Category Archives: Gear & craft

Stuck in iMac

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I really love my Apple iMac computer. Being a long time PC user it is refreshing to use a desktop computer that is fast, silent, uses state-of-art operating system and looks gorgeous. It is an ecstasy to use its real estate 27″ screen with 3.7mpx physical resolution for editing photos. However, nothing is perfect. Neither is my iMac.

It looks that for Apple engineers the design is far more important that ergonomics. There is a serious design flaw. At least as far as the SD card reader placement is concerned. The issue is that it is located very close to the slot-in optical drive. Can you see the problem?

Exactly. I bet that first time you try to put the SD card by groping you’ll put it into the optical drive rather than the reader. And then the real fun begins. The drive has quite efficient dust cover. The card can go easily in but it is not so easy to take it out. You need to turn over the computer to the side, use some piece of cardboard and try to take it off. An you can only pray that you won’t damage the internals of the optical drive.

In my case after some time I was successfully to pull out the stuck card. Luckily, I use SD cards much less than CF cards. However, I think the SD card placement urgently needs a redesign.

Kirk lens collar for Nikkor AF-S 300 f/4

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The Nikkor AF-S 300 f/4D is an amazing lens. It the most affordable entry point to the super telephoto lens class for any Nikon DSLR user. It is small, light, at f/4 relatively fast and allows use of Nikon teleconverters to increase its reach. There is a reason why this lens is so popular among Nikon budget minded wild life photographers.

Nikkor AF-S 300 f/4D ED IF

Nikkor AF-S 300 f/4D ED IF

Unfortunately, the lens it is not perfect. As mentioned in all online reviews of this lens I read (and I can back that up by my own experience) one of its principal weaknesses of the lens is that its tripod collar is not so well designed. The problem is that the foot is quite tall and the material is not very strong. As result of it the lens can vibrate when attached to the tripod. You can actually try it – press the collar at the end towards the lens and you will see that it slightly bends. This does not seems to be that much, but rigidity of a mount is absolutely critical for telephoto use and even the smallest move can ruin your pictures. The problem is even bigger if you use teleconverter. You can imagine how frustrating it could be – you have a great lens, its well focused, use perfect ball-head, rigid tripod and still some of your pictures are blurred or not so sharp.

Nikkor AF-S 300 f/4 lens collar

Nikkor AF-S 300 f/4 lens collar

Some people might never notice that as the problem is shutter speed specific. On short shutter speeds faster than approx. 1/100 there is no issue at all. Slower the shutter speed more is likely for the blur to occur. The critical shutter speeds seems to be around 1/2s. For longer times the problem disappears again. The problem can be somehow reduced by using special techniques, like delayed shutter release, using Mirror Lock-Up (MLU) or special camera and lens holding techniques. However, these are neither convenient nor can solve the problem completely. They are just masking the symptoms rather than solving it. The root cause is that the lens collar is weak and does not provide enough vibration dampening to the relatively small lens.

Some people found their ways how to solve the problem. It can help to put a piece of something between the front of the collar foot and the lens to fixate the lens on one extra point. It does not have to be something special. For example for some time I used just a a piece of wine cork. Like that:

Lens cork

A lens cork

It works, but… Not only it looks ugly, it also makes me harder or unable to turn the lens to the vertical shooting orientation. Also it tends to get lost all the time and I have to drink another bottle of wine to get new lens thingy :) Therefore, I looked for a better solution.

I found three aftermarket Lens collars for Nikkor 300 AF-S. First, is Kirk NC-300. Another is RRS LC-A10. And last one is Burzynski NI 4/300. According to reports each of them seems to solve the vibration problem and each of them seems to have certain advantages. I selected Kirk one. Not only it is cheapest of the three (although still not really cheap), but it looks more rigid with extra fixation point. I must say though that I have never tested the others.

Kirk NC-300 lens collar

Kirk NC-300 lens collar

One of the greatest things about Kirk lens collar is that it’s base is Arca swiss compatible. That means you don’t have to bother with extra piece of equipment (Arca quick release bracket). I never understand why lens makes don’t make their lens foots area compatible by default. The world would be better place to live with that small improvement. The collar food is wider than Nikon and not flat so that it can allow you to use safety feature of your ball head clamp which is another point for Kirk. It has standard 1/4 thread for your monopod at the bottom.

Kirk NC-300 from the bottom

Kirk NC-300 - lens bracket from the bottom

The Kirk collar is just a bit heavier at 190g that Nikon stock collar (150g). However, once you add short Arca QR bracket to the Nikon its weight advantage is gone (I measured 220g with shortest bracket I have). It is made from same quality anodized aluminium like the Nikon although the finish is not exactly the same and doesn’t quite match the finish of the lens barrel.

Kirk NC-300 vs Nikon stock colar

Kirk NC-300 (left) vs Nikon stock colar

The inner parts of the front and main rings are padded so that there shouldn’t be any metal to metal contact that could scratch the barrel of your lens. There are no velvet padding but just regular plastic. However, this is nothing you can’t fix by doing it yourself. There are no gaps in the safety groove in the main ring like Nikon has. On the other hand removing the lens from the ring is much easier as the ring is split and you can simply open it. You don’t have to even unmount lens from the camera to remove the collar from the lens.

Kirk NC-300 Inner parts

Kirk NC-300 Inner parts padding

On the lens it feels exceptionally solid. And what is the most important you can press it as hard as you can but it never bends or anything. This is very promising.

Kirk NC-300 on the lens

Kirk NC-300 on the lens

Hand holding the lens with Kirk collar is not so comfortable as I find it harder to place my thumbs betweens lens and collar foot. However, I prefer to turn the collar foot so that it is above the lens and support the lens by palm of my hand. The best thing happens when the lens is mounted on a sturdy tripod.  If you touch the lens, the image is visibly more stable than with Nikon collar.

Nikkor NC-300 on the lens

Nikkor NC-300 on the lens

to be continued…

Telescope is a lens too

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Talking about super telephoto lens class makes many wildlife photographers sigh. It might be very expensive. For example getting into the 600mm range in camera world could mean spending something like $9.999 on Nikkor 600mm f/4G ED VR. Obviously this is a plenty of money and most enthusiast photographers will never afford to own one.

However, there are ways. Astronomical telescopes, like small apochromatic refractors are in principle very similar to camera lenses. Their objective lens creates an image that is then magnified by an eyepiece lens so that it can be observed by human eye. It is similar to a camera lens except there is no sensor at the end. Obviously, I am oversimplifying, there are more differences but basic principle is the same. As the telescopes are simpler in design they are cheaper than camera lenses (but don’t be mistaken, they can be very expensive too).

Nikon D700, Skywatcher 600mm telescope, f/7.1, 1/1500, ISO200

For less that $500 you can buy a decent Skywatcher 80/600mm scope that can provide you breathtaking views on celestial objects. It has apochromatic objective lens that give sharp and contrasty image quality. There is no surprise that many astronomers use this telescope for photography as well. Since we are on a wildlife blog I couldn’t resist to use it for a wildlife shot.

I know, there is some light-fall off at the edges of the field, but better than you’d expect from a $500 super tele photo lens, isn’t it?

Obviously, you always get what you pay for. First of all it is all manual. You have to manual focus, manual exposure, manual everything. There is no way to control the aperture. It has no camera mount so you have to fiddle with adapters to attach your camera to the scope. Since telescopes are designed to observe objects at infinity you can never focus closer that very far. f/7.1 is not particularly a fast aperture, etc.

However, you can take the picture and that’s what is the most important, isn’t it?

Sandisk Extreme CF 16GB

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I am not particularly a burst shooter. In most cases I am OK with the memory buffer and framerate of my D700 (5 fps) and have never really felt an urge to use MD-D10 grip to improve frame rate to 8 fps. However, sometimes the more speed is handy when shooting birds in flight or some action scenes. In those situation you realize that even the fastest camera become slow as soon as it’s buffer is full. For those disciplines you need a fast memory card.

Although some people prefer to use many small memory cards in order to reduce a risk of card failure I always owned just a single memory card. However, having just a single memory card can be risky. Fortunately, I have never had a memory card failure. On the other hand, I would be more confident to have at least one spare card in my pocket just in case. It is also handy when shooting on longer photo trips when you have no access to computer where you can unload your pictures.

Therefore I was in the market for a fast memory card with  decent capacity. I wanted to use it along with my proven 16GB Sandisk Extreme III 30 MB/s. My Sandisk Extreme III card is actually a pretty fast card. It supports UDMA and is quite snappy. However, the new Sandisk Extreme with declared speed of 60 MB/s or 400x should be twice as fast. I couldn’t resist and ordered one.

 

 

Where are my megs?

First thing I noticed was that the remaining shot counter was slightly lower than with my 16GB Extreme III card. My camera reported 620 lossless compressed 14bits RAW with Extreme III compared to just 605 with new Extreme (both cards were freshly formatted in the camera). After checking on my Mac I discovered that the formatted capacity of my Extreme III is approx. 373MB higher that the capacity of the new Extreme card. Strange, but also not a big deal breaker for me.

Speed

Any camera can sustain maximum burst rate only up to the size of its memory buffer. As soon the buffer is full the camera slow downs significantly. From experience I know that the size of my D700′s memory buffer is good for approx. 16-18 frames depending on the camera settings (12bit/14bit setting, RAW compression, noise reduction and possibly other settings). Without the grip I can shoot at maximum speed (5fps) for approx. 4 seconds. Then the buffer gets full and frame rate drops to the speed of memory card. While full buffer my Extreme III card allows camera to shoot with a slow irregular framerate (something like 2 fps in average). This is actually a pretty good performance as some old non-UDMA cards slow down the camera much more. However, 60 MB/s should be twice as fast than 30 MB/s, or shouldn’t?

In order to compare performance of cards I did a very unscientific test. I set my camera to manual focus, manual exposure mode, exposure time 1/8000 and high-speed continuous mode. I also disabled Image Review feature as it can interfere with my tests. I pressed the shutter for 30seconds. I measured time until buffer got full and then how long it takes to empty the buffer to the memory card (card write is indicated by LED diode on back of the camera body). Then I checked how many frames were actually taken in those 30 seconds of shooting.

And the results (repeated four times and averaged):

Card Maximum fps sustained for Buffer flush time Frames taken in 30s Frame rate after buffer is full
Sandisk Extreme III 30 MB/s 4.0s 8.13s 69 1.88
Sandisk Extreme 60 MB/s 4.9s 4.5s 98 2.89

Conclusion

I confirmed that the Extreme 60 MB/s card can give my D700 a decent performance boost. With the new card my camera can flush the buffer almost twice as fast. What’s more important it gives me one more second of maximum burst speed. It is like having  25% buffer expansion for free (or better said for the cost of the card). Also once the buffer capacity is exceed I can still shoot at almost 3 fps instead of 2 fps thanks to the faster emptying of the buffer which is more than many amateur DSLRs can do at their best.

I’ve noticed that there are some other reviews on the internet that actually came to very different conclusions. According to Chuck Steenburgh’s blogpost the new Sandisk Extreme 60 MB/s is slower than the cards in reviewer’s D300.  Furthermore, Rob Gelbraith who runs very nice pages about memory card performance measured something similar on his D300s. I don’t know. Either Sandisk updated the card in the meanwhile (both reviews are two years old) or there are some differences in the D700 vs D300/D300s memory card interface that makes the card run faster in D700 than on D300 cameras? It is hard to say.

Anyway, Sandisk Extreme 60 MB/s 16GB provided me exactly what I expected. Significant performance gain and a plenty of additional capacity. Highly recommended.

Note: Adorama has them in 8GB, 16GB and 32GB sizes. Support this site by buying one or more through the link from this site :)