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Nikkor 24mm f/1.4G Prime Lens

Arcade Addiction - 24mm 1.4G — Arcade Addiction - Nikon D810 + 24mm f/1.4G Nikkor

Introduction

The Nikon 24mm f/1.4G ED lens was announced in February of 2010. It came out a few years following the release of the D3 and D700; Nikon’s first full frame digital bodies. It was a huge deal to see an ultra fast aperture lens with such a wide focal length. Let me tell you that in 2010, this Nikon 24mm f/1.4 lens was considered the best 24mm full frame lens money could buy, and it was priced accordingly at around £2K! (I paid about half of that in 2015 for a nice new copy). Admittedly a while ago now, however this is a lens that I still use and appreciate to this day across several different disciplines including; portraiture (obviously), landscape and astrophotography. Up until the time of buying this lens I was shooting with a bag of primes (I still do this for portraiture and other photography genres). My then 24mm lens of choice was the 24mm f/2.8D. I know many people dislike it, but they have to judge it for what it is. An old lens design. I still have it in the bag, because it produces a look, and has excellent sunstars and great flaring. It has rough bokeh and the deep corners are not up to modern standards wide open, however centrally it is fantastic straight from f/2.8 and it always gave me a strong 3D impression when shooting with it, in fact I have made some memorable pictures with it in the past and I’ll show one below. That said, I was and am all about aperture, and I just could not resist the lure of this magnificent Nikkor - the 24mm f/1.4G. Click any image on a desktop to see a larger view. On mobile, simply pinch zoom.

24mm 2.8D prime — Boy in Restaurant - Nikon D800 + 24mm 2.8D

As you can see here, the 24/2.8D is and was plenty sharp centrally, even on a D800 with it’s juicy 36 megapixel sensor. There is simply no reason I would want to see more detail in a portrait on a face. I’ve shot with that lens for many years and knew my way around it in terms of how to get the best out of it. (Hint, focusing at infinity or 1/3 in isn’t necessarily the best advice for landscapes on high resolution sensors). This said, the two extra stops of aperture in the G lens swayed me as I was also becoming heavily into astrophotography. Armed with my D810 at the time, the 24/1.4G was added to my bag and is still in use today.

Cinematic

Personally, I love to capture people and children in a cinematic style. I am a huge cinefile and this influence strongly affects how I shoot weddings also. I’ve always loved using fast aperture lenses because it allows me to most closely match this style. It also gives me the largest advantage in low light, and it gives me options outdoors in bright sunlight to capture pictures in any conditions that look the part and that people will pay for. I learned to shoot using off camera flash to begin with and I am not averse to using it; however I don’t pretend to use it for anything other than very posed studio type work. To capture people that aren’t models in their absolute best light (literally), the most obvious clue of my presence would be a flash going off repeatedly. People act different around a camera and I want to discourage that. I want to blend in. I use aperture to do this. I look for light where possible; for subject, shape and form. If I shoot a wedding, I wait in areas of good light. Then it simply becomes a matter of timing. I do not run about chasing ‘moments,’ nor do I direct them in any sense either, for that style of shooting.

Don’t for a second mistake a lens like this to be about obliterating the backgrounds in photographs. At 24mm, we want context, and gentle separation, and the lens isn’t able to completely dissolve backgrounds unless we are ultra close anyway. Context is so important to a successful picture (depending on the closeness to the subject of course), and the more experienced shooter comes to learn that eventually, once they get over their depth of field obsession (okay some never do). Even considering the background out of focus elements (bokeh), I am placing my subject in a suitable place around the blur. Just look at any cinema. Most of the time there is separation of the subject to the background. This is done by light, the focal plane depth and, the background itself and it’s own contrast. Most of the time in films the director includes the subtle background. Otherwise you simply have subjects’ detached from their surroundings; which rarely tells a good story. The major plus points of this particular lens; are that it keeps contrast a little lower than modern lenses at it’s largest apertures, which better matches the rendering I like from cinema. It still has access to greater contrast, on stopping down, e.g. at apertures such as f/2 and beyond. It is the best of both worlds in this regard. It becomes a dual personality lens in a very real sense.

Imaging Characteristics and Lens Capabilities

First a note on build quality. This lens is really well built. It is mostly very high quality polycarbonate with a metal mount, full sealing and a rubber gasket to seal onto the camera. It’s never skipped a beat in the around ten years I have owned it. I will admit I do baby lenses, so mine still looks as new, however it has been used in adverse conditions consistently - ie by the sea and near beaches. I have had zero problems with it, it still works as the day I bought it. Speaking about the nitty-gritty…The 24mm f/1.4G has fairly controlled spherical aberration for the standard of it’s time, however it is obviously not as well corrected as modern lenses are in that regard. It does produce a bit of glow wide open in certain light, but not much, and I like how it looks. Most of the time, it adds to the subject, and I can simply close the aperture down if I want the effect to dissipate which it does quickly when doing so. The 24 has high level’s of coma and chromatic aberration by modern standards. At the time, this was about the best it got on 35mm format, however things have changed and there are several mirrorless lenses that beat this for astrophotography specifically. The higher coma, is actually advantageous for bokeh qualities, so it certainly pays dividends for portrait work. The lens has a touch of barrel distortion. Not noticeable to the human eye I find unless we put a lot of straight lines into an image right into the top and bottom of the frame. Vignette is quite high, (modern designs don’t improve this though, and are actually worse stopped down than this lens), whereas CA is well controlled. Autofocus is provided by an on board motor, of which mine seems to still work like the day I bought the lens. The lens is sharp at f/1.4, sharp enough for how I like my portraits. I am always after very specific looks with lenses and I dislike the ultra sharp digital look. Take that as the major caveat for where I am coming from when I suggest lenses such as these. I know many share my thoughts. I don’t necessarily put it down to magic, however I use what works for me and you should too. This lens has been invaluable for me for over a decade now because of this. I use it for portraiture, weddings, landscape (landscape less now, as I tend to prefer using the 24-70/2.8S and my Z8). I also use it for astrophotography too. You might wonder why, when I have explained it has quite high levels of coma and astigmatism wide open. Well, this rarely matters much for aurora work, which is done without trackers. With trackers, I just stop the lens down a bit and it cleans up. Ideally I would like a better performance wide open in a 24 for astro and it’s certainly possible; however that would probably affect how it worked for portraiture and the rest of it. In life, we often cannot have everything. I also use the 24 end of a 14-24/2.8S on a Z8 on a tracker if I don’t bring this lens with me. Short story, there are better options for astro only shooting now in 2024 than this lens, however if it’s portraiture, this lens has some undeniable beauty to impart on a scene. The other big thing about this lens is it’s dual personality nature. Wide open some would call it on the softer side, yet stopped down it achieves very good resolution, not quite reaching the absolute best of today however, those lenses can’t do what this lens does between f/1.4-3.5 either.

Here are some genres that I use this lens for:

Landscape

When I bought this lens, it was pretty close to top of it’s game for landscape. Things have moved on even since, however there becomes a point of diminishing returns. Computer aided optical design has pushed what is possible in recent years, however it doesn’t mean that this lens is obsolete if you seek it’s characteristics and look. Stopped down, this is a perfectly capable lens. Not all lenses are the same at f/8 either; this really is a fallacy because things like CA, especially lateral, do not often improve when stopping down a lens. This lens holds a very solid perfomance from f/4.5-f11, or rather, at ‘landscape’ apertures. It’s rugged build and sealing, also mean with a little care, it just keeps on plugging away as mine has done. (I do recommend wiping any salt spray off as good practice however).

Intimate Details

Lit Leaf - 24mm f/1.4G Nikkor — Lit Leaf - D810 + 24mm f/1.4G Nikkor

At close distances, it is clear as day to see the undeniable attributes this lens can bring to an image. I am very close to this leaf here, and have very little depth of field to play with, even at 24mm. It’s a strange place to be in some ways. The background takes on a soft gaussian blur effect naturally; however it is still very important to compose with the background, rather than against it. Place scene elements so they make compositional sense within the bokeh background. Don’t be hap-hazzardly throwing your aperture about the place now.

Night and Astrophotography

For this type of night picture, I am stopped down - to f/16 here to get a nice depth of field and sunstars. The lens like any, will be diffraction affected at this aperture but I wanted to get the sunstar effect, so that took priority here. This lens works well in these conditions - the lens hood offers protection from some of the elements, as does the sealing. Just wipe it down after when near salt spray. For astrophotography, it works, however it has plenty of coma / astigmatism (winged stars) in the corners wide open. It’s just an older design in that regard and you will expect to see this when shooting with it for astrophotography. Unless of course you do a panorama. If using it this way, the edge frames are often cropped off when stitching; this means we see better performance. This shot below is taken at blue hour on the North of Scotland, with some faint Aurora appearing on the horizon.

Astrophotography Panorama with the 24mm f/1.4G

Portraiture

24mm 1.4G Nikon - The Arcade Kid — The Arcade Kid - Nikon D810 + 24mm f/1.4G Nikkor

Here is another arcade shot - yeah we like arcades here a lot! Notice the very real difference between this and the 24mm 2.8D picture I showed earlier in this article? The 1.4G produces a very soft, gaussian / painterly bokeh behind a subject at close to medium distances in the frame, which, at these wide apertures it works it’s magic. The 2.8D produces a much more subtle, and rougher background. I’m going to be controversial and say I still do not dislike the 2.8. It’s just different. Options are good. I happen to think that the D shot earlier wouldn’t be made any better by using the 1.4G.

So there you have it. I am a serious astrophotographer - landscape - portrait - wedding shooter all rolled into one and this still seems to work for me. Bear in mind for astro work in isolation there are better options, also consider that I have access to a 14-24/2.8S on my Z8. I keep the 1.4 for the aperture boost on my D800/D810 for aurora etc. For portraiture, weddings, people; there is this lens, which still do this day produces a look which is undeniable in it’s beauty. This at the end of the day is what I am all about. Not the spec sheets, the calculated MTF graphs, not the jargon, but the image rendering characteristics that I can plainly see with my own eyes. And boy do I see it with this one.

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Steve

Using the Nikon D200 Alongside Modern Cameras

Introduction

I’ve continued to use the venerable Nikon D200 camera alongside the latest technology in 2024 and will continue to use it along side other great cameras of yesteryear. I have been using this camera for a few years now, following recommendation from a friend. I wanted to share some pictures from the last few years that inspire me to continue using this CCD colour king. If you read the very first blog post I made on this camera, you will know I value this classic body for it’s CCD sensor alongside it’s strict Colour Filter Array (CFA) which follows strict colour discrimination which produces naturally vibrant and colourful images out of the box, without oversaturating individual colours and hues. This allows for an overall very organic, ‘filmic’ looking output with sublime skin tones that I enjoy to this day. In fact, I’d go as far to say that with the right conditions and lens, I sometimes prefer the initial output from the Nikon D200 to other cameras, and contrary to some opinion, find it difficult to get a D200 ‘look’ from other cameras. Knowing how to use the D200 to get the best out of it is another matter, so we will explore that here along with some other tips and tricks. This will also be a bit of a ramble. Most people do not perceive, or seem to care much about colour in digital photography. As long as the sky is blue and the grass is green (no matter what shade or hue of blue and green that is), most people simply don't care one bit. Nobody cares, because if the camera they grab to shoot with has the sky coming out blue, with the grass remaining green, and caucasian people are not Alien-green, and skin colours somewhat resemble close to real life, they are happy. I think that colour is important in photography and I have noticed a couple of things about cameras that do colour well. Read the first article I wrote about the Nikon D200 here.

Nikon D200 with 18-55 Zoom — The Quiraing in dappled light, Nikon D200 and 18-55 Zoom. A one shot image with careful exposure.

The D200 CCD Sensor

The 10 Megapixel CCD sensor found within the D200 has some interesting characteristics. 10 MP is considered very low by today’s standards - however for most work I have to ask why people think like this. Nine times out of ten, I’d imagine most people buy the marketing koolaid. “You aren’t a man if you don’t shoot 45 megapixels!” However, consider that most do not print now, and most simply display images on tiny phone screens, so I ask again, why do we really need 45-60MP bodies? I say this as a user of such bodies. I have no choice in the matter if I want a modern, high dynamic range camera with all the bells and whistles that provides. I would say 36MP is the limit I would ever require, but hey, what do I know. The D200 sensor is a CCD technology, mostly phased out for the cheaper CMOS design found in most digital cameras these days, which offers better high ISO capability (and it does). The D200 sensor falls apart at high ISO, and I simply wouldn’t use it for such. You should be aware, the D200 sensor has quite a thick anti-aliasing filter. Because of this, it really benefits from using nice and sharp lenses, though as I will show, combined with some lens attributes / optical imperfections, one can use this to their own advantage to create a very specific look to the resulting pictures.

Nikon D200 Colour — D200 with 85/1.4 Sigma Art. Shot in JPG. (A friend’s shot)

The above picture of my friend’s son demonstrates beautifully what I am speaking about when it comes to colour reproduction and skin tones. This is an impromptu picture which was shot in JPG image format, (it probably needs a little cropped off the bottom). Here we can see beautiful colour reproduction out of the box: so many modern cameras fail in this regard and I guess I didn’t notice how bad they do as I tend to shoot RAW nearly all the time for professional work. This shot could easily be further processed and dodged and burned for even more dramatic effect of this little moment captured. And how nice is this portrait too? It is so rich, doesn’t feel digital at all, and has beautiful skin tone reproduction. The subtle changes of red - orange hues in the skin tones are picked up beautifully here. The subtle red hue of the top is picked up beautifully. Some cameras struggle with basic colour reproduction such as this; red tones are pushed to orange, golden colours, skewed to yellows to name a few. Some of my modern CMOS camera’s really have issue with red colours especially in lowered light. My D810 changes red neon signs to orange every time. Even although the high ISO ability of the D200 is much poorer, I found it doesn’t do this sort of colour skewing that my eyes have become accustomed to seeing. As mentioned, this is a straight out of camera shot too! Hold that thought.

Colour Filter Array

In digital imaging, a colour filter array (CFA), is a mosaic of tiny colour filters placed over the pixel sensors of an image sensor to capture colour information. Without such a filter in the imaging chain, the sensor is not able to ‘see’ the differing wavelengths of light, and thus would not be able to produce an eventual colour image. The illustration shows a Bayer colour filter array typical in many digital camera sensor designs. Each two-by-two submosaic contains 2 green, 1 blue, and 1 red filter, each filter covering one pixel sensor. (You can see therefore, that natively some sensors capture more green wavelengths of light easier - this sometimes presents itself as a problem when processing deep sky images - there’s more green to deal with). The colour filters filter the light by wavelength range, such that the separate filtered intensities include information about the colour of light. For example, the Bayer filter gives information about the intensity of light in red, green, and blue (RGB) wavelength regions. The raw image data captured by the image sensor is then converted to a full-colour image (with intensities of all three primary colours represented at each pixel) by a demosaicing algorithm which is tailored for each type of colour filter. The old CFA's were clearly built to prioritize colour fidelity at base ISO, whereas, at least in the initial generation of high megapixel sensors, they seem to have been weakened to let more light pass, to allow those sensors to achieve better high iso capability. This I feel may have affected their native colour output, compared to bodies like the D200, D60, D40, which had strict CFAs and CCD sensors which borrowed the kodak colour recipe from the film days. Modern CMOS image sensors tend to have smaller pixels (to increase resolution and reduce optics weight, volume and cost) and thus. less light gathering capability per pixel. A "weaker" CFA is used to partially compensate this. Do the same with a CCD and you will also get "weak colors." So the point is, the CFA is extremely crucial here in the imaging chain. There are plenty of CCD sensors that produce subjectively bad colour. This is where people go wrong with this CCD thing. It’s the CFA that has probably the largest say in the colour discrimination from the sensor and it just so happens to be that CFA’s a the advent of digital technology were more strict then some found in more modern tech. BSI CMOS has basically erased the light gathering advantage CCD sensors enjoyed years ago when FSI CMOS sensor circuitry still blocked part of the pixel. Although the sensor itself is monochromatic, the colour depends on more than just the CFA. There's an interpolation step required to convert the 4 measured RGBG pixels into native colour after which a 3x3 color correction matrix produces sRGB.

A weak CFA over CCD can and will indeed suffer the same color problems as a weak CFA over CMOS.

Sensor Colour Response - SMI

From DXOMark - “The sensitivity metamerism index (SMI) is defined in the ISO standard 17321 and describes the ability of a camera to reproduce accurate colors. Digital processing permits changing color rendering at will, but whether the camera can or cannot exactly and accurately reproduce the scene colors is intrinsic to the sensor response and independent of the raw converter.

The underlying physics is that a sensor can distinguish exactly the same colors as the average human eye, if and only if the spectral responses of the sensor can be obtained by a linear combination of the eye cone responses. These conditions are called Luther-Ives conditions, and in practice, these never occur. There are objects that a sensor sees as having certain colors, while the eye sees the same objects differently, and the reverse is also true.

SMI is an index quantifying this property, and is represented by a number lower than 100 (negative values are possible). A value equal to 100 is perfect color accuracy, and is only attained when Luther-Ives conditions hold (which, as previously stated, never happens in practice). A value of 50 is the difference in color between a daylight illuminant and an illuminant generated by fluorescent tubes, which is considered a moderate error.”

NB: SMI depends more on CFA selectivity and AA strength than other sensor parameters, and since newer cameras with more pixels can do with weaker AAs, they can be a little less precise at handling colour in this regard.

Nikon D200 SMI Colour Response in Daylight. Courtesy of DXOMark.

Sensitivity metamerism index, or SMI, is essentially a measure of how well a specific camera under test lighting can reproduce the colour checker colour set. To give you an idea, under testing many phones sit around 40-50 in their SMI score out of 100, which is pretty low. Larger sensor cameras, aka DSLR’s and mirrorless designs tend to be much better, They start around 75 and go up. Scores in the 80s tend to be very good indicators of ‘good’ colour reproduction. Cameras valued for good color typically have high SMI values, while those known for poor color usually have low numbers. But not always. Anecdotal evidence suggests that some photographers feel that their older cameras deliver better colour than their newer ones (of course, a subjective quality regarding colour). In our colour images, it can be valuable to have a camera that is able to accurately pick up all the subtle tones and hues of individual colours, without oversaturating any of them like some other cameras do (new and old, I might add). This would be like someone noticing their camera did not saturate individual colours well in a scene, and another remarking that they could just turn up the saturation in post processing. However, in doing so, colours over-saturate before the more subtle colours saturate properly. That said, I mostly just go by look though in these matters. This stands to reason, because when I first picked up the D200 to shoot with it I immediately noticed what my buddy was saying. This is despite having a lot of cameras under my belt and using the latest cameras for landscape photography, astrophotography and other genres.

Let’s have a look at the DXOMark data on colour for the D200 camera. What we are looking at here is the daylight response to colour reproduction (CIE-D50) Click to see a larger view, or pinch zoom if on a mobile over the data. The D200 scores very highly, at 84 in this metric. Compare that to another body, not known for it’s colour reproduction quality - the D600. Note that it is scoring notably lower from the testing procedure at 77. Actually, the two Nikon cameras that top DXO's list for highest color SMI are the D40 and D60 which both scored 85 and 84 respectively for CIE-D50 and CIE-A. The only downside is they are very old bodies now and come with a worse autofocus system, and less bells and whistles than the D200 provides. They are definitely not built like the D200 either.

Nikon D600 SMI Colour Response in Daylight. Courtesy of DXOmark.

See here to find the full details on the ISO International Standard for Camera Colour ISO 17321-1. Feel free to look up SMI figures for colour for other cameras. Generally, the trend is, the lower that number, the worse it’s out of the box colour tends to be for the particular body under investigation. Curiously though, things have gotten interesting recently. At the advent of modern high megapixel cameras such as the D800, D810 and D850, there was a slight drop in colour performance if we look at this metric. For example the D800 took a notable hit at 78 on the SMI scale. The D850 scored a slightly better 79. The Z7 mirrorless reached 82, and now the Z8 I own got an 83! Only one point less than my beloved D200. However, as I wanted to describe, it is important to not just attribute colour performance to one number. The Z8 colour is very different to the D200 in the way it’s colours present. Different is the best adjective here. Neither is better, it really becomes a personal preference. This is indeed another point that I would make. I have realised that I am someone that loves to shoot different cameras, also for the experience in itself. To me, every sensor ‘draws’ differently. So even cameras that I have stated have ‘poorer’ colour than the D200, such as the D800, I love to use because I still like their output, for other reasons. It becomes a tool to task, or what I want to create type of thing. With regards to the D200, it does feel very film like in it’s reproduction. The colours feel older school, the thick AA filter mutes some detail too, the skin tones are gorgeous. The effect is, the D200 really feels like a digital-film camera hybrid to me in comparison to the modern technology. It is noted that the D200 can individually pickup and discriminate all the subtle hue changes and saturations of individual colours in an image. In trying to emulate what the D200 does natively with other cameras, tends to make particular colours go ‘nuclear’ with oversaturation, whilst trying to properly saturate the weaker colours in the image. I have noticed this over and over.

There are some problems with SMI, and using it in isolation:

As a statistical measure, it only gives us an average and doesn’t tell us about the distribution of errors.
If they only use the ColorChecker 18 color chart, then this is an amazingly poor sample. Really, there should be a better methodology using far more colors. What I find surprising is that manufacturers can’t even get these 18 colors right.
There could be a potential problem of them ‘gaming the system’ where manufacturers only work on getting those 18 colors right, ignoring the others, giving a deceivingly high SMI number. This is a big problem with artificial illuminants such as fluorescent and LED lamps, which are often designed to delver a high Color Rendering Index even though they still have poor spectra — and the CRI test is even worse than SMI, using only 8 sample colors. Lamp manufacturers lately rejected the use of the full ColorChecker chart, which is rather distressing.
I’m not to sure how good CIELab is as a color distance metric, although it is far better than Euclidian RGB distance.
This does not take ease of re-touchability of colors into account, which is related to color depth. High color depth does not mean that the colors are correct, but it does make them more correctable in post processing.

Looking at this in a bit more detail with a test scene, it all looks similar until we take a closer look. It proves the point that this isn’t really about CCD vs CMOS. It is more about, which camera has the stricter CFA with that sensor. Look at the D200 colours, then for example the D300 example below it. Green crayon, third from the left, look at the wrapper. It’s barely saturated compared to the D200 image. Same with the purple crayon wrapper near the centre. The D200 shows the subtle saturation of the hue, whereas the D200 shows a very washed out tone in comparison. This is true of many of the other colours shown here. Note that only the D200 has a CCD sensor here. The Canon 5D does well in this comparison because it appears to have a much stricter CFA than the D2XS or the D300, despite having a CMOS sensor.

Canon 5D - CMOS with strict CFA, D2XS, CMOS weak CFA, D200 CCD, strong CFA, D300, CMOS, weak CFA. Image used with permission courtesy of Imaging Resource.

In the above scene, there is a subtle but noticeable colour difference; a ‘when you see it’ type of thing. The M240 image is on the left side. The Leica M9 CCD sensor with strict CFA is on the right. Here the author can't match the M9's rich rendering of the purple vine because the green foliage of the M240 image would go nuclear if he did. Yet we can see the strong saturation applied to bring the M240 image closer to the M9 has already unnaturally overcooked the weaker colours in the M240 walkway, yet it still doesn’t match it. Only the M9 seems to preserve the full dynamic colour range of the scene. If you are looking at these images on a cheap monitor that doesn’t show at least 100% RGB colour, you won’t see the subtle differences I am showing here. Also note that the M9 image shows more shadow detail in the gate than the image from the M240, despite still being a punchier, more contrasty image. You might look at this and think oh I see it but it’s subtle. However I see it across other colours too. Many cameras skew reds to orange, and golds to yellows, as well as undersaturating them, which is even worse.

Have a look at this image from dpreview.com : https://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/53185762?image=0

Here we can see four CMOS cameras. The D700 by far pulls out the gold tones the best. The D800 really skews this hue to yellow. The D700 has a much stricter CFA than the D800 does.

How To Get the Best from the D200

To get the best from the D200, and considering that it is an older body and sensor in terms of digital tech, we need to understand the nature of light is noisy. The inherent nature of light is such that in anything but the brightest sunlight, light comes bundled along with ample amounts of noise. Most of that noise is located within the shadow regions of course, but not all of it resides there, depending on the conditions. We don’t see any of this however, as our visual system is not evolved to require to see or care about this, however it is the reality. (Consider that the noise present along with light is different from shot noise, which is the noise generated in capturing and processing the signal within the sensor and associated tech, essentially the noise generated from the electronics within the camera). Why am I labouring so much on the basic physics of light here? Because it is crucial to understand this, and to realise that the best way to deal with the D200, or any camera is to properly expose to the right. Ensure that everything is pushed as far to the right wall of the histogram before overexposure occurs, for the best overall fidelity. (This is tricky in some ways, and sometimes you might have to bracket exposures). In addition, the second layer of complexity comes about when we realise that the histogram on the back of the camera is built from a jpg preview - meaning it is a rough guess of the actual RAW data at best. It is however, all we have got, and with experience, it is a useful tool. Just know that sometimes it will say you have clipped, when you have not. (So never delete a shot because of this, at the scene). The D200 files cannot be pulled as easily as files from class leading full frame image quality camera’s such as the D850, Z7ii, Z8. Also, since the D200 is a smaller sensor camera than the full frame cameras I use alongside it; I also have less latitude in terms of dynamic range, over 3.5 stops less at base ISO:

7.79 Stops of Dynamic Range for the D200 vs 11.32 for the Z8, another camera I also use (at base ISO).

Because of the reduced malleability of the RAW files coming from the D200 camera, and it’s lowered dynamic range as shown above - it is important to maximise each and every exposure. I do this by using good shot discipline. I suggest clicking the link to learn more, however one should understand that using base ISO is absolutely crucial to this concept.

Consider Processing in NX Studio

NB: Note that I use Lightroom most of the time for Raw conversion and processing, along with Photoshop. Despite this, Nikon’s free to download NX Studio software really allows the D200 to sing, and display colour the way Nikon intended it. It is important to note that adobe won’t be doing this accurately with their simulated picture controls. NX Studio really does create some magic with the D200 and some other cameras. Whilst it is much less polished than Lightroom, I still often start conversions here, and export them to Lightroom as a Tiff to maintain accurate colour as Nikon intended when I really want critical colours. As much of a hassle as that may sound, for special pictures it is best to take time with them to get them just right. Nikon’s NX Studio is as I said, a little clunky, however you will find it will match the reproduction you are seeing on the monitor on your camera better than adobe or any other software will display. Have you ever noticed that Lightroom’s rendition of your image looks miles away from the back of the camera? This is why (it would also occur if you had different picture controls on camera vs the software, of course). I highly recommend using NX Studio, especially for a colour king such as the D200. So often in lightroom I find things like the vibrant red colours appear as orangey hues in LR, however in the Nikon software they are spot on. Easy solution…open those Raw files in NX, give them a very basic minimal process, and export them as a TIF and continue in Lightroom / Photoshop. Below is a very quick and dirty test. I’ve shot at ISO 400 (not an ideal test but demonstrates my point here fine - this is the highest I would ever push this sensor - I have plenty of cameras that do high ISO well) and shown that the LR conversion (right) skews all the red and orange hues to pinks which are not accurate to my desktop editing PC lighting). Notice also, that on the right side, (LR conversion) much less detail is seen in the glass reflection than on the NX conversion on the left side. There are other differences other than just colour when we use different software to process - notice the severe blooming around the ram sticks on the LR conversion, not present on the NX picture? This lens will do this, but not to the amount that the LR edit suggests. I will add more here in daylight at base ISO when I get the chance, however it is important to stress that software plays a part in this also.

Why Shoot with a D200?

Colour and Skin Tones. As stated, this body has a very unique approach to colour reproduction, and in my opinion produces just sublime skintones. It’s Colour Filter Array (CFA) is extremely strict relative to most modern CMOS style sensors, built to be able to deal with high ISO better; (they let more light pass to be able to do this). In doing so, many argue that it affected colour, which was better on the old bodies such as the D200. Better is of course a subjective term. I have heard many explain that they can make any RAW file look like it came from a D200. I have yet to see it. I tend to still shoot in RAW format on the D200; however there is a strong case, depending on your shooting style, to use JPG with this body. This is because the JPG ‘recipe’ is naturally very strong with this body. It produces fantastic JPG files in fact. The colours that this body produces may or may not be technically accurate to your eyes, and if you don’t see what is special; move along. I have always felt this body had something great to offer and I continue to use it. The other reasons I use it - I like to take a lightweight backup camera and zoom out with me. This body is lightweight; yet extremely well built. Carrying it with an 18-55 feels like barely any additional weight to me.

What Lenses to use with the D200?

I will go through in turn my most used lenses with the D200 body. There is a bit of a mixture in there, which for my preferences works well. First up is the must have 18-55 f/3.5-5.6 VR DX Zoom Nikkor

18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 VR DX Zoom Nikkor

Glen Tilt: The Autumn Scene, Autumn, Nikon D200 Camera — Glen Tilt: The Autumn Scene, 18-55mm Zoom.

The Wave: St Monan’s Scotland. Nikon D200 with 18-55 Zoom

Rainbow at Pine Cone Point, Nikon D200 with 18-55 Zoom

This is a must have all rounder which is surprisingly sharp considering it being a very cheap DX zoom lens. As you can see, it also produces beautifully pointed sunstars, a feature that I find lacking in so many modern lenses. Above all, this lens is lightweight, has fast and accurate autofocus and is small in stature, making it perfect for use with the Nikon D200 body.

Nikon 50mm f/1.4D

The next up is the Nikon 50mm f/1.4D prime lens. For me, it is important that it is the D variant, because the G lenses are much larger and don’t have the attributes that I use the D200 for. On a DX body such as the D200, bear in mind that a 50mm lens acts like an 85mm in terms of field of view one would experience with a full frame body, because of the smaller sensor size. This allows the 50/1.4D lens to be a lens to isolate a subject. The 1.4D lens produces a truly painterly image, in part due to massively under-corrected spherical aberration, which gives images shot near wide open a glow as we can see in the following frames:

As we can see here, the greatest effect comes at the widest aperture of f/1.4. The lens has tons of spherical aberration here, and with dappled light as seen here in this close up scene, is akin to a painting. The light is soft here. If the light was more contrasty or direct, you would see some chromatic aberration. We can see the sharpness is overall lower than most modern lenses.

Light really affects the perception of sharpness, so hold that thought, however we can see that by stopping down to f2 the lens is sharper and whilst the effect remains (good), it is not as prominent now. Below is another shot at f/2:

It is important to note, that all of these images are shot at base ISO to get the best from the sensor. I very rarely deviate from this as previously mentioned. The 50mm f/1.4D is a dual personality lens. Stopped down it is bitingly sharp as shown in the final autumnal scene vs these wide open characteristics of the close-range flower shots above. I’d give a special mention to the 50mm 1.8D lens also. It is much cheaper and still and extremely good choice for a camera like the D200. Whilst not achieving a f/1.4 aperture, it actually has basically zero distortion. Very useful to have in a 50mm lens. Straight lines stay perfectly straight.

Let’s draw our eyes to another sharp prime lens, the 20mm 1.8G Nikkor in this summer waterfall long exposure picture that I made with my son:

Nikon 20mm f/1.8G

The 20mm 1.8G gives a 28mm equivalent field of view on the D200’s Dx CCD sensor. I have grown to like this focal length quite a lot, as 24mm can be too wide and too ‘foreground orientated,’ pushing details in the background too far away. I have the 20mm 1.8G for my full frame DSLRs so it was a natural progression to test it out with the D200. I found that it was extremely sharp. This above picture is a x2 frame bracket which has been exposure blended using luminosity masking to balance the bright sky to the ground. I love the layers of focus in this shot in the foreground. Sometimes I look back on this one and wished that I’d move the camera ever so slightly left to prevent the blurred edge reflection in the foreground tree. Another part of me likes that it produces a slightly unsettling feeling to the picture overall. I also have very little room to maneuver before falling into fast moving water! (Always an important consideration when framing up, I find).

Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art

I used a sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens for the above shot. I found the focus a little erratic when using this lens. This may just be unique to the Sigma as I have heard some reports of this on other bodies. If you are buying a 35mm prime specifically for the D200 I would look at Nikon’s Dx 35mm 1.8 lens. It’s small, lightweight and sharp, acting as a 50mm field of view compared to full frame cameras.

Nikon 24mm f/1.4G

I absolutely love using the 24/1.4G lens on all bodies. The subtle but beautiful background blur produces a great cinematic feel to images when close enough (as we should be) to our subject. This image here is a good example of this in practice on the D200.

Final Thoughts

Colour is something that is intrinsic to many great photographs and in my opinion should be valued and considered more than “the sky is blue=check, and the grass is green=check,” which is how a huge swathe of photographers consider colour in digital photography. I have placed into this article a lot of anecdotal and other evidence to try to show that there are differences between CMOS designed cameras with weak CFAs, and CCD cameras with strong CCDs. This obviously applies to CMOS sensors with strong CCDs, admittedly a seemingly rarer thing to come across; despite that the older Canon 5D achieves this accolade. I will attempt to do some of my own tests of the D200 vs the D810. When I get round to this I will add them to this article. So if you are after accurate colour in Nikon land, you can buy a D200, D40, D40x, D60 - they are all up there with an SMI of 85 (from DxO's Color Response tab) vs current cameras at less than 80 (D600, D800 and D4 all having the exact same score). The big win is how cheap these bodies are; they can be mostly found for peanuts, even in great condition. I highly recommend the D200, to experience that old school colour, accurate and beautiful skin tone reproduction and an overall ‘film-like’ look out of the box. You might even on occasion, find that the colour the D200 produces is better than that fancy-pants modern camera you spent thousands on!

Have a look here, when a youtuber did a comparison of the venerable D200 vs the modern Z7 camera and found with hilarious results, that most people by far preferred the images coming off the D200. New isn’t always better.

If you enjoyed this article, consider following me on Instagram or Facebook.

Steve

The Nikon D810 - Still A Class Leading Camera

Nikon D810 - 50mm f/1.4G Prime Lens Portrait — Street Gaming - Nikon D810, 50mm f/1.4G Nikkor

Introduction

I have shot with the D800/D800E/D810 since their release (D810 now exclusively from this series and you will see why later), and have extensive experience out in the wild with these bodies (also with the D850 which you can read about here). Let us consider pure image quality. The D810 came out a decade ago in 2014. And you would think that things have moved on in a big way since that time with regards to sensor technology, and the resulting image quality one could get? Sorry to disappoint you, however if you shoot still scenes (or scenes that aren’t sports or very heavy action - and yes I include weddings as being absolutely fine with this body), don’t care about video and value great image quality, these bodies are still cutting edge, even today. Dynamic range has not improved, because with current tech there aren’t any improvements to be made here. We have had a little improvement at high ISO with regards to shadow noise in the latest sensors such as the Z8, but that’s it. Not a huge amount has changed. This isn’t really a disappointing revelation, because we know of course that the D800 and D810 can produce fabulous pictures from the great sensors they have hidden away inside them. In some genres that involve shooting in LED lit areas, it could be argued that the slower readout speed of these DSLRs is advantageous as these bodies do not cause banding in resulting images in those conditions that can occur compared with bodies without shutters, such as the Z8 and Z9. This is the case because sensors had gotten so efficient by 2012, that only tiny gains have been made since. In fact, with the D810’s ISO 64, base image quality at the bottom of the range remains class leading and ultimately the same with the D850 and Z7ii / Z8 camera bodies. I am still regularly using the D810, and I know of many superb shooters doing the same, because they understand these basic facts. Of course other things have improved, autofocus technology, liveview tech at night, frames per second etc. If these things don’t matter to you much, or you can shoot around these, then these bodies are still absolutely relevant in today’s camera world. I say this because there are so many out there in the wild, that can be had in great condition second hand for very reasonable prices compared to new tech, which along with learning how to shoot will do much more for a shooter than buying the latest mirrorless camera and fancy lens. The truth hurts; but if you cannot make a good picture with the D810, something’s up, and it ain’t the camera…

D810 captures Coment A3 in 2024 over Loch Tummel — Nikon D810 with Sigma 14mm 1.8 Art and Comet A3 in 2024 over Scotland

Nikon D810: Key Specifications

36.3MP Full-frame CMOS sensor (no AA filter)
ISO 64-12,800 (expands to ISO 32-51,200)
Electronic first-curtain shutter and redesigned mirror mechanism
New 'RAW Size S' 9MP Raw mode
Expeed 4 engine
Max 5fps shooting in FX mode, 7fps in DX (with battery grip + EN-EL18 / AA batteries)
3.2in 1,229k-dot RGBW LCD screen with customizable color
OLED viewfinder information display
91,000-pixel RGB metering sensor for advanced subject tracking and metering
Improved Scene Recognition System allows face detection in OVF mode
'Split screen zoom' display in live view allows horizons/lines to be leveled precisely
51-point AF system with new 'Group Area AF' mode (inherited from D4S)
New 'Flat' Picture Control mode for massive dynamic range capture (video-focused)
Auto ISO available in manual exposure movie mode
Zebra stripes for exposure checking in video mode
Uncompressed HDMI output with simultaneous recording to memory card
Built-in stereo microphone

Of all the specifications, most don’t matter in the real world. The D800 had it down. The D810 is more refined though, and benefitted from a correction of a major design flaw which I will discuss later in this article. There is another major point to make though:

ISO 64

ISO 64 is a magic ISO where one can feel free of dynamic range problems or constraints. Unfortunately was not available on the D800, only the D810 and D850, so it lost out on a tiny extra bit of dynamic range at base ISO compared to these two. Let me explain something about ISO 64 to the uninitiated. If you shoot Sony, Canon or Fuji, you are simply missing out. It’s ironic for the Sony shooters. Nikon sensors are made by Sony; however Nikon tune them and get more out of them than Sony do (and a lot better colour). ISO 64 is a landscape photographers dream with so much latitude that exposure brackets are needed less and less. NB: Of course, still needed in certain situations. Note that the D800 only natively goes to ISO 6400, although this really doesn’t have any bearing on good photography as you will see.

Access to a Vast Lens Catalogue

All f mount bodies have access to an expansive lens collection from Nikon and other third parties such as the wonderful Sigma, Zeiss, Tamron, to name a few. There is simply no way that you won’t find peace in the vast amount of options out there. Special mentions go to the Sigma 40mm f/1.4 Art - a very special astro / landscape lens which is still class leading to this day. The 28mm 1.4E Nikkor on f mount, which again is utterly superb still. The 24mm f/1,4G dual personality lens which gives a beautiful softer wide open rendering and an ultra sharp stopped down landscape scene. There are so many options to choose from that you simply cannot go wrong.

Dynamic Range

Dynamic range is the single biggest marker of where a camera is at with respect to full frame bodies. It is also one of the single biggest reasons I am still using the D810 even today. Let’s take a look at the data from photonstophotos.net:

(Tip: If you have trouble seeing these graphs on mobile, just pinch zoom into them). Well this is embarrassing. It appears that, aside from a megre bump above ISO 400 in dynamic range terms, it is a draw here. (99% of the time, you would never see this difference anyway). I choose the Z7ii and not the newer Z8 as it technically has the highest dynamic range in Nikon’s current lineup of 11.59EV). Now let’s look at the D800 vs the Z7ii:

See what I mean here? There is no difference at all here in reality. They are essentially, completely the same! More fool us for pouring more money into the coffers of the camera companies.

Now I want you to think for a moment, consider that many will be saying:

‘Oh well, but the newer camera has X or Y feature that makes this or that easier and the like’.

That might very well be true, however if we are really honest, at the end of the day, when it comes down to it: the most important thing about a camera for these purposes is how true to life it can be, and how eager it can be to capture a great range at the scene, and more so, have a huge RAW file malleability built into the files for post processing. I cannot stress this enough. You could completely ruin an exposure by taking it -5 stops underexposed and still make a perfectly usable image: such is the RAW file malleability in these cameras. I’m serious: if you have never shot at ISO 64 on a D810 then you need to experience it. I see no real difference between the D810 and the D850 in this regard, of which I wrote recently about in the Nikon D850 article I wrote:

Not only this, the RAW files are so malleable (which these charts don’t necessarily tell us) in post processing. You can pull a file any which way and it holds up. It saves you if you screw up when taking the image. The shadow latitude is absolutely insane. One can expose for the highlights, and drag the shadows up to get a realistic image, without horrendous noise or banding like with other brands. It is simply ridiculous how good this sensor is.

It is of course best to have good shot discipline, however the fact that we can do this is extremely advantageous to a photographer working in contrasty light.

Nikon D800 at Gourock, Scotland Shooting Long Exposures — A demonstration of Raw file Malleability at Gourock, Scotland. D800, 24mm. This is a singular exposure, no bracketing was required luckily, since this is over 6 minutes of exposure.

ISO Invariance

The D810 is essentially ISO invariant. Shooting at higher ISO in camera, is the same as shooting at lower ISO’s at the scene and raising the exposure in post by the same amount. (Above shot was taken at ISO 400, f/1.4 and 1/60). The shot came out ultra dark - essentially ‘underexposed’ in the classic sense. I then processed it to how my eyes saw the scene. Invariance is generally a great feature of a sensor and it if course helps to save you in times if you ever screw up. It means you can shoot at much lower ISO’s where high dynamic range and image quality exists - less noise, better colour, and in post brighten intelligently whilst retaining all the benefits and none of the drawbacks. Well, except the images might look a little dark on the in camera monitor, but no matter. There are some caveats to this method however. Extreme pulls, such as the above shot, need some consideration. I shot this at ISO 400, following the ISO invariance method. I ended up with a clear purple band down the right which I removed in post. I wouldn’t have gotten this if I had shot above 3200, where the deep black noise reduces:

Shoot above 3200 if you know you are gonna need to boost an ultra dark scene 5 stops. You’ll get less magenta and amp glow.

Sensor Resolution

The D800/D800E and the D810 all share similar 36 megapixel sensors. The D800 is the only one of the three that includes an anti-aliasing filter sitting atop of the sensor to reduce possible problems with moire and false colour. This approach has sort of gone by the way side in modern times, with most cameras now not requiring to have said filter. It really only requires a little more sharpening than a camera without an AA filter, such as the D810 and D850. I tend to keep files pretty under sharpened as I find that these days in the photography world most are overdoing this; which creates ‘thin’ digital looking results. 36 Megapixels is in my opinion, the right balance of resolution vs good colour and noise reproduction. These cameras produce noise as close to film grain as I have seen from any camera. The D810 is especially good in this regard. The D810 has improved shadow noise from ISO 400 upwards over the older D800, which is actually more beneficial. The truth is though, these three are all excellent across the native ISO range.

Autofocus and FPS

The autofocus in the D810 is what I would term ‘more than capable’. The D810 can’t match the D850 in sports, but this was never really my area of shooting interest. I have shot some equestrian events, and some motor racing and have always been able to nail it on the D810 and make pictures with fast lenses, the same goes for weddings, which I have shot extensively, again no problems there for that genre. I am a bit of an ‘artistic’ shooter when it comes to that, and have long since got over the pixel sharpness thing I used to obsess over and I now look at the whole image. This doesn’t mean I accept constantly blurry pictures, but I do sometimes still use a beautiful picture that is a mild focus miss. I also slow down the shutter to create blur for weddings at times. (The same way the Cinematographer uses shutter speed creatively - this should never be discouraged). That said, close fast moving subjects on the D850 have a higher hit rate with these cameras. When it comes to speed, these camera’s are a little pedestrian compared to the modern spray and pray offerings, however I find 4FPS and 5FPS fine (mainly because I actually don’t use these modes except on the rarest of occasions). I find it tiring enough to cull and edit only the best of shots without trawling through thousands of pictures captured in this manner. Leave that for the sports guys!

Optical View Finder Advantage

Mirrorless tech now is a ways away from the first major iterations: for example the Z7, in that camera’s like the Z8 have hardly any or no perceptible lag when shooting. Despite this, there is still a case to be made for a large and bright optical viewfinder found in Nikon’s D8xx bodies. There are several things I would touch on here. The D8xx series features 100% frame coverage for composing. Also, there is absolutely zero lag with these designs; light comes in at the speed of light through optical finders. Secondly, in genres such as wedding / portrait and others that involve long staring contests of the photographer looking through the finder, optical finders are still relevant. Think about this for a second. DSLRs do not need to power an electronic feed for you to see and compose your image. You can have your settings down and simply wait for the decisive moment. Doing this with mirrorless involves chewing through batteries simply waiting on the picture. This may or may not affect a shooter; however it is important to consider. The last advantage can also for some be seen as a disadvantage by some. For me, it is nice to observe subjects without any electronic representation. As long as one knows how to meter and understands exposure, this is generally not an issue. Shooters now are growing up in a world of smartphones, where they need to see what they are going to get on the mirrorless screen in order to make a picture. However, even things like brightness can throw people shooting like this off, so it is best for them to go back to basics and learn how to meter and use histograms. Of course, the other side of this coin is that in low light, mirrorless cameras can have the advantage in that they can electronically boost the signal. When you think about it, since DSLRs have liveview, this should have been technically possible with DSLRs too, just not via the optical finder. Lastly, I love the built in viewfinder blind in the D8xx cameras; perfect for long exposure work.

Electronic Front Curtain Shutter

EFCS is designed to help reduce vibrations from the shutter. With the electronic front-curtain shutter, exposure is started electronically after the front curtain opens; exposure ends when the rear curtain closes. Only the D810 and D850 has this, however I had no issues with the D800, which doesn’t offer this function. The D850 went further to create a completely electronic way of shooting, allowing less wear on the shutter compared to the D800 and D810. Obviously this does put less wear on the shutter at night. Astro often involves many, many exposures, particularly if doing time lapse photography. Using this mode means the shutter stays open and the shutter actuations count will not rise with exposures. The electronic shutter is a huge boon for this type of shooting because of this, potentially prolonging the shutter life of the camera as well as dealing with any vibrations, unfortunately it is only available in the D850 though. It is definitely not something to loose much sleep over, however.

LCD monitor

The LCD monitor is extremely high resolution and adjusts to a level that it can be used in bright sunlight. A special mention goes to the D800, which has auto brightness, like all phones do. It seems Nikon considers it’s user base confuses brightness with actual image exposure perhaps and removed this function? I dare say many do, but it should still be an option in the D810, D850 and all the mirrorless bodies but it is gone. I on the other hand love this function from the D800 days. My only complaint is that I would prefer a dual axis tilt screen, like the Z8 and Z9 now have. (This becomes really useful when doing low lying vertical orientated shots, especially at night). The D800 and D810 LCD panels are fixed flat to the body. Arguably this does increase resistance to breakage though.

Pop-Up Flash and Hotshoe Flash Functions

Pop-up flash is extremely useful as fill-flash at times. Used properly, it can negate the need for a larger speedlight. It can also be used to control off camera speedlight flashes. The hot shoe on the D8xx series of cameras works perfectly with Nikon flashes, or my preference, the Godox range which I personally use. Having a good speedlight or two is really essential for any type of portrait work; and although I do not use them for every genre of photography, or every portrait type shoot, understanding how light works on a deeper level is always going to elevate your work. The fact that the D8xx series integrates so well with these, is a huge boon to the shooter. I was sad to see the D850 loose the pop up flash, by the way.

Mode Dial, Top LCD and other Buttons

The Nikon D8xx range has the best implementation of this in DSLR land. Special mention to the D800 which also places a nice metering dial on the back of the camera, right where it should be, with the ability to switch between matrix, spot and evaluative metering easily. The D810 and D850 has this moved to the flash hump, and I don’t like it as much. This was in part I expect, due to the fact the D810 inherited a new metering mode - ‘highlight’ metering. It can be customized in menu, which I did as I find it cared too much about specular highlights too much. I tuned it so that it would expose bright white clouds as far right as possible on my histogram. The top LCD screen may look like an 80s Casio watch, however I would not be without them. In fact, they are kind of cool, and better yet, they can tell you a ton of information about your settings from a quick top down glance. As mentioned, the D810 has a larger thumb support and I personally find it more comfortable in the hands; however I find the button layout slightly better on the D800. So it’s horses for courses, one wins a little in one area over the other, however they are both really good in most respects. As mentioned also, I do wish Nikon kept the ‘auto brightness’ feature on the D800. You can see the sensor for it on the back above the liveview mode switch. I wish the D810 I use had this now.

Nikon D810 Build Quality

D800 Chassis - A great deal of magneium alloy, however looks can deceive. It had a fatal design flaw

Call me old fashioned, however I like to buy products that have been solidly built and can if required endure the rigors of modern life. The D810 certainly qualifies in this regard. Yes, it is not small, and are quite ‘brick-like’ however overall I have never had one skip a beat in use. Just look at the D810. It’s full magnesium alloy chassis is extensive and is a massive superstructure that all the main parts are attached to. This gives it a great longevity, as it benefited from a design flaw correction in the D800. Yes eventually the shutter may give out, but there are still places that will repair them (and Nikon), and there is a plentiful second hand market. The D810 feels great in larger hands, and feels much more comfortable because of the deeper grip compared to the D800. (Note that the D800’s evolution was perfected at the time of the D810-D850. The D800’s shallow thumb rest and shallow grip for the right hand and fingers makes it less ergonomic over prolonged periods of use).

The Build Quality of the D800 Let it Down

The D800 really pushed the envelope when released. It was the first true high megapixel sensor in a 35mm body ever. Like so many things that push boundaries; mistakes were made, and sadly some of them, were serious.

The D800 should have had seriously good build quality, but there were engineering problems with the way it was built, despite the amount of metal used in it’s construction. The D800 has had major issues with cracked subframes (a metal structure which runs around the LCD monitor on the back and extends down above the tripod plate which keeps the sensor and AF system - mirrorbox in alignment - a serious part) due to a design flaw. This means using the tripod socket could cause a fulcrum effect to occur when using heavier lenses like the 24-70/2.8, because the tripod socket was not directly connected into the chassis. If it were, it would be a better design. This caused users to experience cracked subframes from the tension this caused internally. On examination it was found to be too thin a structure and had sharp corners (the cracks nearly always occured at these areas too). This combined with the one’s examined by a metallurgist, which were thought to have a poor pour, these were always destined to fail in this area. The problem is, D800’s can have this broken frame internally with no visible damage externally.

Not only this, early D800 batches suffered from broken 10 pin remote terminals, whereby the socket would fall into the body and Nikon was still initially expecting the customer to pay for this (it happened to me, but I forced them to cover the cost). I actually had mine do this and nikon rectified it under warranty when I sent it in (this only seemed to affect early built models, but they never really admitted this either). There was also the left autofocus issue, which plagued early bodies, causing mis-focus when using the far left AF sensors in the viewfinder. Eventually they did acknowledge this issue after the internet blew up about the issue; they really had no choice. The frame issue and the socket problem flew under the radar for a long time because the nature of it was more obscure and it took time to reveal itself. Make no mistake though, Nikon knew, and fixed this silently in the D810…

The problems really mounted up for Nikon with the D800 (which still seemed to be an excellent seller for them - because there was nothing else like it at the time), and they failed to acknowledge this broken frame thing they kept seeing in service centres, wrongly claiming user error and ‘impact damage’ as the cause. It should not be possible that a light knock externally could have caused this to break internally, especially when all the marketing stated how rugged and secure the build of the camera actually was. From examination of many broken frames it was thought to be tensile forces that were the cause of the breakages. Many camera’s examined by Nikon had zero external damage. No chips, no marks, camera’s in mint condition; yet this frame was broken and was potentially, sometimes the cause of autofocus problems.

You can see why my recommendation has to be the D810, or of course the fantastic D850 because of these problems. Even if you find what seems like a good D800, and yes it is a great camera when it is working, however it can be difficult to know what you will get when buying second hand, and external examination will not reveal the issues mentioned here. I have tried two second hand mint condition D800’s and both had the left autofocus issue to varying degrees; or just general screwy autofocus precision compared to my D810: they might even have this coming from the cracked subframe which could have drifted the left side out of alignment. D’oh Nikon! This should never have happened with a camera maker this experienced, and it is worse they never properly admitted it, I assume due to embarrassment / financial repercussions it would cause them.

This is why I recommend the D810 or D850 only now. The D810 was redesigned to have a stronger subframe, and a plastic mirror box so that if anything breaks from a large impact (which by the way would be externally visible), the part will shear away and have a much greater chance of being repairable because it will have much less chance of screwing up the internal alignment of crucial parts. Initially the internet experts thought this was a bad move before they fully understood the problem, with the ‘metal is better’ thing coming out. For more issue on this cracking subframe problem, and pictures which show the issue, (which most of the time makes the camera irreparable), click here to read the in depth discussion which eventually reaches conclusion. The word is out, the D810 is solidly built and is absolutely and unequivocally proven in the field; whereas the D800 is best avoided now, unless you already have one that you are happy with and is working, and you have checked for these issues.

D810 for Weddings. Shot with D810 and 135 f/2 DC Nikkor

Use Cases:

Landscape Photography

An obvious genre for the D810 - and tried and tested by many for years. You are in good company if you participate in this genre. For 99% of shooting, you will be at ISO 64. As I have shown, with good lenses you aren’t missing anything from the modern technology. This means you can do exactly the same thing as the modern cameras for a quarter of the price or less.

Astrophotography (Landscape / Deep Sky)

I have a tutorial on this here with the D850 used for years to photograph the deep night sky. I wouldn’t say I don’t recommend the D810 for night sky work. I can’t, because I am still using the D810 regularly for this purpose in astro landscape style shooting. The caveat is, that the D810 camera is a little ‘night-blind’ - a trait shared by most DSLR cameras that only got fixed in mirrorless (it took til the Z8 for Nikon to work this out also, talk about slow!). This only affects composing and framing up the shot / focus, in the sense that it makes these things a bit more difficult than with a modern camera. It doesn’t affect the great pictures I see from many great astro and landscape photographers though. It absolutely has no bearing on the end pictures (unless you screw those parts up). The D810 therefore doesn’t see the night sky like modern mirrorless cameras or phones do. You will be picking out a few bright stars to focus on and taking test shots for composing. This isn’t as bad as it sounds - it’s the way we always used to work at night. It’s only the modern technology that came along and spoiled us. That said, you should be aware of it, and camera’s like the Z8 are much better in this aspect. The D810 like the D800 does not have a full electronic shutter mode, so timelapse shooters etc will add to their shutter count on long sessions, which is another thing to be aware of, at least compared to the D850.

Portraiture / Weddings

Another obvious win for the D810. Yes it may lack eye AF, but you really don’t need this, not really. Image quality for portraits is excellent, skin tones are sublime and the files are so malleable as with the other genres, this camera is tried and tested. You also get to look at your subject in real time without an electronic veil applied. Less tiring on the eyes, no?

Macro / Copy work

I am not a macro shooter per se, however I can see no reason why the D810 would not be perfect in such disciplines. The high quality, high megapixel sensor will take care of all needs in these situations.

Final Thoughts

The D810 was around £3K on release in the UK / Europe. Now one can be picked up from around £500-£700 depending on condition. I recommend the D810 if you are a deliberate shooter and aren’t worried so much about tracking or fast sports, and especially if you want a pop up flash which is very useful even to control speedlights etc. The D850 is better suited to sports of course. What’s shiny and new one day becomes old as this camera has, however it functions just the same. D810’s still work great, despite their previous owners feeling they needed the latest and greatest. How many of us have been guilty of falling for the marketing? Spend less time on chasing the latest equipment; especially when it comes to tech such as the D810, because as I have shown, it is just as good (with some caveats) to the newest mirrorless tech. Be free of the current trend in mirrorless, in that to get better readout speed for things like the EVF and autofocus system, that they have actually worsened image quality, by simply shooting a DSLR! I am not a shooter who has to come down on one side or the other. I don’t love DSLRs and hate Mirrorless tech. This would be a naive view to take, and besides, I use a Z8 for astrophotography. I select the camera to use out of a ‘Tool to Task’ approach, and sometimes, just for the fun of showing others that newer is not always better,* and that these cameras never stopped taking great images.

*Definitely not better for the wallet.

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Steve

How I Photographed Comet C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS over Loch Earn

Comet C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS over Loch Earn Scotland — 50 Stacked shots. Sigma 35mm 1.4 on a Nikon D810

Introduction

Spotted in February 2023, comet A3 follows the now well established naming convention of it's recorded year, and it's discoverers. This comet hasn’t been seen for 80,000 years; and another 80,000 will have passed when it completes it's orbit!

My son and I went on a hike last night, carrying all the equipment up the side of a hill in the dark. Looking west over Loch Earn, I tracked this comet for about 50 individual pictures, beginning just at the point of darkness. A large and very bright moon was up, hence the sky is fairly bright and blue coloured. I had many individual shots without the huge imposing cloud formation; however I think it frames the image nicely, so I have went with this one to show you. I like the way the comet straddles the side of the cloud down toward the horizon. This being the wider framed shot, I will see about looking at my more magnified view of the comet from my other camera soon. I will add that picture to this article when finished. The other shot is at 200mm on a star tracker mount.

The Technical Side of a Widefield Comet Picture

The equipment I had with me last night was a Star Adventurer Star Tracker, two tripods and two cameras - a Nikon D810 and Z8. This particular shot is with the Nikon D810. I took 50 shots. My settings where ISO 400, f/1.4 and 8 seconds. Don’t bother stopping down for comets; you want a large clear aperture size, and you want to suck in as much light in as short a time as possible. Don’t stop down to sharpen up edge stars or aberrations as you might normally do. (If concerned about that, simply do another shot stopped down for the stars themselves. I would recommend using a star tracker for this, because stacking stopped down is difficult - yet it might work in bright moonlight like this). In addition to the 50 shots taken, I also took x3 of the foreground light from a small caravan site at the southern banks of the loch. This allowed me to use luminosity masking to reduce the blowout of the lights in the other exposures of the foreground. I layered this section up in post production to correct this area as to how my eyes roughly seen it. In processing the aims are to correct this area, and bring out the comet and the background stars. I did not bother taking a final shot of the stars stopped down - mainly because I forgot, so I used a small ‘coma corrector’ brush which I have made in photoshop to tidy up some winged stars in the deep corners.

Processing

I did a very quick vignette removal in lightroom of the 50 pictures and made sure the white balance was 5500K (daylight). I then stacked the 50 sky pictures in Sequator. We can also use Photoshop, however if you go that route it involves manual aligning, which will take you more time. I imported the stacked Tiff into Photoshop and started using curves to dig out the comet signal and tail, and balanced the stars with that. I used a very low amount of Orton applied to the sky only (low amount, lots looks bad!). The reason I do this with most night sky images is due to digital having a lack of Halation. Halation is a photographic effect, normally naturally occuring with film cameras, born when light traverses a film emulsion and reflects back, crafting a soft glow around bright areas of an image. This occurs due to the scattering of light within the film's structure, resulting in a diffusion that bestows a dreamy, ethereal quality. Unfortunately, digital tech doesn’t do this. It’s too sharp. One of my biggest inspirations is the late foremost wide angle astrophotographer, Akira Fujii. His images are iconic and memorable. A prominent astronomer, he is the author of several books and periodicals about the night sky. He featured in Sky and Telescope Magazine for decades and in other prominent astronomy publications. The main-belt asteroid 3872 Akirafujii is named in his honor. He shot almost exclusively on large format colour film, which gives this effect naturally. To get this in digital, we either use filters applied at the time of shooting (which in a way, lack control and can’t be modded later), or we use orton and other effects in post processing, as I have done here. I applied a custom vignette using a curve layer and a large soft brush, painting the edges and corners to bring the eye in centrally and towards the comet on the right of the frame. I applied a bit of noise reduction at a low level with NoiseXTerminator and was done with the sky portion of the image. The foreground needed an exposure blend of x3 pictures in order to better capture the ultra bright area on the Southern banks, as previously mentioned. I blended these together using luminosity masking. Then I masked both shots together, did a final couple of curves and the like and was done. The overall trick to producing good results in astrophotography, or any genre, is small, focused adjustments. Gradual, gradual, gradual, and following masking, some global adjustments to meld the image together. It is very important to consider overall exposure using the histogram at all times, and the brightness of the land vs the night sky. I have written a great deal about how poor night sky images appear when they have massively bright foregrounds and deep, dark skies. Now let’s look at the deep sky picture of the comet that I obtained:

Astrophotography Comet shot from Scotland — Comet C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS

The Technical Side of a Deepfield Comet Picture

I obtained this picture in the same location, as the comet appeared in the sky at approximate heading of 245 degrees due west, and approximately 21 degrees inclination. I used a Nikon Z8 camera with their 70-200/2.8S lens on a Star Adventurer star tracker mount. I use the ‘pro pack’ version with wifi for this mount, which allows me to properly balance the payload with the counterweight kit onto the top of the mount. This is essential in order to do any sort of deep sky, or ‘magnified’ close up images of celestial objects such as comets or galaxies / constellations. I took 40 pictures of the comet at 200mm. I used 35; five having some light cloud obstruct the view of the comet during the exposures.

I shot the comet as mentioned, at 200mm with the following settings:

Aperture of f/2.8
Exposure time of 20s
ISO of 500

I will address these in order. The widest aperture is always where we should use the lens for comet imaging. As previously noted in this article, forget worrying about lens aberrations and the stars in the midframes corners, at least for now. The most important point to hold in your mind is that we need to collect light and fast. We do this by having the largest aperture. This concept is called clear aperture and you can read more about this online if you want to understand it in a deeper way as it relates to astrophotography. This brings me nicely to the exposure time. The other way we gather light, is clearly via exposure length; in fact these are the only two variables that influence the final collected light. (ISO is a digital boost for the most part, and does not change the physical light collected during at exposure). Lastly, the ISO of 500 was selected because it is sufficiently low enough as to protect the star cores from blowing out to white during the individual sub exposures, and because it, along with the aperture and exposure time, created a histogram with the data bump being approximately 1/3 from the left wall. We have to be really careful here. I am often slightly under this, to protect the stars blowing out to white, which doesn’t tend to look great in the final picture. Notice that I have picked up the individual star colours in the final shot above? Let me be clear here, that the Star Adventurer mount is capable of easily doing one minute tracked sub exposures at 200mm. In fact, I’ve managed two minutes with accurate stars. I’ve even pushed to 3 minutes before…The reason I didn’t need to do this, or couldn’t, is because it was a moonlit night, and that comes with a lot of additional light. That night, longer sub exposures than 20 seconds would have given me general overexposure.

This is a very good result for only approximately 11 minutes of total data. The more data we get, the better the image can be, technically speaking. You should always aim for this, however sometimes cloud, rain or life stops us from going any further. This image could only really be improved from a technical standpoint by increasing the number of sub exposures that I can stack together in post processing and / or by moving up to a telescope with a larger effective aperture. (Remember that aperture is a ratio of focal length. There are f/11 scopes with greater aperture than my 200/2.8 lens which has approximately 71mm of aperture). We can surmise this via the basic equation:

Focal Length / lens aperture ratio = effective aperture for light collection

So imagine I used an 800mm telescope with an f4 aperture. I would have 200mm of aperture to gather light. Significantly more aperture, yes, however with that comes the demand for significantly more equipment, accuracy and alignment. And of course…expense and weight! Bearing in mind that my son and I hoofed all this stuff up the side of a very steep hill, you will see why I am not enamoured by that thought! There aren’t enough clear nights in Scotland in my opinion for me personally to take this side of what I do any further. I do absolutely enjoy every minute of maxing out what I have. There are of course limits of what a 200mm lens can resolve, with regards to the physical size or the ‘angular view’ of the object in the sky. The smallest of objects need more aperture and focal length, that’s just the way it is. I find it extremely satisfying to max out or ‘use up’ every possible trick in the book to create the best picture from the equipment I own, in a carriable sized package.

Processing

Comet processing is very technical. Comets are one of the hardest astrophotography target types of process effectively; the process of trial and error can literally have you tearing your hair out. Eventually I may get around to making a tutorial however to surmise:

The 35 images where stacked in Deep Sky Stacker on the stars only, producing a resulting linear 32 bit Tiff file
Then I aligned (called registering) each file on the comet because the background stars and the comet move at different rates to one another
Further to this, those resulting 35 intermediate registered files had StarXTerminator ran on each one to remove the stars, leaving only the sharply aligned comet in each one
I then took those resulting 35 files and stacked those together
So far, I had two stacked tiffs, one where the comet was sharp and in focus, and another where the background stars where
I went further and split the blurry comet out of the background star stack by using StarXTerminator then subtracting one from the other
As a result, I now had x2 workable files, one of the stacked and aligned comet, one of the stacked and aligned stars, with the comet removed
I then processed using most of the normal workflow available here

Faint Comet Tail Photograph — The Dust Tail of the Comet and very good star quality

Ta-dah! And that’s it. I highly recommend trying much easier astro targets than comets initially, because comets move differently against the background stars, they are much more complex to process. I appreciate that people will want a shot of the comet in the sky right now. That’s fine - I encourage you to go ahead, and try processing in a simplistic manner intially to get a resulting image, hopefully the information in this article can help. There can be great satisfaction to be had in this process. Comets come when they come. You can even keep the resulting data for when you are able to process them better than your initial try, after learning / improving your skills over time. As you can see with my crop into the ion tail, the stars are very good with this lens, considering it is a zoom, I use it because of it’s aperture and I am very pleased with what it can do. More later, maybe…

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Steve

Nikon 14-24/2.8S Lens for Astrophotography

Excellent Star Quality - 14-24mm 2.8S Nikkor lens.

Introduction

The Nikon 14-24/2.8S lens is a solid choice for landscape astrophotography style photographic work. The more I have used this lens, the more continually impressed I am by it. If you have been reading my blog over the last year, you will know that I favour tracking the night sky in most instances. This lens is very easy to use in such situations to produce high fidelity results edge to edge, The above image in this article is demonstrative of this. I have done no correction to coma, astigmatism or chromatic aberration here. The stars at the edge frame and corner, remain in good shape and are not noticeably affected by these aberrations which are so common in ultra wide lenses. This shot is at 14mm, as I discuss later there are some changes to this behaviour through the zoom range (with 14mm being the best), however it is safe to say, that Nikon did a really good job with this lens on Z mount.

Lens Features

This is probably the lightest 2.8 ultrawide zoom on the market. This is no mean feat when considering how optically proficient this fast aperture ultra wide zoom is. It weighs only 650g, and it is well built to boot, with extensive sealing against dust and moisture. This is very good for climates like Scotland where humidity at night can be intense. It’s size is not unwieldy, being smaller than the previous f mount version. This is a huge boon for hikers and night sky photographers in general. I was intially indifferent to the small LCD information screen built into the barrel of the lens; however I found it, along with the top LCD screens on the Nikon mirrorless cameras, to be invaluable at night. I of course use a headtorch, however this saves me having to turn it on to make small adjustments in the dark. You can even mod it’s brightness and the information it displays, from focus distance, aperture, or focal length information. One of the best features that this lens, and others in the Nikon Z mount ecosystem have, is the ability to remember the focus position from when the camera was turned off. I cannot tell you how good this feature is. I am a strong advocate for shot discipline and have previously written quite a bit about it on this blog. I am no stranger to making sure focus is right as part of this strong discipline. That said, I rarely need to adjust this lens. It’s just right out of the bag - so much so that it feels like witchcraft sometimes. The lens, like many in the Z mount family also has a control ring which can be customised for things like the changing of aperture etc. I turned this off as I was concerned of knocking it a night, however I can see many using this function. The focus ring is a narrow but smooth ring, and is very responsive on the Nikon Z8, such that it feels very close to a manual focus lens. This lens can take filters, important if you also want to double it as a daytime landscape lens which I do. I suggest magnetic 112mm Kase filters with an inlaid adapter. I can stack x2 of these no problem with no vignette between 15-24mm. You can also buy a big holder if you want to go that route for daytime landscape work.

Aurora over the Quiraing, Scotland - 14-24/2.8S

Aperture

Yes, aperture can certainly be considered a 'feature’ of this lens, however it deserves it’s own topic heading. I see too many folks trying to shoot landscape astrophotography with f/4 lenses. These individuals seem to want to experience pain. Photography is light, and I’ll tell you at dark starry landscape locations it is in very short supply. Combine that problem with the issue of balancing burning out star cores to white blobs whilst trying to properly expose the sky background and you already have problems: so why add to them before we even start? If you are half way serious, discount any f/4 ultra wide zoom lenses for this purpose from the get go. Ultra wide angle lenses already have tiny clear aperture sizes - remember that aperture is a ratio.

To capture fantasitc details and colour in the night sky with low noise, we want the fastest lenses we have, and to keep things easier, a wider frame of view to begin with is best until we become proficient in capturing the night sky. I always recommend lenses no slower than an f/2.8 aperture. When shooting with limited light, it should be a given that we want to maximise light collection. There isn’t much light at night, so we can use large aperture lenses in order to help us out in that regard. See my gear page for some of the lenses and cameras that I personally use. In terms of light collection, some of the most efficient lenses are between 24-50mm and with an f/1.4 aperture. This is due to clear aperture size (the amount of light a lens collects is based on it’s aperture and focal length. We have to remember that aperture is a ratio, thus it is affected by the focal length of the lens. A 14mm 2.8 lens does not gather anywhere near the same amount of light as a 50mm 2.8 lens does, so we really do not want to hamper this further by selecting an even slower f/4 lens). To work out a clear aperture size for a lens, we take the focal length and divide it by it’s aperture. Thus:

For a 24mm f/1.4 lens we get:

24 / 1.4 = 17mm diameter of clear aperture

For a 35mm f/1.4 lens we get:

35 / 1.4 = 25mm diameter of clear aperture

Now let’s look at something that everyone jumps onto when shooting the night sky, or aurora. Ultra Wide Angle lenses. Now they can have some advantages, however, with regards to light collection, let’s look at the numbers:

For a 14mm 2.8 lens we get:

14 / 2.8 = 5mm diameter of clear aperture

Since clear aperture is a direct correlation of the light collection abilities of a lens, we can deduce that ultra wide angle lenses are not necessarily the best as everyone thinks they are, despite this I still love using them at night and continue to do so. For further reading on this subject, please see here. It is important to understand that once you get more competent, you may want to explore this on a deeper level.

If we use a 14mm f/4 zoom lens in an astrophotography situation, our light gathering clear aperture is only 3.5mm!

Optical Performance

I used to shoot with the 14-24mm 2.8G lens for the F mount. This lens was revolutionary at the time it came out in 2007, and even had people from other systems adapting it to their cameras. As mentioned, this new lens improves the basics like size and weight, and further pushes optical quality. I no longer have the G lens, however the major improvements I notice are generally better aberration control throughout the zoom range and vastly improved vignetting control. Firstly, this lens is sharp throughout the zoom range and across the frame (I generally hate talking about lens sharpness, it is such a bourgeois concept). The strongest points of the zoom lens across the frame are 14mm where it is superb, this is also the case up to about 22mm where it slowly drops off in a very mild way with regards to corner performance. This sharpness drop off is so mild, and it starts off so great that you will simply never notice this in real images, for the most part this is a normal phenomenon optically: that the longest end of the zoom is a little weaker. Despite this, it’s actually 24mm that has the sharpest central region of the whole lens, and lens testing that shows this corner drop off in sharpness, doesn’t seem to affect stars badly at all. In fact, I found that the stars got better again at around 24mm in the deep corners, a touch better than at 20mm. Regarding other major factors, there is significantly less chromatic aberration in the new S lens, so star colour is improved. The shape of the stars remains better into the far corners throughout the zoom range than the old lens. Please bare in mind that these images are not all taken on the same evening, so conditions can and do effect what we see. However, the following will still give you a great idea of what to expect when using this lens for astrophotography. Let’s have a look at where this lens performs at it’s absolute best in terms of most aberrations:

100% Corner Crop - 14mm f/2.8 ISO 500, 60s, Tracked sky

This is a 100% crop from the deepest corner on a 45MP Z8 body at it’s widest focal length of 14mm of the headline shot in this article. This is very good performance from a fast, rectilinear ultra wide lens. Star colour is good, chromatic aberration is under very good control, and star shapes remain very good into the far corners, with almost imperceptable enlargement of their size which is not noticeable in the end shot, even for the discerning viewer, on a large screen or print. Note that some of the glow is due to atmospheric conditions. I also wonder if I was just a slight hair off perfect focus, because in other shots, I’ve seen even better corners (atmospheric conditions too). Another thing to point out here, is that almost every ultra wide angle zoom has some level of field curvature present. This means the plane of focus isn’t perfectly flat. This can reveal itself more at certain points throughout the zoom range. Here, I could have improved this by focusing a bit further out from the centre. Most of the time I advocate focusing 1/3 in from the sides to get balance between central sharpness and corner performance. This doesn’t mean that the centre will turn blurry - no sir, infact it will stay sharp, but the corners will benefit hugely. NB: there was also aurora present during this shot. I’ve shot with a 14mm 1.8 sigma art lens on my DSLRs for years now, and it is crazy how much optics have been able to be improved for astro in the corners. This is in part due to the Z mount no doubt, and of course we are comparing different apertures - however I can tell you even if I put the 14mm 1.8 art to 2.8, the 14-24mm would easily win in this regard. (Of course, I wouldn’t do that, because you shoot a 1.8 lens at 1.8 for these situations and you take the pain of the aberrations). Now let’s move our attention to the centre of the frame and see how the stars look:

100% Centre Crop - 14mm f/2.8 ISO 500, 60s, Tracked sky

A centre crop shows good star colour, chromatic aberration is under very good control, and star shapes are nice and rounded. Now let’s zoom in a little to 17mm:

100% Corner Crop - 17mm f/2.8 ISO 500, 15s, Non Tracked sky

Again, this is an aurora shot. At 17mm, in the far corners of a 45MP file, the star performance is still very good, and consider that if I had tracked here, this would be better than I am showing here, and generally is. There is a touch of chromatic aberration on the larger stars at 17mm. Now let’s look at the centre at 17mm:

100% Centre Crop - 17mm f/2.8 ISO 500, 15s, Non Tracked sky

The centre is excellent with this lens. I can see nice round stars, good star colour and no CA. Now lets move up to 21mm and view the corners we get at this focal length:

100% Corner Crop - 21mm f/2.8 ISO 500, 15s, Tracked sky

This is clearly where there is some minor issue with the star shapes. It’s only found in the deepest corners, where they develop little wings, a slight ‘T’ shape and enlargen a little more than at other focal lengths. It’s still useable, and bear in mind, we are looking at vast crops here. I have said don’t buy an f/4 lens, and for good reason. (f/4 lenses are usually worse than this and stopping down to f/5.6 is a torture test). However, you could stop down to casily improve this issue if it were shot critical. You can do such things with a star tracker, which is why I highly recommend them if you are serious about taking your astro work to the next level. To demonstrate this improvement at f/4 at 20-21mm, let’s look at another 100% crop shot at that aperture on a tracked sky under dark conditions, firstly observing the full scene:

Full Scene, 20mm f/4 ISO 800, 60s, Tracked sky

100% Corner Crop - 20mm f/4 ISO 800, 60s, Tracked sky

As you can see, accessing f4 on this lens at 20-21mm helps to solve this minor issue, giving good optical performance.

100% Centre Crop - 21mm f/2.8 ISO 500, 15s, Tracked sky

As expected, no issues here, the lens looks perfect and stars are nicely rounded. NB the brightness difference you are seeing from corner to centre in these crops are due to vignette and aurora. You will not normally see as large a discrepancy as you are seeing here. It just so happens that when testing the lens at different focal lengths there was a major aurora event (May 2024 in the Northern Hemisphere). Finally, let’s examine the end of the zoom range, 24mm:

100% Corner Crop - 24mm f/2.8 ISO 500, 15s, Non Tracked sky

The corners improve a bit again here and are perfectly useable. We can also (if using a tracker) shoot at f/4 if required to improve this. Doing so improves the star sharps to a slightly better, circular shape as they appear naturally in the night sky.

100% Centre Crop - 24mm f/2.8 ISO 500, 15s, Non Tracked sky

The centre is once again solid at 24mm. Let’s have a brief look at vignetting:

14mm full star field - tracked, vignette at f/2.8, ISO 800, 30s (I could have done 60 here)

24mm full star field - tracked, vignette at f/2.8. ISO 800, 60s

Vignetting is well controlled with this lens. There is nothing here that good shooting technique cannot overcome to produce a picture with a high image quality. You may be wondering about these images being quite dark. Remember, that these are singular shots with zero processing, to show what the lens is doing. You will notice however, that because I have carefully selected low ISOs and exposure times which are long, but not too long, in order to properly reveal stellar colours, that the stars are not burned out white dots? Essentially I have protected the highlights by shooting this way. I will normally stack several of these tracked exposures (three is common) to produce the results shown on this website. Both these shots were carefully exposed, with an intent on stacking the tracked exposures. Many minutes, or high ISO will often burn out the star cores, and we don’t really want that. It is very rare to find me shooting over ISO 1600 for this reason. Distortion is on the whole, well controlled. 14mm does have the expected barrel distortion, as seen from the 14mm star field shot shown, and it’s not bad for a zoom lens. To give a comparison, the 14-30/4 has over double the amount of barrel distortion at 14mm! At around 18-19mm there is basically no distortion present, then up to 24mm, a very low amount of pincushion comes back. A non issue for the most part, and can be corrected with profiles easily if needed. Of course, most of the distortion people are talking about in UWA lenses is perspective based. It reveals itself from the position they are shooting from, and the angle they are holding the lens to the scene at. Our eyes correct for all of this. Vertical and horizontal lines stray straight. When we look up at tall buildings when standing at the base of them, they don’t lean back, or keystone like they do with lenses. (They actually do, but our brains fix it, to spare us the motion sickness).

14-24mm 2.8S Starlight Scotland — Castle Menzies, 14-24mm 2.8S

Why Choose the 14-24/2.8S?

I have advocated for a while now of using more than just ultra-wide lenses for the night sky. This is for many reasons - light collection (clear aperture size), framing up tighter on constellations or deep sky objects, increasing capture detail, reducing noise, etc. However, that said, it is very difficult to be an astro-landscape style shooter without having at least one ultra-wide prime or zoom lens for those times where you just want to keep it simple. Astrophotography can be as simple or as complex as you want it to be. I sometimes just shoot at 14mm. I track the sky, then I turn the tracker off and expose for the ground. I can then blend them in post processing and I am done. I can also shoot tighter, at 24mm on the lens, following the exact same principl as I did at 14mm. I can also shoot in other ways at the longer end of the zoom range; like frame up the sky with a tiny sliver of foreground. That shot is therefore mostly tracked sky only, then I can turn the tracker off, pan the shot down to the foreground, this time with only a sliver of sky and expose the foreground shot. In post processing I can simply edit and line them up from the reference points in both shots. I can be ultrawide one moment, then I can be at 24mm to line up a low lying constellation, or andromeda etc on the horizon the next, with no lens changes - a boon in the dark.

So I’ve spoken about my rationale for using such a lens, however, why this particular lens? Well, if shooting Z mount it is the only game in town. There is a 14-30/4 lens however for reasons previously mentioned I do not recommend going that route. Adapting the old G lens via the FTZii would be nonsensical. One could buy a 14mm prime lens from one of the junk brands out there, however I personally think when all is said an done this is the one lens that needs to be in the bag. If I am cold and tired, this is the lens I reach for, because it is simplier astrophotography than using a 50mm prime to make a huge mosaic panorama which takes ages to complete. The 14-24mm 2.8S is also just very fun to use. It’s well built and optically sound, and like many who do a mixture of daytime landscape photography and astrophotography - a growing crowd, it makes sense to forego the f/4 lens for this. The versatility of a fast aperture zoom with this level of optical quality is difficult to ignore. The relatively speaking lightweight nature of this lens means if you are hiking into a dark sky location you can keep your bag as light as possible, perhaps foregoing your other normal astro primes you would take with you for those ‘near car’ shots that we all do (especially on cold nights).

As one becomes a more experienced astro shooter, especially after a bit of experience in deep sky, they can really become critical of their own images and others. This is not necessarily a bad thing. The first thing that always jumps out at me is when I see astro landscape pictures with huge, deformed stars at the periphery. It’s probably only something we see, but once you see it, it cannot be unseen and in some lenses it is quite ugly. It would be made even worse if the lens was decentered, or had a tilted element. As you can see from the full size images I have shown here, or even the crops, this lens is very solid in this regard and doesn’t leave these problems in any significant way imprinted on the images.

Always be Critical and Re-evaluate

In this game it is important to constantly evaluate our needs and shooting practices. I write this article for 2024, however it may be in 5, or 10 years something else can help me up my game even more. I think it is likely anything I see will be iterative, rather than revolutionary. Most of the improvements will be with my technique and compositional ability over the gear. I say this because the gear has come on so much in the last 10 years that no one can decry it is getting in the way of anything anymore, like we could have perhaps said at the dawn of the digital camera era. That said, to construct these types of images to a high level, it must be said that the gear is important. I would personally like to see a 14/1.4 lens for Z mount. Sigma have one for their mount and also make it available for Sony e-mount. I’d also be interested in a non junk brand, fast aperture fish eye lens. Why you might ask? These lenses can be very creative at night. The advantage in astro shooting can be significant too; when the lens designer is free from bending starlight from the periphery of the frame through the lens to reach the sensor whilst keeping lines straight, the stars can appear much better at the edge frames and corners in a fish eye design. The Sigma 15mm 1.4 fisheye is a perfect example of this, and it’s star shapes actually beat the rectilinear 14mm 1.4 lens they make, noticeably so. I’m sure that even if a lens like this comes our way on Z mount, I’d be unlikely to sell the venerable 14-24mm 2.8S nikkor, because I use it in landscape situations, but also because it is very versatile at night also. This is coming from someone who shot landscape photography for years with just prime lenses, so I know the challenge of composing well with a fixed lens. My kit for landscape astro shooting remains to be the 14-24/2.8, a 24/1.4, 35/1.4 and a 50/1.4. Oh yes, I also have an old 20/1.8 I still use on dslrs too.

So after reading my take on this lens and viewing the crops, it will be no surprise that the 14-24/2.8S comes Highly Recommended.

If you enjoyed this article, consider following me on Instagram or Facebook.

Steve

14-24mm 2.8S nikkor Aurora — 14-24mm/2.8S of Aurora Corona, May 2024 from Scotland

Dark Starry Skies - Astrophotography Season Begins in Scotland

Castle Menzies - Nikon Z8 with 14-24/2.8S Nikkor and Star Adventurer mount

Introduction

Last Friday night we had some clear skies in Perthshire. I should rephrase; there were some clear skies, at some places and at some times during the night. I knew that it would be a risk going somewhere very far to do astro work on a night that has a patchy cloudy forecast, however I decided to go out anyway. The definitive picture I made is above, of the beautiful secluded Castle Menzies in Perthshire with the plough (or big dipper) hanging low on the sky to the right of the frame. This wasn’t the plan on setting out. From the forecast, it looked like a western milky way shot with the castle beneath would be possible, however on arrival it did not look good; and went from bad to worse in terms of cloud scuppering any hope of capturing the mosaic image I planned to take that evening.

Change Plan or Leave Empty Handed

Most experienced landscape and astrophotographers’ have a saying - ‘if conditions aren’t right, change your plan for your shoot, or leave empty handed.’ I have been a very tentative planner anyway for both landscape and astrophotography. I like the challenge of just turning up and seeing what I can do. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t shoot landscape photography scenes at sunset when they are sunrise locations, or have no idea where the milky way is when I set out at night. However beyond the basics, for me, I like to show up and see what works. This means I have always been practicing this mantra. Most of the time I leave with something viable, picture wise. It may not always be what I set off for though.

The Definitive Picture

This picture was shot quickly on arrival, before the plough sunk below the tree line. Using the Nikon Z8 I was able to quickly compose a pleasing perspective and foreground; but first, I aligned and turned the tracker on and did x3 60 second shots at ISO 500 and f/2.8 for stacking later. It is always a toss up of properly exposing the sky background; vs burning out the star cores to white, colourless dots. These days, I tend to prefer low ISO and underexposure to protect the star cores, and delicately bringing them up in post later. Stacking several shots easily takes care of the space between the stars to prevent noise or blotchyness. After capturing these three 60 second shots at low ISO, I switched up to ISO 1600 and took x3 60 second pictures with the tracker off, in exactly the same alignment for the foreground. This helps to combat any RGB pixel noise etc in the final result, and improves image fidelity overall for the foreground.

Editing

Editing took about an hour and a half. This might seem like a long time on one picture; however this includes stacking, saving, transferring between Lightroom and Photoshop, cleaning all the little hot pixels and the complex masking required, and all the other fun stuff. What makes or breaks good astro images is making sure the sky is brighter than the foreground: because that’s reality isn’t it! So despite the fact we are making a picture and it is always gonna be brighter than the actual scene, I try to bare this in mind. The pointers I would give about this, especially star tracker work, is the quality of the masking between the two is really important for believability. Even close up the first image in this article has impeccable masking between the sky and the foreground castle. I used select and mask to do this from within Photoshop, however I also use a lot of luminosity masking too (which I used in the last picture in this article). A rough outline of the edit would be:

Stacking the X3 tracked sky shots in Sequator following minor tweaks in Lightroom
Importing these to Photoshop for stretching
Applying star masks to prevent loss of colour during stretching process (Select, Colour Range, Highlights, adjust)
Bringing out the plough constellation using various techniques including StarSpikes Pro, the Orton effect and clarity
Fixing vignetting and some coma aberrations if required / other lens defects
Then, stacking the x3 ground shots in PS using a combined smart object, applying a median stack mode
I then gently bring that to the right place in terms of brightness colour and contrast before masking
Masking the two shots together - this is the time consuming part if you want the file to stand high level scrutiny
Masking involves hiding any blurred areas from the tracked exposures underneath the actual foreground stack - this takes time to do well
Minor tweak to distortion of the castle from using a wide lens, some left in for effect
Final touches after combining the two shots together

I had planned a ‘Vampiric’ green tinged shot. I shot at the technically incorrect white balance of 4000K which gave this naturally, on import we were somewhere around 3950 with a tint of +4 to magenta in LR.

Thoughts

Could this type of shot be done in a single shot? Yes, well of course it could. However, generally speaking this would not be optimal. The ground exposure is many times darker (on average 5-6 times darker than the sky). This means capturing the sky and ground in one shot gives serious compromises; including noise penalty. So, could we capture this without tracking? Absolutely we could. We could take 10 shots and stack them. It would make processing a bit easier too. Although it has to be said, stacking 3-4 long exposure shots of the night sky, really does provide the highest fidelity though, which is why I went this route. Notice how I have not over-brightened the ground? This seems to be a very common thing now. Because camera’s and image processing software is so powerful now, many seriously over-brighten their foregrounds when it is meant to be a night shot. I caution doing this. It creates a daytime feel, which is more often than not to the be-puzzlement of the viewer; who is thinking, why are the stars out when it is daytime? Moon shots can be really confusing because the ground gets very bright at night when photographing the night sky with full moons. I don’t light paint, other than accidental, head torch on during the shot light painting. Light painting is for the most part a nasty way of artificially lighting a scene. It also annoys the bejesus out of people like me trying to capture the natural starlight, and the light from the stars passed down onto the foreground. Think about how annoying it is when someone shows up to a coastal location or something, a car park or the like, and they leave their full beams on. Not fun for an astrophotographer, is it?

I also made a similar feeling shot on the way to this Castle:

Take Pictures While the Going is Good

I often stop on the way to a location, even just for a quick impromptu shot. I’ve done this for as long as I can remember; and whilst it started off as an eagerness to start shooting on the way to a final destination, it is something that at least means I strike when the iron is hot. By working this way, I probably never leave without at least one viable picture. Yeah it is a simple shot, and perhaps even a little cliche, however it is pleasing enough. At night sometimes there are places when traveling through you find that work very well for astro work, and seeing them during the day you wouldn’t necessarily think they would make a good picture.

I have one more picture to share from this night, as it clouded over and I was done for the night. I will add this here if I get round to looking at it.

If you enjoyed this article, consider following me on Instagram or Facebook.

Steve

Aurora Activity Strong as Solar Maximum Arrives

Strong Aurora Displays over Scotland are coming — Aurora over Perthshire on the 12th-13th Sept 2024

Introduction

Scientists predict the Solar Maximum in 2024-25 will result in the most frequent and impressive Northern Lights displays in more than a decade. This has certainly fast becoming the case. The sun is now reaching it’s peak of it’s 11 year cycle. The solar maximum is defined as the point when the sun’s magnetic field flips between north and south. When the sun reaches this phase, it usually has a greater number of sun spots which appear on it’s surface. This phase produces dramatically more aurora displays with greater intensity; with the potential to see the colours such as greens, reds, pinks and blues with our own dark adapted eyes. This year, there has already been several spectacularly strong displays including the absolute standout in May which lit up the skies for several hours and grew in strength. During this display, aurora was seen overhead even in lower latitudes and it was also seen looking south! We also had a powerful showing in March, August, and most recently on the 12th-13th September. 2024-2025 will see the greatest and best aurora displays until 2035 so we should be primed as photographers, star gazers and astronomers to make the most of it.

Aurora over Scotland on the 12th August 2024

How to See Aurora with your Own Eyes - Dark Adaption

It takes the average eye - brain combination about 45 minutes to become dark adapted at night. We don’t see much at all at first when looking for aurora, unless it is extremely strong. However, our eyes are capable of seeing fainter aurora, or the colour of starlight (they aren’t all white dots), if we allow them time to adapt to the darkness. The purkinje effect describes the situation in human vision: as light levels decrease, the perception of warm colour drops, especially the red end of the spectrum. It is very important to observe the night sky with dark adapted eyes for this reason. To properly have our eyes adjusted for light levels this low, one must observe for at least 30 minutes and avoid all forms of artificial light during that time. This is a much longer time than most people give it. This is why many struggle to see the Northern Lights, and decry that they are a camera effect. Whilst bad over processing and over exaggeration of still images does exist, people that say that the aurora is only good / visible on camera, are often observing the night sky with un-adapted vision, in short they are not giving their eyes a chance to see it. Sometimes they are compounding the problem by trying to view it near streetlights, or in other severely light polluted areas. Tell me how many stars you can see when you look up through / past a streetlight…

Purkinje Effect

As I touched on previously, due to what’s called the purkinje effect, our own human vision is very poor at night at seeing colour. The peak sensitivity of our human vision in extremely low light tends to skew hard towards the blue end of the colour spectrum. Beyond this, when light levels really drop through the floor, our human vision sees very little colour at all. Warm colours register with our eyes much less than cooler colours do; hence the shift is blue-green in our colour range dissemination. With faint aurora, our eyes (especially our un-adapted eyes) will see aurora as a white glowing wash of light on the northern horizon. We have to also conclude, that some people with better vision will see more. Children have obvious advantages in seeing aurora due to their younger eyes / vision system. Of course, it doesn’t mean that older people will not see anything. There are plenty of older folks with good eyesight. The reality is, evolution has not yet given us superb vision for night. There has been no reason to; as how we evolve is shaped by natural selection. For this reason, we can try to maximise what we have and use it to the best of our ability.

Strong Aurora over the Isle of Skye, Scotland — Aurora over the Isle of Skye in Early March 2024

On the Isle of Skye, with dark adapted eyes and a strong display, it was easy to see green and very faint pink pillars as seen above. Aurora is not a camera effect. Make sure you are outside looking North and not at your phone or any other artificial light source for at least 30 minutes. Your chances of seeing colour and the like, rise dramatically.

How to Find and See the Aurora Borealis with your own Eyes

For Aurora we need clear and dark skies, good visibility and a prediction of aurora activity.

The darkest skies you have access too, along with the strength of the display, will greatly increase your chances on the night. People’s definition of dark skies varies. Ideally, you want to be 30 - 50 miles from the nearest city or more. That is my definition however I am spoiled where I live in Scotland; however for most, this would mean a long drive which wouldn’t always be manageable. It is advisable to get at least 5-10 miles away from any major city at least, and if possible, have no further light pollution in the northerly direction from your viewing location. We also do not really want any moon. The maximum would be somewhere around 50% illumination, and hopefully the moon would only be low on the sky. Ideally, it is always better with no moonlight, because it blocks our perception of faint auroral light.

Aurora is most commonly seen looking North when in the Northern Hemisphere, with ultra strong displays, it can be seen overhead and in the south sky. Even for a beginner to the night sky, finding north is fairly simple. Most people are aware of the asterism, the ‘Plough’, or ‘Big Dipper’. If you see that, you are facing north, as it is linked to the north star, Polaris. If you are still struggling, download the Stellarium app on your phone, and it will easily show you a north facing direction.

In terms of an accurate aurora prediction app, Glendale is by far the best, and it sometimes even able to alert that something is coming within the next few hours. Forget the rest, this one is the best and only one you need.

I have already explained how important dark adapted eyes are when hunting aurora. Make sure you get off your phone and just observe the night sky in an northerly direction.

Aurora Corona in 2024 — The strongest Aurora display of 2024 so far in May

It would be extremely rare from our latitudes in Scotland to see the Aurora Corona, however this is exactly what we got in May 2024. Corona only occurs on the strongest of displays and will present itself overhead in the sky dome (zenith) as you can see from this picture above. This is usually much more common to see at high latitudes, such as in countries like Iceland or northern Norway. I cannot put into words how surreal it felt to be standing in Perthshire, Scotland, looking up at these corona patterns in the above image. It was mesmerizing, and a very real reminder of our connection to the cosmos, and our star, the sun’s influence on our little blue and green planet.

Red Aurora Pillars over Balvaird Castle, Scotland — Aurora Pillars over Balvaird Castle

Aurora is very changeable and can be unique night to night. Here there is very little green, and mostly pinks:

Aurora and the Plough — Pink Aurora and the Big Dipper, or plough

Here there are strong greens, pinks and reds:

Aurora over Castletown Beach — Strong Aurora over Castletown beach on the NC500 route

You might be traveling to your dark sky destination to hunt aurora, however it pays to pay attention to the apps once in a while. (Please don’t look at phones when driving). You can have the phone set to beep when alerts come in, because driving with lights on, especially full beams, will mean you will not see any aurora in the car, even when traveling north, unless it goes completely nuclear. Sometimes you just need to stop by the roadside in a passing place and look up. Activity will come and go, so when it fades, you can get back in the car and continue the journey, in the hope you see more later on at your destination.

When Aurora activity is strong, you may even be able to see it in residential areas. This is less than ideal; believe me when I tell you that dark skies are the way to go. However, if you happen to be ‘caught short’ (no, not in the way you are thinking), then it is worthwhile taking a look:

Aurora in Residential Areas, Scotland — Aurora over the Houses

Own a Print!

To buy any of these spectacular display’s of Aurora in a print for your wall, see here to visit my Shop. These can be shipped to any country in the world, just go down to the drop box and select the place of shipping.

In Summary

In order to see the Aurora Borealis, as we have talked about, we must have night adapted eyes. We need to be facing north (look for the plough / big dipper if you have little night sky knowledge, or use an app such as stellarium to help you find north etc). We obviously need to have a clear sky, and be checking the Glendale Aurora App (which can be set to give audible alerts). This can be downloaded free to your phone for convenience. It is not on the app store, go here to find it. Lastly, it is advisable to temper expectations on full moon nights when aurora hunting. The reflected sunlight off the moon into our sky dome on Earth, will vastly inhibit any aurora display, even stronger showings. If might only be a camera that can see it on nights such as these, and it will likely not be as impactful as on moonless nights.

Learning

To learn how to photograph aurora, see my full guide here.

If you enjoyed this article, consider following me on Instagram or Facebook.

Steve

Making Memorable Autumnal Pictures

The Hermitage in full Autumnal Glory. Nikon Z8, with 14-24/2.8

Introduction

As the last days of summer are fast approaching in the Northern Hemisphere; it is time to turn our thoughts to the autumnal season, arguably one of the best times of the year to shoot beautiful landscape scenes. This is for a couple of reasons. One, the sun is arcing over the sky dome at a much shallower angle in these coming months, allowing us to be able in certain circumstances, to shoot all day long because of better light quality and longer shadows. Two, the change of seasons of course allows for some gorgeous colours not seen at any other time of year to develop and slowly fade away. We can use colour contrast to build more interesting pictures than we sometimes can in the depths of summer when it perhaps becomes ‘too green’. It is useful to consider that there are many different ways to photograph autumn, and in this guide I wanted to touch on my approach to the subject, and the myriad of options and styles available to us when shooting.

Long Exposure Photography and the Grand Scene

Hermitage, Perthshire in full autumnal mode — A scene now lost - Long Exposure Photography and Autumn go together like Peas and Carrots (as Forrest Gump would say)

As with the first picture in this article, the grand scene is probably the most common way any photographer shoots any landscape, and for good reason. I too love the grand scene; infact it is probably my favourite within the whole genre. I love the interplay of foreground, midground and distance and using composition to direct the eye and tell the story. For these pictures; wide angle and ultra wide angle lenses are my go-to in order to produce memorable pictures, if we can somehow meld light and composition into something that makes sense compositionally.

I love to shoot autumnal scenes by water, so I can create evocative long exposure photographs. I have to say that long exposure photography was one of my first loves when I started, and that love is not lost all these years later. There is something so etherial about the final look of a good long exposure photograph, and the excitement when creating: as there is always an element of chance. Will everything come together to make a great picture or not? Whilst recording the image we have no true idea of how it will appear until it is done. At times we really have to explore different shutter speeds to reveal different effects, and the best pictures are not always the ones that have the longest exposures either! This certainly keeps the creative juices flowing when out in nature, I find. The above shot is one I am particularly fond of. I shot this with an old 24mm prime lens (I used to work only with primes), and took a sixty second exposure in the early morning light with a ten stop filter. This is a picture that now cannot be replicated. The trees on the left have all landslipped into the water below and the landscape is left bare now. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Base ISO, a stopped down aperture and a shutter speed to create an appropriate exposure is all that is needed here. Sometimes, if the range of light is expansive, you might also need to bracket a scene like this. I took two frames, one properly exposed for the highlights, and a second for the shadows. The intent was to create realism to the eye of the viewer.

Polarisation

I will admit that I am not a photographer that constantly uses a polarising filter; however in autumn at least, it finds more use when I am doing long exposure photography. There are many reasons they are useful to have around in autumn. In autumn we can naturally enrich the colours of the folliage by polarising the light and thus removing the glare from leaves that are reflecting harsh light back into our lens, preventing us from realising the full detail and colour tones within the scene. Polarising filters are also extremely useful in order to cut through glare on the surface of water; however I caution you here on how much polarisation we need shot to shot. If there are some interesting rocks in a deep pool of still water, and the light on the surface blocks their view, it might be advantageous to apply the maximum effect. However, too often I see pictures with too much polarisation applied, since that the water looses it’s naturally reflective nature that we see with our own eyes, and the scene can begin to look flat because of it, loosing it’s realism. Be careful of pushing this effect too far. I would also caution using it on blue skies. If you use it on blue skies, especially in very wide angles of view, it will polarise different sections of the sky by differing amounts, causing bands to appear which are nigh on impossible to remove in processing. If the sky is cloudy, you do not have to be concerned about this, however. Used appropriately, polarising the light can add to the overall look and meaning of the scene.

The Grand Scene On It’s Own

Autumnal Heather in Glencoe — Glencoe Heather Colours, Autumn

As often with photography, sometimes the simplest compositions with a bit of directional light make the most overall impact. For the above picture; there are no long exposure tricks, just a great location, light and moment. This image was just a waiting game, albeit a long one. I set up the composition and I simply waited until we got some light on Buachaille Etive Mòr, Scotland’s most famous mountain. The heather in the foreground and grasses are lit by soft dappled light which leads us right up to the mountain in the distance. This shot would not really have suited a bright blue sky, so the overall conditions made sense for the shot.

Go Panoramic

Panoramic, Glencoe, Scotland — Go Panoramic to really discover the grand scene

When the grand scene is just too interesting, sometimes a panoramic picture is the way to go. This is a very basic handheld pano, at the time taken with no real attention with a 35mm prime lens. Panoramic images are very simple to make nowadays with software. We simply want to use a modest focal length (here I used a 35mm), so not too wide to introduce distortion into the scene, and not too long or you will literally be there forever - unless that is your thing. I then simply stitched them in Lightroom / Photoshop. I also highly recommend Microsoft ICE - a free stitching software available online. The proper way to be super accurate when making a panorama is to use a tripod, level it, and overlap each shot. I know how to do this, believe me, but I find most of the time these images never come about until I am wandering, the light comes (and will go if I don’t react), thus I nearly always do it hand held. I am careful to keep the frames perfectly vertical, and to give a good overlap to aid the stitching software later. It was nice to be able to record this scene in the colours of autumn, without hoardes of people. The never-ending problem with the iconic areas: it gets very people-ly at times. Whilst we can remove them easily now, it is nicer to have the place to ourself in early morning or at sunset, or heck, even after a heavy rain shower.

Long Lens Autumnal Landscapes

Autumnal Photography with Long Lenses — 70-200/2.8 shot at 200mm

The above shot is about detail. Here I have lopped off the top of the mountain to get in nice and close to the intricate detail of the mountain which was created about 400 million years ago by fire, and then shaped by ice. Autumn is a great time of year to capture subjects at distance with long lenses in great light. My go to lens with this type of work is always a 70-200/2.8 due to sheer flexibility. A 70-200/2.8 is not my most used lens. Especially on long hikes, it will often get left behind (although saying that, I have lugged a 70-200 up and down plenty of mountains - called munros, in Scotland). At one point I even sold my 70-200, to eventually buy it back. Although I am admittedly very wide angle focused, there are too many pictures I would be missing if I did not have a long telephoto lens in the bag. This is not just true of autumnal photography; it applies to the other genres which I shoot in, and of course for other times of year. I’ll often use it wide open to create a bit of a vignette, and add to it later on in some cases.

Telephoto Landscape pictures in Autumn, Scotland — The Flow of the Landscape in Autumn

This next picture is very simple. It is all about intersecting lines, and of course, the light that falls on the right most slop, curving down to the lower left third area of the frame. Long lens photography is of course all about removing distracting elements from a scene as well as getting closer so we can see what our wide angled vision doesn’t allow. If there is too much going on, or the light is not quite falling in the correct places, it’s often time to slow down, and distill the scene into basic shapes and elements.

Aerial Photography by Drone

Aerial Photography - Loch Tummel, (Queen's View), Scotland — Loch Tummel in Scotland, also known as Queen's View

Aerial photography literally gives us a diferent point of view anyway, over ground based landscape photography. So therefore, in autumn it can let us even further accentuate the landscape from an aerial perspective. I very rarely shoot drone photographs straight down, as most of the time I find them quite uninspiring. Note in the above picture, again shot for realism, I have not overly tamed the highlights. Nothing is burned out here, however I have left the sky realistic: large, bold and bright. with a nice strong central-based cloud. A very simple composition here, all centralised. This was a two shot bracket, which was blended using luminosity masking in Photoshop.

Kenmore Church from above, Loch Tay Scotland — Kenmore Church, Loch Tay

Sometimes I like to pick of little subjects in the landscape - in this case this picturesque church in Kenmore on the east banks of Loch Tay. Ideally I would like to reprise this shot soon. I would ideally like big black clouds covering that whole sky, so we will see what we get this year when I visit.

Rannoch Moor, Scotland — The Wolf, Rannoch Moor

In this shot, you might be able to find a little animal. I am going to admit that I did not see this when taking the shot on the monitor. However, it was a pleasant surprize. Again, a very simple shot depicting the extreme flatness and desolation of Rannoch Moor, vs the glacial landscape of Glencoe. If you want to learn how to shoot captivating aerial photography, click here.

Ultra Close Isolation

Autumnal Photography - Closeup of a leaf in sunlight with shallow depth of field — Lit Leaf - Nikon 24mm f/1.4G prime lens to give a wide field of view and isolate the leaf

Not always the first thing that comes to mind in autumn, however closely isolating subjects is a nice way of shooting something different. Here I have used a Nikon 24mm 1.4G prime lens, but any fast wide to medium telephoto would do the trick depending on the scene and the intended picture. You could of course also use your favourite macro lens. If you have a macro lens, then you probably already know more about that genre than I do. It’s important to make sure the lens you are using produces pleasing bokeh and gives a good overall look to the resulting picture. Here again, it is all about light. I didn’t wait about for this picture, I saw it, walked over to it and took it. I framed up to allow the leaf to fall (see what I did there; I apologise to my American readers!) on the almost third point of the frame, yet display the other leaves in the background negative space surrounding it. The fact that the foreground leaf has the most directional and powerful sunlight striking it over the background, further pulls it outward at us, giving the photograph a good separation. Looking closely, we can see the bright and deep blue skies above, with a cloud seen in the top of the picture.

Shoot the Animals

Highland Cow, Scotland — Highland Cow, Northern Scotland in Autumn

With a camera. A camera! Whilst I do not consider myself to be a wildlife photographer, (in another life I would be using a 600/4 and absolutely loving it) I will still stop to capture any interesting animals in the landscape. Most of the time for me, I approach animals in the landscape much like the great Colin Prior does; they are not my main focus, however if I do take a picture of them, most of the time it is to tell their story within the landscape. Yes this one isn’t the best example of that priority; however I tend to take only a handful of shots like this…It works as a simple record of this fantastic beast. My aim is to get a better ‘in the landscape animal shot’ this year or next. We will see what happens.

If you enjoyed this article, consider following me on Instagram or Facebook.

Steve

Aurora Borealis Makes a Strong Appearance in August 2024

Aurora Borealis (Northern Lights) over Perthshire, Scotland — Aurora in the Glen, Perthshire - Scotland

Aurora and the Perseid Meteor Shower

It was quite a surprize to have these two things coincide on the evening of the 12th / 13th August 2024. Meteor showers are difficult animals to photograph. They involve multiple hours of shooting pictures one after the other in order to build a competent image and I had a busy day the next: so I focused on aurora. (𝘌𝘥𝘪𝘵 - 𝘐 𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘭𝘭 𝘦𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘥 𝘶𝘱 𝘣𝘦𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘶𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘭 𝘢𝘣𝘰𝘶𝘵 3𝘢𝘮 𝘢𝘴 𝘶𝘴𝘶𝘢𝘭). I shot my other camera in a continuous mode for an hour or so and captured some faint meteors, however nothing that is a compelling, cohesive picture in my opinion. It all just bolsters my thoughts: one good image is all that is needed. (I did happen to capture a few lesser images that I think are still worth showing here.

With aurora photography, it is very easy to make a colourful picture of the sky and forget that a truly memorable picture needs to include a foreground that makes sense in relation to the sky. I tend to look for simplicity of elements when doing so, and I am careful to display the picture depicting the night. It's something I see all the time: night that somehow looks like daylight in photographs. Not only is it confusing to the viewer; it completely shatters the illusion that a truly iconic image can build in our heads, a sense of 'being there', rather than some faked photoshop / AI creation.

I shared this above frame on a specialist astrophotography website recently and had a chap living in Ireland contact me to say it made him pine for his homeland of Perthshire. To me, I have always found it curious; the power that a single image can conjure in the mind of the viewer.

Aurora with Fast Aperture Lens 24mm 1.4 Nikon — Aurora over Perthshire - 24/1.4

The above shot was extremely difficult to process. It is shot with a 24mm f/1.4 lens wide open on starlight, then a second exposure for the land, and then one for the electrical pilon, which was slightly out of the depth of field. Blending these all together involved a mixture of luminosity masking and select and masking in photoshop, along with some minor manual sections. This might sound crazy, however when you begin to see this game as a quality over quantity and get into that mindset - it all starts to make sense. People will see the effort you put in, and focus much more on one or two shots, than they will if you dump 20 on the internet.

At Night It Is Dark

It might sound obvious, however in most places this is true. If we want to invoke a strong emotional reaction from our imagery, we should try to simulate that in our photography.

Notice how in the above picture, it feels like night? I could have easily made that foreground bright, like daylight if I wanted. Such is the power of our photographic technology these days. However, it would have made very little sense! Aurora comes to us at night (at least, we can only see it at night). I loathe seeing all these strange composite images online of dark black milky way’s (usually they are incorrect colours, like purple), but worse than all that is that they look like the milky way appeared over a beach in the daylight. Again, another easy way to differentiate yourself from the crowd in this regard.

Aurora Panoramic Image in Highland Perthshire — Panorama made with a 24/1.4 prime lens in Highland Perthshire that night

Composition

Composition is so important with any photography, and those rules do not change at night; but they do become more difficult to implement. Simply being able to see what is in the frame, and particularly at the edges is usually pretty challenging, however newer cameras such as the Nikon Z8 and the newer sony bodies are able to really help out in this regard. When the camera has a really sensitive live feed, we can easily line everything up so that the composition makes sense. Too often I see random foregrounds that make no compositional sense in the context of the overall shot. In that sense, it is low hanging fruit to be able to differentiate yourself from others when you display your pictures online.

This picture above is simple, yet effective. No it is not some masterpiece of photography, however it works as a still image as it makes compositional sense, along with having good light and subject matter.

If you want to learn how to shoot aurora for realism, thinking about composition and the more technical side of imagery, visit my Aurora Photography section.

If you enjoyed this article, consider following me on Instagram or Facebook.

Steve

Astro Landscape Lenses - How to Use Focal Length at Night

Dunnottar Castle shot at 14mm Ultra Wide Angle with Milky Way overhead — Nikon D810 with Sigma 14/1.8 art lens. Sky Tracked with same lens.

Ultra Wide Angle Lenses

One of the first lenses I used to capture starry skies was a 14-24mm/2.8 lens, and before that, many years ago, a fixed 24/2.8 prime lens when I had no 14mm zoom. Too much of the time, my zoom was fixed at 14mm because I was always wanting to have a big sky and foreground together; this was how I shot starlight. One of the reasons I was doing this was obvious - with no tracker at the time, the wider the focal length, the longer I could expose for, say 20 seconds. I am not the only person who did and does this. The top picture was an in-between shot in 2022 when I was shooting a tracked mosaic with my other camera (Nikon D850). I had long since stopped taking every shot at 14mm by 2022 (actually much earlier). The foreground is taken with the tracker off, otherwise the landscape would be a blur.

Orion over the Quiraing - 14-24/2.8S on Star Adventurer Tracker Mount

The above shot is with Nikon’s 14-24mm zoom; it is shot at 14mm and this is going to be the first field of view I show here. There are lots of reasons I stopped this practice. One of the most obvious, was that I grew and developed what I wanted to do, and my skills when shooting complex scenes improved, as did my post processing. Other reasons include the realisation that not every shot (or not as many as I was taking) required such an expansive field of view. Now that I owned a star tracker, I was no longer beholden to ultra wide angle lenses in the same what that I was with a fixed tripod up until that point. I am now glad, that I quickly got over this habit. Below, is the same scene as the first shown in this article, on the same night, shot entirely with a 50mm lens. This is about 20 individual shots of the night sky on the Star Adventurer Star Tracker.

Shooting at 50mm

Milky Way Core over Dunnottar Castle Mosaic, Scotland — Nikon D850 mosaic with a 50mm f/1.4 prime lens - A huge mosaic of the night sky on a Star Adventurer Mount showing incredible detail and colour as the core rises over the horizon

I don’t think I have to point out the very obvious difference in detail between the first 14mm milky way shot to the 50mm shot above. One is much more effort to do and takes a lot more skill to pull off, both in shooting and in post processing. I should mention that I still to this day find a great deal of satisfaction in a 14mm night shot that works well photographically. I just use it more wisely than I used to. The foreground is a little better here than in the last shot; it is less distracting and has better separation.

Shooting at 24mm

Meteor spears Auriga Constellation NC500 Scotland — Meteor Spears Auriga - 24mm tracked sky

Shooting at 24mm is a good balance between land and sky. Every scene is different though, and in some circumstances we need slightly wider field of views in order to get a decent sky and land together. However, we are not beholden to doing them in one shot. Break free from this practice and consider that you can capture the sky right above the land where you are shooting, then pan the camera down to capture the landscape below.

Shooting at 35mm

Here is a shot made with a 35mm f/1.4 prime lens, without a star tracker because I was shooting the aurora:

Strong Aurora over Scotland in Residential Areas — Band of Green - Bright enough to be seen in residential areas

If I had used a 20mm, or 14mm focal length for this, I would have got yards of foreground, a distant sky, and the aurora would not dominate. I would also have gotten distortion to the houses in the bottom of the frame.

The next time you are shooting the night sky, consider that the be and end all is not ultra wide angle lenses. A star tracker greatly helps access longer focal lengths in your shooting. Unless there is aurora, I mostly use my Star Tracker Mount for astro work. See my gear page for more information, or my tutorial on how to shoot the milky way or aurora photography for further information and guidance.

If you enjoyed this article, consider following me on Instagram or Facebook.

Steve