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 [...]

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:

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Note: the photos above are from among the hundreds of shots taken with the Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 that have appeared on my blog since I first published this article. The photo I originally opened the article with, seen below, was one I just happened to have taken just before writing the article, but it reallly doesn't do the lens justice, so I came back to add a few that do.

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 [...]