ESFotoClix Blog

Yesterday the newest member of the team arrived, a vintage Nikkor AF 35-70mm f/2.8. Truth be told, I picked it up more for nostalgic reasons than a driving need, inspired by Bryan Peterson’s numerous references to this lens in the two books I’ve read from him. I love how these lenses make even the newest DSLRs look classic. Here it is on the Nikon D80.

Nikon D80 & AF 35-70mm f/2.8

First impressions are good. I was expecting needing to march this lens over to Nikon service for an AF calibration, but quickie early tests at f/2.8 seem to indicate acceptable performance. We’ll see when I have more time to test it further.

70mm, f/2.8	70mm, f/2.8
35mm, f/2.8	70mm, f/2.8

Three out of the 4 sample shots were taken at 70mm and f/2.8, where this lens is reputed to struggle the most. The first two shots also were taken within very close focusing range, which in my experience tends to stress the ability to auto-focus accurately. Again, time will tell, but things are looking promising.

Ever wanted to go “commando” but still keep all your clothing on? Well, maybe you can still live out the thrill by getting yourself a classic, fully manual lens and foregoing all the fancy in-camera automation. If you prefer, call it waxing nostalgic or going retro, and you can do it in style with a nice light fast prime, like an old Nikon AI-S 35mm f/2.8 or 50mm f/1.4. As you consider this you may say, “manual focusing is one thing, but what about metering? How will I get along without it?”

Start by going out in a sunny afternoon and shoot lots of bright things using the Sunny 16 rule (at ISO 100 and f/16, shutter speed = 1/100 or 1/125). Twist that ring to try different apertures and adjust ISO or shutter speed to match. Then aim the camera at something in shadows, stop down by two full stops and see what you get.

Go ahead, check the histogram as you do all this. You may have gone “commando,” but you’re not exactly streaking. You still have some technology to lean on. So let yourself “chimp” around until you get a histogram you like. Then review the exposure you use and remember it.

When you’re feeling brave, head indoors and try different exposure settings there. If you have a fast manual lens, you should stop up to f/4 or f/5.6 and start there. If there isn’t enough light to make the exposure work, you may have to ramp up ISO or learn how to use your flash in manual mode. The latter exercise is also very useful for learning how flash inter-plays with exposure.

It may be tough to match a meter’s speed and consistency (Matrix metering excluded, perhaps), but learning to anticipate in rough terms what a meter is going to tell you, or what it should tell you, will take you a long way in becoming more confident in how to get well-exposed images. Do this, and the next time you’re staring at a Sunny 16 scene and your meter is telling you that at ISO 100 and f/8 your shutter speed should be 1/250 sec, you’ll be ready to say, “I don’t think so.”

For those of you who want to give this a try, check out Flickr’s No metering lenses on Nikon DSLRs group.

After making some disparaging remarks about Active D-Lighting (ADL), the data caused me to reconsider. Primarily, I now see I had the wrong expectations.

How I thought ADL worked: I thought ADL would auto-magically compensate for Matrix metering’s (MM) tendency to over-expose. Indeed, in some test cases I saw how ADL applies negative compensation, but not enough to make a difference consistently.

How ADL seems to do best: If you apply negative compensation to MM or otherwise meter to avoid clipped highlights, ADL helps avoid under-exposed shadows through adjustment of the tone curve (or however it does it), effectively pushing out shadow detail and producing a balanced shot.

To elaborate, I assumed that ADL would adjust MM’s tendency to over-expose, much in the same way I sometimes purposefully expose to the right by +0.3 to +0.7EV from what the Spot meter indicates as the centered exposure, then back-off the exposure in ViewNX and apply shadow protection to recover shadow detail. Why I thought ADL would do something similar I can’t really explain, but to move on and learn something new let’s compare some samples of my approach vs. ADL and see which does better. Along the way, we will examine the effect each approach has on noise, and to illustrate the effects of each of the approaches, we will use ISO800.

The first capture uses Matrix metering with ADL=OFF. The bright back-lighting against our dark subject produces the typical Matrix metering clipping in the highlights.

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For the next capture we set ADL to Normal. ADL tames down the highlights a bit, but not enough, and pushes out shadow detail in the vase. Start paying attention at the 100% crop on the right and look at whether noise is becoming more evident there.

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For the next two exposures, we use -0.7EV and -1.0EV respectivealy. Now the highlights are under control, but what is happening in the noise department?

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To arrive at this final image we use the first exposure, thankfully captured in RAW, and we apply -0.7EV adjustment in ViewNX and shadow protection = 30. (For another example of this technique, see When Over-exposure happens). Compare the resulting image to the previous 4 samples.

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Which adjusted exposure achieves the best noise performance should be self-evident. Which of these achieves a better balance in the overall exposure is probably largely a matter of preference. My perspective is that the last image balances highlights, middle tones and shadows best. I wish ADL or some other algorithm performed similar simple adjustments on the fly in-camera (hint, hint, Nikon).