carstenw wrote:
My D800 arrived today, and much to my amazement, after careful diopter tuning, I find myself able to focus my Zeiss ZF.2 50/1.4 with some care, and to nail it, at various apertures.
With some more practice, I have been able to miss focus once in a while. Careful checking is the order of the day
carstenw wrote:
With some more practice, I have been able to miss focus once in a while. Careful checking is the order of the day
I'm curious what the situation with wider lenses and manual focus is if the 50 is giving occasional focus issues. Have you tried to manual focus say a 24, 28 or 35mm lens hand held, no LV?
carstenw wrote:
Not yet. In fact, I have only tried the ZF50P so far. I love that lens in this camera already. It will be hard to take off.
But this weekend I will head out and try some more tests, including the ZF21.
I'm looking forward to hearing you're experience. Great to hear about the overall image quality. Something about the color quality I have seen in a number of D800 examples have reminded me of the Sony a900 color a bit.
I am not sure it is quite as natural, colour-wise, but there is a lot in those files. With a good profile, this could get quite interesting.
It was very sunny today, and a bit hazy. Daylight WB gave almost grey foliage, but overcast WB was too intensely green, so I used somewhere in between. It looks like I will need a better workflow for choosing WB, if I want to get appealing, natural colours.
Carstenw, Look forward to see more of your finding with D800. I echo your feeling about Push/pull ability of the file. I also feel the color is more fidelity. I think that may have something to do with DR since individual channel are no longer clipped easily as before. To me the bigger surprise is highlight recover which my D700 is lacking.
But my keeper rate is still very low. P50 has formally join the group of very difficult manual focus lens for D800E
Ah, forgot about this thread, and started posting photos in the normal Zeiss/Leica R Lenses threads.
I do have something to report now, however. I own the Gitzo GT1542T and GT3542XLS, and I wanted to see when I can use the 1542 and when I need to grab the 3542, so I set up my 70-200/2.8VRII and TC14E-II on both tripods, set to 280mm, focused on a building across the street, and starting shooting. I focused manually by live view, and shot without VR. I shot first with no shutter delay, and then with a 3s shutter delay. The results are somewhat logical, but still surprising.
With no shutter delay, both tripods deliver slightly soft shots. The 1542 shots are noticeably softer. So far, so good, but a bit disappointing for the 3542.
With a 3s shutter delay, both tripods were sharp, and indistinguishable from each other! Great, but again, not so great for the 3542.
I guess I will use my 1542 most of the time, and use good technique always. I am sure the 3542 will beat out the 1542 when there is a bit of wind and so on, but since I often shoot urbex stuff indoors, I can actually stop carrying my heavy tripod for that, which is good news.
The ballheads are Burzynski Ball Head II for the 3542, and the Markins Q3T for the 1542. The centre post was down for the 1542. I need to test with the post up as well.
I am going to repeat the whole thing at different shutter speeds, and stopping down a bit more (this was at f/4, which is not as sharp as I would have liked), but I don't expect any changes.
Has anyone else done D800+tripod tests, or D800+handheld at various shutter speeds tests?
