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Posts Tagged ‘DSLR’

Photography, Portrait, Technology | 0 comment

Leaf Shutter Lenses Part 2 – Tech Thursday

Outdoor portrait with leaf shutter lens and flash - ©TimeLine Media

Last Tech Thursday, I had the first post on using leaf shutter lenses. In doing a little research, there are not too many of these that are available in convenient or “affordable” kits. The ones that are available cost most than most DSLRs bundles with lenses – for the lens alone! These are normally in the realm of the medium format cameras with much larger sensors, and much higher price tags. A new medium format camera is in the $15,000 – $40,000 range with the accompanying leaf shutter lenses starting at $4500+.

So you can see why I was excited to learn that the relatively inexpensive Fuji X100s has a leaf shutter. As a refresher, here is a photo taken without any added flash outside. It is the metered exposure from the camera, and has a nice shallow depth of field with the trees and the shed going out of focus. The settings were 1/1000th second at f/2.0 ISO 200. The shutter speed was very fast due to the open aperture. There was bright sun that is starting to set but is still high overhead.

Flash Photography Test

Flat outdoor portrait without fill flash - ©TimeLine Media
Flat outdoor portrait without fill flash – ©TimeLine Media

With a typical DSLR, you would not be able to use these settings to get proper exposure*. The 1/1000th of a second exposure time is too fast for the flash to fully expose the frame. You will have a black bar along one of the long sides of the frame where the shutter is still covering part of the frame. You are limited to 1/200th or 1/160th of a second on most cameras. To find your, look in your manual, and look for the maximum flash sync speed. On the Fuji X100s, however, the leaf shutter lens is able to sync with the flash up to this fast shutter speed. This is the biggest benefit to using these types of lenses – having more control over balancing the available light in the scene with added light from a flash or strobe.

Outdoor portrait with leaf shutter lens and flash - ©TimeLine Media
Outdoor portrait with leaf shutter lens and flash – ©TimeLine Media

You can keep the nice darker blue sky, and saturate the other colors by underexposing the background with a high shutter speed. The flash power you can control from the strobe or by adjusting the aperture. Even though in some of these, the aperture was not wide open, it was only closed about 1 stop which keeps the background nicely out of focus compared to your subject. I cannot wait to do more shooting with this setup! It gives a lot more flexibility in what time of day to make outdoor portraits.

Outdoor portrait with leaf shutter lens and flash - ©TimeLine Media
Outdoor portrait with leaf shutter lens and flash – ©TimeLine Media

TimeLine Media – www.timelinedc.com
703-864-8208

Photography, Portrait, Technology | 0 comment

Leaf Shutter Lenses Part 1 – Tech Thursday

ballroom dance photography - ©TimeLine Media

The wintry weather finally broke for a little bit last week! I finally had a good chance to test one of the best features of the Fuji X100s camera – the leaf shutter lens. Most cameras produced today have focal plane shutters which have a curtain that opens and closes in front of the sensor. With a leaf shutter lens, there are blades built into the lens itself that opens and closes as the shutter opens and closes in the camera. As you press the shutter button on the camera, there is no difference in the operation between these two types of lenses. Where the big difference comes is in the fastest flash sync speed that is possible when using a leaf shutter lens. This opens up a lot of creative possibilities!

Camera Tech

On typical DSLRs, between 1/160th to 1/250th of a second is the fastest shutter speeds that you can use if you want the flash to fully expose the frame. If you use a strobe with a DSLR and have your shutter speed set higher (ie 1/500th second or higher) you will start to get a large black band on your photo where the curtain is still covering a part of the sensor since the shutter speed is too high. This is not a limitation for leaf shutter lenses such as the one in the Fuji X100s. When shooting indoors, like ballroom dance competitions, this limitation is not a problem as 1/250th second is plenty fast to control the light coming into the camera.

ballroom dance photography - ©TimeLine Media
ballroom dance photography – ©TimeLine Media

The limitation of 1/250th really impacts outdoor shoots. If you want to use a flash, and you have to keep your shutter speed at 1/250th or slower, that means you need to close down your aperture – f/8 or higher depending on how bright the sun is outside. In viewing these photos, everything including your background will be in focus making it difficult to separate your subject from the background. One solution is to not use a flash since you have plenty of light, but now all the tones in the scene are very similar making the image flat, and not as dynamic. Next week, I’ll show you how the leaf shutter lens really changes this photo with the change of a few settings in the same scene.

Flat outdoor portrait without fill flash - ©TimeLine Media
Flat outdoor portrait without fill flash – ©TimeLine Media

TimeLine Media – www.timelinedc.com
703-864-8208

Photography, Technology | 0 comment

New Nikon D4S Announcement – Tech Thursday

Nikon D3 - ©TimeLine Media

Upgrading Tech

Has it been 2 years already? Nikon releases new camera bodies less frequently for their top end professional line (thank goodness). For them to take such a long time in between the release of a new body, they try to make improvements making it worthwhile for users. You can find rumor and review sites to read the specs. However here are my impressions on the new developments for their flagship Nikon D4S that was just recently announced.

  1. 16.2 megapixel sensor – This is a redesigned sensor from the Nikon D4. Additionally it does have some better improvements with the link EXPEED 4 image processor. I like that they did not up the megapixel count! The 36 megapixels in the D800 are a bit of a chore to work with. They take up so much hard drive space, and they take a big chunk of memory to process on workstations.
  2. Group area Autofocus – This is a feature that Canon digital cameras have had. Consequently, I was waiting to see it in a Nikon. Something has changed in the way that Nikon has designed their auto focus systems that has made me have a little less faith in how accurate they are in locking focus. Both the D4 and D800 have had more misses due to backfocus, or other missing focus compared to older models. Considering they have not changed the options and setup of auto focus in the camera menus, I am having more trouble with them. I am hopeful that grouping together a bunch of focus points to cover an area to track focus will improve the performance.
  3. XQD and Compact Flash card slots – Disappointing! Till now, I have not seen any other still camera manufacturer support the XQD card format. I do like that it handles like a more robust SD card with super quick transfer speeds, but having to carry around two different formats of cards neither of which have built in readers for laptops is a pain. I would have preferred 2 XQD cards, or even two of the new UHS-II SDXC cards – they can transfer at up to 280MB/s, with readers that are readily available on almost any laptop.

In any case, it is nice to see that Nikon is still trying to improve on image quality. Images that I shot with the top end Nikons from 4 years ago are holding up nicely especially compared to any image made on a smartphone, and many modern DSLRs. But it still depends mostly on what is in front of the lens to make the photo. It is just fun to geek out once in a while.

Nikon D3 - ©TimeLine Media
Nikon D3 – ©TimeLine Media

TimeLine Media – www.timelinedc.com
703-864-8208

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