Woo-hoo, as the rumor mill has been buzzing about for the last two weeks, Nikon officially announced the “D700” professional SLR today, just 10 months after announcing the D3 and D300 followups to the D200 that I have.

Last year, I got to play with the D3 & D300 before they went on sale, and despite lusting after “shiny & new” and the benefits over my D200, I decided to not upgrade.

This time might be different.

I didn't believe the rumors first started, not least of which because the name – D700 – makes absolutely no sense in light of Nikon's normal camera-naming scheme. But the press releases went out today, and Digital Photography Review already has a D700 hands-on preview, so it's real.

The D3 is still Nikon's top of the line, but the D700 brings in some of the conveniences from the prosumer bodies – features missing from the D3 that the D300 provided. About the only thing that the D700 brings from the D3 that I wish it didn't is the tiny autofocus-selector coverage. All three (D3, D300, D700) have a bazillion auto-focus selector points, but only in the D300 do they cover the whole screen. With the D3/D700, they're clustered all in the center (in the “DX” portion of the sensor), which makes the bulk of them fairly useless.

Still, the D700 is pretty much exactly the “full-frame D200-sized camera” that I wished for early on, and much earlier than I expected, so I'm thrilled...

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 78 mm — ¹/350 sec, f/2.8, ISO 320 — map & image data — nearby photos

These signs popped up at intersections in my area of Kyoto a month or so ago. They read:

As I mentioned the other day, the G8 Summit meeting of foreign ministers was recently held in Kyoto, which entailed a lot of hubbub.

There was a massive police presence everywhere. I snapped a couple of pictures from my scooter while waiting at red lights. Mostly, there were congregations of police at intersections, looking bored....

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 86 mm — ¹/40 sec, f/9, ISO 100 — map & image data — nearby photos

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 200 mm — ¹/125 sec, f/3.5, ISO 320 — map & image data — nearby photos
Well-Guarded Trees

There was an incessant buzzing of helicopters the whole time, and while killing a few minutes one of the days, I practiced manual-focus tracking on one of them...

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 200 mm — ¹/500 sec, f/9, ISO 100 — map & image data — nearby photos

As in the Watching a Helicopter Take Off post, I'm surprised how slow the helicopter blades move. The shot above is 1/500th of a second, almost freezing the blades. I'd have thought that I would have needed a much shorter shutter to do that.

Anyway, with all these police, I wondered how much was being spent. It wasn't nearly the hubbub of a presidential visit, but it all – every last yen – seems to be a waste. If these 8 foreign ministers want to have a chat, why not pick up a friggin' phone? Or, if they really need to do it in person, why not meet at a place that's already secure (e.g. Camp David or the like) and do so without telling the world's crazies in advance?

Even worse, last week's meeting in Kyoto was just one of nine sub-meetings building up to the main meeting in Hokkaido next week.

So how much does it cost for the G8 to meet in person instead of using a phone? Today the Japan Times (major English daily in Japan) reports that it's 60 billion yen, or about $575 MILLION DOLLARS.

This quote from the Japan-Times article – particularly the last line – pretty much sums everything up:

Wow.

The photo below, of pizza at a cafe, appeared on my previous post. It was taken with a polarizing filter on the lens adjusted to block glare from the window in the background. Mouseover the “Without Polarizer” button below for the same scene two seconds later, without the filter...

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 24 mm — ¹/90 sec, f/2.8, ISO 500 — map & image data — nearby photos

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 24 mm — ¹/125 sec, f/2.8, ISO 500 — map & image data — nearby photos

The difference is striking.

Without the filter, the reflections on the pizzas, table, and glasses of water just destroy the scene. I'm glad I happened to have brought the my polarization filter that day. In the “Without Polarizer” picture, the filter is still actually on the lens, but rotated so that it doesn't comb out the reflections.

Normally, the individual waves that make up light are not “oriented” in any particular direction, so a filter designed to comb out light waves having a particular orientation doesn't do much except dim the whole scene a bit (because it removes the few percent of waves that happen to have that orientation). However, in some situations, all the waves of a particular light find themselves oriented at the same angle – it's polarized light – so filtering for that angle stops all that light, while only slightly dimming the rest of the light.

In the scene above, the background glare reflected from the pizzas, table, and water glasses was polarized, so I simply rotated the filter in front of the lens until the reflections dimmed... they dimmed because the angle of the filter “comb” matched the orientation of the waves making up the glare, thereby blocking it.

This next example (from our trip to Kanazawa) shows that the filter blocked almost all the reflection of the sky, but left the locally-lighted reflection of the water glass...

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 85mm f/1.4 — ¹/250 sec, f/5, ISO 400 — map & image data — nearby photos

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 85mm f/1.4 — ¹/250 sec, f/5, ISO 400 — map & image data — nearby photos

With Polarizer  ·  Without Polarizer

mouseover button to see that image

Wikipedia has a detailed discussion of the physics of polarization, but for practical photographic applications, Light — Science and Magic is excellent.

It's not always easy to predict what light will be polarized when, or to what extent, but modern polarization filters can be freely rotated while affixed to the lens, so it's a simple matter of rotating the lens a bit to see what, if any, light is attenuated. When there's a lot of polarized light, a polarization filter adds additional ways to be creative. Consider a close-up of yesterday's pizza...

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 45 mm — ¹/60 sec, f/2.8, ISO 500 — map & image data — nearby photos

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 45 mm — ¹/30 sec, f/2.8, ISO 500 — map & image data — nearby photos

With Polarizer  ·  Without Polarizer

mouseover button to see that image

Without the filter, the glare just destroys the picture, but with the filter at full effect, the pizza looks dull and lifeless. Well, it's a pizza, so it is lifeless, but it need not be dull, so if I had been serious about making a portrait of the pizza instead of eating it, I'd likely have tried rotating the filter such that a touch of glare was left to enhance the 3-D look of the surface.

In this wider shot, though, where the pizza is not the whole image, I'm happy to forego sparkle in the pizza in order to reveal the richness of the table's wood grain... richness that without the filter the glare blows away.

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 34 mm — ¹/100 sec, f/2.8, ISO 500 — map & image data — nearby photos

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 34 mm — ¹/160 sec, f/2.8, ISO 500 — map & image data — nearby photos

With Polarizer  ·  Without Polarizer

mouseover button to see that image

It's less clear to me what to do with the salad...

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 48 mm — ¹/80 sec, f/2.8, ISO 640 — map & image data — nearby photos

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 48 mm — ¹/60 sec, f/2.8, ISO 640 — map & image data — nearby photos

With Polarizer  ·  Without Polarizer

mouseover button to see that image

I was just playing around with the filter prior to more important tasks (eating), so I didn't notice that the focus point slipped between the two pictures, and that focus difference has a greater effect on the overall feel than the glare or lack thereof.

Reflections aren't always a bad thing. The polarization filter pretty much destroys the shot below, from our trip to the Heian Shrine during a rare snowfall....

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 17 mm — ¹/80 sec, f/2.8, ISO 400 — map & image data — nearby photos

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 17 mm — ¹/125 sec, f/2.8, ISO 400 — map & image data — nearby photos

With Polarizer  ·  Without Polarizer

mouseover button to see that image

Well, okay, it was my composition that destroyed these shots because both are pretty pathetic, but you can see how much more interesting a well-composed shot would be with the reflections of the snowy branches left in tact.

Some things, like Plexiglas, or glass under stress, polarize light passing through in sort of random ways that can reveal internal stresses – useful for scientific and safety applications – but which make a polarizer fairly useless. Here's a scene from the Geometric Richness in Kanazawa Station that shows unsightly patterns regardless of the angle the polarization filter is rotated to...

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 85mm f/1.4 — ¹/180 sec, f/4.5, ISO 100 — map & image data — nearby photos

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 85mm f/1.4 — ¹/250 sec, f/4.5, ISO 100 — map & image data — nearby photos

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 85mm f/1.4 — ¹/500 sec, f/4.5, ISO 100 — map & image data — nearby photos

Polarizer Removed  ·  With Polarizer #1  ·  With Polarizer #2

mouseover button to see that image

In these cases, you do have to physically remove the filter from the lens in order to avoid the patterns, because they appear to some extent at all rotations of the filter.

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55mm f/2.8 @ 52 mm — ¹/80 sec, f/3.5, ISO 800 — map & image data — nearby photos
The Face of Freedom
working for pleasure, not just a paycheck

We decided to have a relaxing day, and took drive north an hour and a half to a middle-of-nowhere cafe that Fumie had read about on someone else's blog. It turns out that it's run by a guy who used to be some kinds of architectural-plastics engineer in Osaka, and left it all behind to follow his passion for, oddly enough, stone kilns. That translated into a cafe with fresh pizza on the menu.

The place is called kamo no shirabe (かものしらべ), which means either “melody of the ducks”, or “sounds of the river”, depending on whether the kamo in the name is the word for “duck” or a reference to the kamo river (“Duck river”) that flows by the place. (There's also a kamo river in Kyoto, so perhaps it's a common name?).

In either case, there was good food in a very pleasant atmosphere.

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55mm f/2.8 @ 52 mm — ¹/100 sec, f/2.8, ISO 320 — map & image data — nearby photos
Looking In
from the terrace, which we didn't use because a light rain was falling

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55mm f/2.8 @ 17 mm — ¹/320 sec, f/5, ISO 800 — map & image data — nearby photos
outside terrace
Where We Would Have Liked To Sit

It's in a place called Takashima City in Shiga Prefecture (an hour and a half north of Kyoto, Japan), but they must be on the far-flung outskirts because there's no City in evidence anywhere around here. There are map links under each photo (all of essentially the same place, of course).

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55mm f/2.8 @ 24 mm — ¹/90 sec, f/2.8, ISO 500 — map & image data — nearby photos
Pizzas Arrive

We each got a $15 “pizza set”, a triplet consisting of a personal pizza, a drink, and a small salad. It was most excellent.

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55mm f/2.8 @ 34 mm — ¹/100 sec, f/2.8, ISO 500 — map & image data — nearby photos
Cutting His Own Pizza

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55mm f/2.8 @ 48 mm — ¹/60 sec, f/2.8, ISO 640 — map & image data — nearby photos
Salad
with carrots, cucumber, tomato, black beans, sesame, and a fairly heady vinaigrette

After stuffing myself on my pizza and most of Anthony's, I went out for a short stroll with the camera. Here's the restaurant from the rear, from across the little river that flows by.

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55mm f/2.8 @ 28 mm — ¹/90 sec, f/8, ISO 400 — map & image data — nearby photos

And the view looking the other way – the one you see from the restaurant – is of terraced rice paddies, mountains, and on a drizzly day like today, mist...

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55mm f/2.8 @ 17 mm — ¹/200 sec, f/8, ISO 400 — map & image data — nearby photos

I love the looks of terraces of rice paddies cut into the mountains, such as these and these.

It's then that I met the proprietor, who was happy to show me the wood-burning stone kiln that he made himself, in which our pizzas had been cooked...

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55mm f/2.8 @ 17 mm — ¹/20 sec, f/5.6, ISO 640 — map & image data — nearby photos
Stoking the Fire
of his pizza kiln

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55mm f/2.8 @ 23 mm — ¹/20 sec, f/2.8, ISO 640 — map & image data — nearby photos
Hot Stuff

I like a cup of hot coffee to settle the tummy after a big meal, so I ordered one, then watched him prepare it. He was chatting with Fumie as he did, which yielded the big smile in this post's lead photo, but eventually it was time to get down to business of fine coffee...

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 85mm f/1.4 — ¹/80 sec, f/2.2, ISO 800 — map & image data — nearby photos
Serious about his Work

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 85mm f/1.4 — ¹/60 sec, f/2.2, ISO 800 — map & image data — nearby photos
Fetching a Cup

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 85mm f/1.4 — ¹/80 sec, f/2.2, ISO 800 — map & image data — nearby photos
My Trying To Be Artsy

Meanwhile, Anthony played with the heavy stone mill they used to grind the coffee beans...

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 85mm f/1.4 — ¹/90 sec, f/2.2, ISO 800 — map & image data — nearby photos

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 85mm f/1.4 — ¹/125 sec, f/1.4, ISO 800 — map & image data — nearby photos
Coffee Mill

The guy and his wife do a lot themselves. He made the kilns, and the furniture, for example. (Check out the heavy wooden tables in the 2nd photo, for example.) They grow most of the vegetables they use in their cooking, right next to the restaurant. Here's a shot of the sign out front, with the restaurant in the background on one side, and the garden on the other....

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55mm f/2.8 @ 22 mm — ¹/250 sec, f/6.3, ISO 800 — map & image data — nearby photos
Kamo no Shirabe

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 200 mm — 0.8 sec, f/4.5, ISO 500 — map & image data — nearby photos
“Kyoto Tower is That Way”

Okay, that's not really what the guy pointing was saying... or maybe it was, I dunno, I was 100 feet away.

Kyoto Tower, is, of course, the big bright spire left of center. Although it's not that pretty, it's tall and easy to see, so it's made cameo appearances in my blog several times, including from close up, from the same spot as today's pictures (Shogunuzkua), from far away, and from very far away.

I had a few spare minutes this evening, so I drove up to Shogunzuka (where Anthony and I watched a helicopter take off the other day). I half worried that it might be closed due to the G8 summit going on today in Kyoto. There's lots of hubbub, but not quite as much as when a US President visits, so Shogunzuka was fine.

Coming over the rise from the parking lot, I was struck by the silhouettes of those at the lookout spot, so set up my tripod to capture them.

I tried various approaches...

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 + TC14II @ 120 mm — 0.8 sec, f/4.8, ISO 500 — map & image data — nearby photos
Focus on the People

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 + TC14II @ 120 mm — 0.7 sec, f/4.8, ISO 500 — map & image data — nearby photos
Focus on the Scene

I took a bunch of shots, with exposures ranging from just under a second to 30 seconds. Each came out with its own character, due mostly to the movement (or non-movement) of those in the foreground. I liked a lot of them, but they'd quickly get repetitive, so I'll just share these few.

I tried a longer-exposure wide-angle shot to capture more of what it felt like to be there, but sadly, it doesn't pick up the deep dark blue that still existed in the sky, the cigarette smoke from the jerk who decided to stand next to me with his cancer stick, or the misquotes...

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55mm f/2.8 @ 26 mm — 6 sec, f/9, ISO 400 — map & image data — nearby photos
Kyoto's
Shogunzuka at Night