Here are some shots I took last Sunday morning with the D800. No post processing, I did convert them from Raw to Tiff in Capture NX2, then in CS5 converted to sRGB, cropped and saved as jpg. The Nikon 16-35mm f4 G lens was used with a polarizer. I did some playing around at different ISO's, fstops, etc just to see how the images worked.
#1 - ISO 50 / f22 / 1/5 sec
#2 - Crop of #1
#3 - ISO 800 / f13 / 1/250th sec
#4 - Crop of #3
I am very very impressed with what I have seen so far. In the little bit of processing of these that I started, for my own work I would use UnSharp Mask at about or slightly less than when I used my D700 to get the image "sharp". I also was impressed with how much better the D800 is than the D700. And I loved my D700, but the D800 from what I have seen, beats it in every way.
JimFox wrote:
That is amazing detail that you got of the Venetian! Are these handheld? What lens did you use?
Jim
Handheld? haha, I'm having a hard enough time getting pixel-sharp D800 photos with a tripod Those are long'ish exposures, taken with the 14-24mm, tripod, and 3-second exposure delay (MLUP-equivalent).
snapsy wrote:
Handheld? haha, I'm having a hard enough time getting pixel-sharp D800 photos with a tripod These are long'ish exposures, taken with the 14-24mm, tripod, and 3-second exposure delay (MLUP-equivalent).
Ha ha... okay... That reminds me, in my shots, there is no MLUP, no exposure delays, because I shoot fast sequences of 5 to 8 shots as waves come in. Now, I will have to say, that for as slow as it sounds to say 4 frames per second... the first time I fired it off at a faster shutter speed... those 4 fps, seemed very very fast... For sure, it's enough for what I shoot, which a majority of is at the beach.
The f13 crop looks much sharper to me. I think maybe some diffraction issues causing softness in the smaller aperture shots. Did you do any more at wider apertures?
LMT1972 wrote:
The f13 crop looks much sharper to me. I think maybe some diffraction issues causing softness in the smaller aperture shots. Did you do any more at wider apertures?
Cheers
Leigh
Hey Leigh,
Yeah, the f13 does look sharper. Though both seem to sharpen about the same with UnSharp. I definitely want to do a test where I run each of my lenses through each of their stops, to see where diffraction might be an issue.
Now some of our landscape buddies are using Focus Stacking now... so they are shooting at f8, and adjust the focus from near to far taking up to a dozen shots that they then focus stack... Seems to work great, unless you are talking about a moving scene like this. It's too dynamic I think to do that. Now if I was in Yosemite, doing a more straight forward landscape, or perhaps Death Valley, that could work... But for shooting scenes like this, getting acceptable DoF is more important I think, unless the diffraction truly ruins the sharpness...
So yeah, I will get out in the next few days and shoot a series of shots and see how the sharpness changes in relationship to the focus and diffraction...
With the resolution of the D800, lens diffraction is going to become apparent at larger apertures when pixel peeping at 100%. I am willing to bet that any aperture smaller than f8 or maybe f11 is going to be where diffraction blur becomes noticeable when pixel peeping.
The question becomes: at what aperture does diffraction blur become enough of an issue to cause one to be willing to accept less DoF to limit it?
Then again, the reason we see the diffraction blur sooner when pixel peeping is the same reason that what we consider enough DoF, or what is considered acceptably sharp, changes.
I have read on digilyod and the lens rentals blog that f/8 is the max aperture to use before diffraction kicks in....most lenses peak at f/5.6 then slowly decline from there. Of course we all want sharp corners but in landscapes where your focusing on a seemingly flat field in the distance f/8 should be ok?
Im also starting to think my 24-70 isn't wide enough =\
Thank you very much for sharing the D800 shots with 16-35 F/4 lens.
Do you have corner crop for the above shots? I'm switching from Canon and am considering the 16-35 F/4 lens. But the sample shots on DPReviews showed very bad extreme corners. (like this one on left extreme corner). I hope they just used a bad copy.
Thanks for posting these, Jim! I'm very tempted by this camera and your pics are swaying me towards it further (as much as I wouldn't look forward to dumping my existing gear). The 16-35 f/4 interests me as well so getting an idea of its corner performance would be nice. Of course, as bad as the dpreview shot looked (in the corners anyway), my Canon 17-40 is worse on my 5DII.
Hey Henry and Guy, I will do some corner crops later tonight. I will get out also and shoot the lens through it's paces to get a better idea on the diffraction issue as the aperture gets closed down. But one thing I will say is I applied UnSharp to one of the images taken at f22, and it sharpened very easily. So while diffraction vs DOF is a good thing for all of us to get our heads wrapped around, I am very encouraged, that in the end if I shoot at f22 to get the DOF I need in a shot, that whatever softness diffraction would cause, I can easily sharpen it away...
Those are long'ish exposures, taken with the 14-24mm, tripod, and 3-second exposure delay (MLUP-equivalent).