Project: Pohjanmaa

Actually I hate winter. Winter is not photographic. The mental landscape becomes lost during winter. There is just snow. I always start shooting when April comes, yesterday I was one day early.

Pohjanmaa is one of my three main projects. Pohjanmaa is a region in Finland. If you check wiki on Finland, you will find the regions in English: Ostrobothnia and Southern Ostrobothnia. They are my Pohjanmaa, and what I want to show is how I see the mental landscape of Pohjanmaa.

Blue overlay shows "my" Pohjanmaa.

If you think of American movies, you could think of Pohjanmaa as sort of mixture of Texas, Mid-West and Bible belt of Finland. I did a short shooting trip yesterday. Here are a couple images from this session. For now they are just nice images among other material.

-p-

Club house of Pohjanmaa MC.

Most of Pohjanmaa is flatlands. I think Pohjanmaa has relatively more entrepreneurs than other regions of Finland.

Canon TS-E 17mm f/4 L

I tested Canon´s new superb 17mm tilt shift lens already in June. But then came E-P1 and I´ve been shooting like crazy. Now, finally I found time to write my impressions on this great lens.

Canon´s new super wideangle tilt shift lens is absolutely fabulous (well I kind of said it already but that´s what it really is) but it also is not one of the easiest lenses to use. Even a regular 17mm lens takes some time to master but this beast with it´s ample movements gives a whole new meaning to wideangle distortions. Of course  already it´s price at about 2500 euros rises it above the reach of casual shooter. This is a PRO lens.

TS-E 17mm is a totally new lens, a new design and only Canon has such a lens presently. This kind of lens is basically a normal/short tele lens with a powerful wideangle adapter in front. This is very obvious if you look at the huge bulging front element. This large element, however, is one ingredient in the performance of this lens. One other important feature is nano coating inside of first element. I have noticed in practise that lenses with nano coating have time after time a better micro contrast than other lenses from either Canon or Nikon. This lens has also UD and aspherical elements but I`m not going further into technical specifications. They can be found at Canon websites. A sad but also obvious fact is that lens prices will get higher as manufacturers are trying to make lenses that are up to 20+ MP sensors. More and more nano coatings, special glass, special surfaces etc and tighter tolerances at manufacturing.

Another Canon first in TS or PC lenses are separately revolving tilt and shift adjustment planes. This gives the shooter more options. I will not go here into using these adjustments. Tutorials can be found elsewhere. Usage is familiar to every shooter who has used Canon TS-E lenses. Everything goes smoothly and precisely. Everything in the handling of this lens tells about quality. 

Suited for

As I see it, this TS-E 17mm is suited for interiors, landscapes, architecture and product photography. In this order. I´m going to write later on using this lens and Canon´s new TS-E 24mm f/3.5 MkII in product and landscape photography. So, I´m passing those genres here.

Interiors

Above we have an interior shot which combined from three TS-E 17mm shots: one normal and two extra shots with lens at maximum shifts to the right and left. These three shots were combined into one photograph in Photoshop. Now, this kind of job SHOULD actually be done so that lens stays put and sensor moves, a job for a view camera or special tripod head for 35mm camera. When sensor stays put and lens moves, the vantage point moves and combining of images is not automatic like it is in the first case. When lens moves, you need to do some manual work in Photoshop to get things aligned and it is more difficult the wider the lens. With masks aligning can be done reasonably fast if you know how to do it. Below panoramatic shot we have the single center image on the left.

Image Quality

TS-E 17mm gives a very high image quality in interior shots. Better than any comparable wideangle lens I have ever used. 

Above on the right there are two 100% crops from combined shot above. They are from the left upper corner and right lower corner. Sharpness and contrast holds on even with maximum shift. There is some chromatic aberration but surprisingly little considering angle of view. Very little distortions. Canon body used here is 5D MkII, ISO 100, f/11. 

Finally on the left the smaller crop is from a shot with Nikon D3x and Nikon´s formidable 14-24mm zoom. The difference here is real, both images are focused equally, same aperture f/11. Of course any difference is most obvious in the corner, but same trend is seen through out the whole picture. Canon image is sharper and has better contrast in these only slightly sharpened shots. D3x is a ”sharper” camera than 5D2 as such at ISO 100 and Nikon´s 14-24mm zoom is a VERY good lens. This only shows how good the TS-E 17mm really is.

Above another version of the same interior. Done in the same way as the horizontal one but this time I had camera vertically. Same procedure, same possible difficulties while combining shots. This version gives a much nicer sense of spaciousness and also an aspect ratio that is suitable for most interiors. This image shows also how careful you have to be with corners with such an extremely wide view.

One more interior. Same procedure: three vertical shots with maximum shift, combined in Photoshop. Curvature of vertical line to the left of image is NOT caused by TS-E 17mm lens. I had to go and check afterwards and it actually is a fault of builders. This curvature is obvious here but not really noticed by the naked eye while standing in the room.

Buildings, Architecture

Architecture did not take the first spot in my suited for list. Here´s why. With this lens you have to be really careful with angles and not distort the building too much. This is not a horror example. This is the true nature of TS-E 17mm ;-). I think a 24mm TS/PC lens is more suited for architecture. 17mm is for those situations where you really need those extra angles and know how to tame the beast. Shot with 5D2, ISO 100, f/13. Image quality is superb.

TS/PC lens or ordinary wideangle and Photoshop?

Well, the lens always wins. To be able to get the same result in Photoshop you need first a wider lens to shoot from the same spot because you end up cropping later. Here a 15mm lens, above. Same image corrected in Photoshop below it, before crop. My big TS-E 17mm image above has been cropped only slightly from the right (construction work). As you can see, the needed amount of tweaking is huge AND you lose most of image area while cropping. You get less and inferior pixels.

 

Tilt and Backlight

Tilt is kind of obvious. You can control plane of focus. Above I got all the flowers sharp at f/5,6. With an extreme lens like this you have to be again careful with what happens in the corners. Either you like the effect or you hate it!

Despite of huge front element this lens tolerates backlight really nicely. There is no veil all over the image on the right. Contrast stays high. Flare spots are easy to retouch if needed.

Conclusion

A very special and high quality lens for pro shooter, a very special and fun or frustrating lens for special wideangle effects. A must have for any Canonist shooting lots of interiors, a no brainer for wide angle landscape photographs with 35mm FF. All the others watch your step.

-p-

Nikon D3x: ISO 400 -> 1600

Here are two observations on Nikon D3x in dimmer light conditions. One is about image quality at high ISOs and the other about camera´s stability at slow shutter speeds, which are kind of connected issues.

D3x, AF-S Nikkor 200mm 1:2G @ f/2, ISO 400

ISO 400 - ISO 1600

I have been lately shooting using Nikon´s great Auto-ISO feature. Previously I was very disappointed with Canon´s  Auto-ISO version in 5D MkII. For me it´s totally useless. Nikon betters by giving user two sets of parameters: a setting for highest allowed ISO value and a setting for lowest allowed shutter speed. These two settings make Auto-ISO a really useful feature. For instance with a 85mm lens I set 1/125s as the slowest allowed shutter speed. That ensures sharp hand held images, and thus gives me the real benefit from D3x high resolution sensor. Auto-ISO works as should with every exposure mode setting, and ISO sensitivity is shown in the viewfinder all the time so that I can override automation when ever wanted.

Originally I considered D3x only as a studio and landscape camera. I was not expecting anything special from higher ISO values at all. Actually in Lappland while shooting landscapes I was afraid of going over ISO 200 to maximize quality.  Now Auto-ISO led me suddenly into using higher values than before. When I evaluated images I was positively surprised with the clean tight noise granularity in them. Actually I did not notice any visual difference with Canon 5D MkII look which I liked so much. 

Now I had to test also this issue to really see how these two cameras compare.

Test image pairs at ISO 400, 800 and 1600 can be found here. Those images should be downloaded into your own computer if you want to see them at 100% size. Test images contain Canon files scaled (107,7%) into Nikon size to show comparable same size prints.

These images are converted from RAW files. Both cameras had always equal ISO settings and all camera corrections set off. Lenses were Nikon 85mm/1.4 and Canon 85mm/1.2 LII respectively. Aperture was set at f/8. My chosen converter was Adobe Lightroom because that´s the one I always use. Noise Reduction settings were Luminance 0, Color 25. To bring out any possible differencies I had  Shapening settings at 50 / 0,5 / 50. I´m fully aware that there are tests like DxO Labs (dxomark.com) which say these cameras should not have similar sensitivities. My findings do not support that claim. Same Lightroom tonality settings gave almost same highlight values only Canon being slightly more ”sensitive”, but these highlight corrected pairs show Nikon as slightly lighter at 1/4 tone. So these cameras seem to have a little different tonal responses but in reality sensitivity differencies are buried into differencies in lens aperture calibration.

I find comparison pairs very similar. Nikon has a slightly smaller and tighter noise grain and shows also a slightly better detail. This difference is shown on screen but it is almost disappears in a print. Still, this is a very impressive result from Nikon when you consider how much better camera D3x was at ISO 100.

Disclaimer:

I also test converted Canon files with DPP and Nikon files with NX2. DPP gave a cleaner and tighter grain structure for 5D MkII which I knew from my previous experience. Nothing new there. For D3x it was more interesting with NX2 but I did not see any practical difference between it´s two converters. So, because for me DPP is a subpar converter in every other respect than slightly better grain and sharpness I did not go into a useless trouble of trying to get DPP images into same tonality and sharpness as Lightroom images. Outside of test images I´m not going to sacrifice the beauty that I like in my real world Canon shots for a little tighter grain by using DPP. If anyone wants to see the difference between Lightroom look and DPP look, it can be seen in my comparison between 5D and 5D MkII.

D3x, PC-E Micro Nikkor 85mm 1:2.8D @ 1/50s, f/2.8, ISO1600. Crop 100%.

Stability of shooting at slower shutter speeds

Another IMO thing that had to be solved by doing a little test was the stability of hand held shooting. Namely, when I started  testing D3x it felt as a very stable platform and shooting with it felt positively non shaking. Now I have done some shooting with 5D MkII again, and when I raised it to shoot it also felt very stable but in a totally different way than D3x. The moment of exposure with the whole feel of it is so different. Actually, now I don´t know which I prefer more. But my little test showed that my first hinch was in the right direction. During a longer series of images that are scaled in to same print size I think I can manage more sharp images in the average with D3x. The slower the shutter speed the better for Nikon comparatively. Each of my test shots is a sum of ten consecutive shots. (Ten shot aligned as Photoshop layers to give as tight pattern as possible, mode screen). Shutter speeds are 1/15s and 1/2s, lenses 85mm like above.

This almost equal result shows again the difficulty of ”testing”. If someone says that one top camera is better in hand and has better ergonomics than the other, I say hardly, you just think so. These are very personal preferences that are dependent on your physiology and previous experience.

-p-