesting plays of light. I set the cap in front of the window, and used a tissue box to steady the lens (because walking all way back to my room to break out my tripod was more work than I was willing to invest), and ...

Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 cropped — ¹/400 sec, f/8, ISO 4000 — full exif
Edge of Knurled

This is, of course, the subject of my most recent (though not very recent) Disorienting “What am I” Quiz.

I took an interesting photo yesterday that I want to post as a “What am I?” quiz, so because I don't want to have two open quizzes, I was sort of forced to post about the Voigtländer today. So there we are.

Now back to the Lightroom plugin bit mines...

(ignore this... it's just some ASCII-only versions of some names, for the search engines: Bjorn Rorslett, Voigtlander 125mm