Hal MacLean

I have just bought Scott Kelby’s recent book Digital Photography volume 2 and love it. I read the first book and learned that Scott’s style is down to earth and practical. He uses a lot of humour to ease you in to the subject for each chapter, but there are some seriously good tips and hints in each section.

Since I consider myself a learner still (and probably aways), particularly when it comes to photography, I really find this kind of book extremely useful. Yes, there are bits that are probably common sense and need not be said, but then again there will be folk will appreciate the information nonetheless. After all, having your common sense ‘confirmed’by an authority such as Scott can only be a good thing!

One immediate action as a result of reading the book was to buy a Nikkor 50mm f1.8 lens. I love it… so fast compared to even my f2.8 Sigma and the results are tack sharp. Thanks Scott! It didn’t cost a fortune, and I am sure it will be a firm favourite of mine very soon (probably by Friday afternoon, since it will be used for a wedding shoot then).

Reading Scott’s book also prompted me to  go through all of my kit and check out some of the features I know I don’t use so often. One such is the ability to use my SB800 flash gun ‘off camera’ using the wireless connection from my Nikon D200. I love the depth you can get when you move the light around to a different angle instead of blasting right off the top of the camera. Another tip was to shoot ‘tethered’ - i.e. using a USB lead from my camera straight in to my Mac. This needs a piece of software from Nikon (30 day trial) and you’re away. I liked the ability to see the image right on my laptop screen instead of in the viewer window on the back of the camera, but the software leaves a lot to be desired… more on that in another post, I think.

All in all, the two books I now own from Scott are proving to be a goldmine of useful information and I can thoroughly recommend them. The information in the second one about the use of flash is brilliant (no pun intended), and just what I needed to give me the confidence to go off and try stuff out. Buy the book - you won’t be disappointed.

I’ll keep this one brief. If you are at all looking for a lens in the 18-50 range, this one should be all you need. I use it on my D200 and love it. Fast, crisp and versatile. I used it for a wedding recently and found I didn’t need to change the lens at all, but did have to move in closer to the subjects. I used it at a conference recently and found it coped pretty well with the very low light levels. I love the crispness of the image and whilst I can see some slight vignetting in the corners at each end of the zoom range, it is not significant enough to make me stop using it. Go and try it yourself - make sure it is the HSM version, and you won’t be disappointed.

I am now wondering about the 18-200 lens I have written about previously… this new one knocks spots off it at equivalent zoom range, so I might well be looking to replace the older one. Maybe I ought to try the Nikkor 18-200 VR lens… anyone managed to get hold of one for less than £500, and if so, what do you think of it?

Have you ever been on a photographic shoot and run out of memory cards? Have you thought “I know - I’ll bring my laptop and download from the camera to that every so often…”? Have you tried that only to find that it takes a very long time to do and your camera is effectively out of action whilst you do it?

Enter the memory card reader with a built in hard drive!

There are several available on the market, including the excellent Epson P3000 or P5000 and these have a high quality built in screen for viewing your images. I imagine that you could use such a gadget to show ‘proofs’ to your client, but in my experience that is seldom necessary as they are too involved to pay much attention to your images there and then (especially true of weddings… the bride and groom seldom want to stop to look for very long on the day). Consequently, I opted for a Jobo Gigaone device. No viewing screen, just a screen to tell me the vital stuff such as battery life, capacity, operation and so on.

The version I got is a 40Gb drive in a snazzy silver case. It looks fairly good, IMO, and has slots for CF, SD, SM, MMC and MS cards. The CF slot also takes MD, too.

One thing that concerns me is the speed at which you can empty your memory card and get it back into action. I say ‘empty’ - in fact you only copy the content over to the internal drive and then return the card to the camera. You can then run a quick format to empty it. I have a couple of different sized compact flash cards which I use with my Nikon D200 and as a test I filled a 4Gb card to capacity and ran it through the Gigaone. It took about 25 minutes to copy the lot, which I guess is pretty acceptable - the files were all 15Mb RAW files. I reckon that’s a transfer rate of approximately 2.7Mb per second or thereabouts… I didn’t time it accurately or calculate the precise file size of all the images on the card. What I wanted was to find out if the time taken to empty the card allowed me to continue to shoot with a second card and not fill it up whilst waiting for the first card to be copied. It didn’t. I was using a 2Gb card as the second card and managed to fill it with RAW files faster than the Gigaone copied my 4Gb card. However, with two similarly sized cards I reckon you’d be about right. So that then leaves the battery life.

In the accompanying manual, the battery life is quoted as enough to copy 3.5Gb of data before you need a re-charge. This is complete nonsense, of course, and I can only assume it is a misprint. I copied the 4Gb card and the battery indicator still read as full. I copied it again, and then again. By the end of the third copy it was running low and I would have to re-charge it. Having said that, I did this test in the warmth and comfort of my own home, and in colder conditions (say winter time outdoors) you can expect the life to shorten. That said, a long time ago I invested in a power inverter (a device that allows me to run 13a devices from my car cigarette lighter socket) and if I was out on a location I’d take that with me.

The Gigaone has a USB connector on it which means I can easily attach it to my laptop and then read the images off it. Transfers are at USB2 speeds, which is nice. The device comes pre-formatted as FAT32 and popped up right away on my Mac. I assume the same would be true for a PC.

I’m using the device on a shoot in Yorkshire this week, so will no doubt have more opinions of it after that. So far I have been very pleased and wouldn’t dream of going out without it now! It has a space in the gear bag, and that’s that!

Just a few words on this one, as I don’t actually have time to write a full review right now.

The Nikon D200 is an astonishingly good camera for the money. It feels solid, reliable and trustworthy in my hand, which can’t be a bad thing! The feature set is superb - very ‘pro’ level stuff in there - my current favourite time saver being the automatic ISO adjustment. I realise I ought to take more control over things than let the camera do it, but when in a rush, in low levels of light (or fluctuating levels on a cloudy day with sunny intervals) I just didn’t have time to keep re-setting it. Using the auto setting was a lot easier, ensured the images were exposed more appropriately and allowed me to use aperture priority rather easily.

The histograms are very good - colour charts help me to establish what is going on in the pictures before I get it to a computer, and enable me to effectively set the exposure where it needs to be.

Using a Sigma lens is nice as well - the lens responds quickly to most situations, although I do occasionally find it struggles to focus when using one of the outer-most focus points in the viewfinder. Using the  central set gives very few problems, so perhaps this is something any lens would struggle with… I need to test it more.

In practice, using this range of lens gave me all I needed for wider shots, portrait type shots and close ups on details… a Macro lens would help with the latter, but in all other respects this lens is a lovely compromise across a wide range of focal lengths. So much so, in fact, that I wouldn’t automatically carry many others.

So is the Sigma as good as the Nikkor counterpart? Hard to say without a scientific test, but apart from the VR capabilities on the Nikkor, I can’t see any real differences on most images - the Sigma performs well across a range of settings. I did get a touch of barrel distortion at the wider end of the scale, but in all honesty this could as easily have been down to the angle of the shot as much as anything else.

Since the camera body came along so reasonably priced, and the lens is a good performer, I can recommend folk this combination. Of course, don’t take my word for it - pop along to your nearest tame retailer and try them both out to see which you prefer. Shoot in RAW format, compare the images on a computer and see which you like best.

Talking of RAW - a 2GB Compact Flash card in a D200 will store about 120 images in RAW format from this camera. Don’t forget this is over 10 megapixels and files coming in to Aperture are regularly over 15Mb each. Shoot in JPEG fine and get hundreds of images… or JPEG normal and see the numbers grow - but I am preferring RAW format at the moment - it allows more possibilities for manipulation when on a computer.

We have been very fortunate lately to be working with some excellent people. One such is Phil Sharp who works for Canon UK. Part of what we do is to undertake film and animation workshops around the UK, and occasionally get to do some filming for a wider project brief. Whilst at Ultralab we were fortunate indeed to have some pretty good kit to help us along the way, but at Cleveratom we have yet to purchase what we want/need. That’s where Phil comes in! He has arranged for us to have access to one and we have been using it on a project in the north of England.
Having a good camera like the XL2 for a few weeks (seemed like at least a month) really allowed us to get to grips with it’s capabilities. We were used to the ‘XL’ way of working, having had an XL1 previously. The XL2 has a much nicer interface and access to the common features is a lot more straight forward. Things like switching to 16:9 aspect ratio - on the XL1 this is buried deep in the menus… on the XL2 it’s a physical switch on the left hand side of the camera. The two XLR jacks on the back are a big improvement, as is the ability to switch easily into progressive scan mode.
So ok… it is not the newest of cameras, having largely been usurped by the HD trend. However, it is a great performing camera in the SD range, and I would buy one as soon as look at it. The lens is fabulous for the reportage style documentary work we have been engaged in, and whilst the camera is quite bulky, I like the solidity it offers.

Would I buy this over something like a Sony HVR Z1U? A tough call, since they are two different beasts, but I would definitely have one to hand if I could… and I’d have a sony as well