CHASING THE PERFECTION


Last Sunday it rained in Grenoble but it has nothing to do with the subject of today’s blog, just felt like starting with ‘the rain’.

Me, yes same me-a proud owner of Nikon D60 was feeling a little sandwiched between my friend Prakhar’s Semipro Nikon d300 and Ashutosh’s unassailable Canon50D. Not that D60 is any less, but I had not seen ‘better’ ones so closely until Prakhar kindly allowed me to touch Nikon d300, take a few shots with it and in the process unknowingly made me count whopping 51 focus points through its view finder. D60 has just three and I thought it was too much until yesterday. Immediately, after I saw 51 sensor points through the view finder, I started seeing glass half empty in my half full (I mean half frame) D60, such is a human mind. Then after each shot, I would stressfully run my eyes across the monitor display to check if anything is out of focus. Basically trying to find cracks where none existed before.

It took me about 20 shots to get back my mind on track. Good news is my mind always comes back, however far/wild it may have gone to. At least till now!

Being a Nikon usher, I’m a little sentimental about its products. But I do respect Canon, Olympus, Sony and Pantax too. I feel it’s not wise to compare. Each one is unique in itself. Squabbling over ever-upgrading products get us nowhere.


I was planning to share my experiences with Nikon D60 here in this blog from a long time so that someone else (like I was 1year ago) gets a feel of the product he/she is about/planning to buy, but wasn’t able to deliver. Partly because I was busy and partly because I was not motivated enough coz Nikon didn’t want to pay me. No, the last line was a joke.


Before you buy Nikon D60 (or any camera for that matter), you must know what you can and what you can’t do with it, instead of scratching head over sharpness, mega pixels etc. Of course they are important, but given a competition level in the market these days, any DSLR, irrespective of what brand it belongs to, meet with these criteria without any doubt. Otherwise, the companies wouldn’t run for long by selling just dreams (like some politicians)!

GO DIGITAL : review cum diary cum tutorial cum wishpers!

Introduction

After using Nikon D60 for nearly a year and having to learn nearly everything from scratch, I feel I’m eligible enough to revie this camera. But wait, neither my photos have been selected for National Geographic cover page nor I have earned a single penny with the photos I made. I believe in ‘help ever, hurt never’ philosophy, so it’s a part of an altruism. I have nothing to claim, all I will pour here are based on things I learnt through personal experiences, reading books and interaction with other photographers. Being a student of science, I seriously take interests in things around and when I learn or rather develop an impression to have learnt something after much effort, I like to share!


Race of Mega Pixel:
Shot with a 6MP sony cyber shot
Pixels are smallest pigments in a digital photo that sum up to form an image. Each pixel contributes to the colors and other features of the image and obviously greater the pixels in a photo, better the details. Take any picture in your computer and keep zooming it; at some point of time you should see squares. If you have already seen them, congratulations you saw pixels!
You must have witnessed 5MP or 10MP in digital cameras, that’s megapixels. Nothing scary, one million pixels is called mega pixel (pixels along length multiplied by pixels along breadth). Agreed, greater the MPs higher the details, but then there is a limit to everything. I would surely believe if someone says a cup of tea has become sweeter after adding 3 cubes of sugar. I may believe him if he tells me the same thing by adding 3 more. But then not after some point. The point is there may be considerable difference in picture quality when we go from 0.3 MP VGA camera phone to 5 MP point and shoot camera for a given print size. But then after 5 or 6 MP, I can’t believe it is always getting better and better. Nothing works like that in life otherwise so many people would not have died of diabetes. The difference between two A4 size photos: one with 5MP point and shoot camera and another with 10 or higher is barely perceptible provided other factors remain unchanged. It took me many years to realize this and I feel no remorse to break it here that even I was once running after megapixels. That said; if you have plans to take photos for billboards or something gigantic, then higher MPs should have some advantages. But if you can’t afford those expensive cameras, no worries I have seen billboards, which look absolutely flawless from a distance, but have the pixels the size of a cricket ball that are clearly discernable if looked closely. No wonder they are hung so high! My Nikon D60 has 10.2 megapixels (multiply 3872 x 2592) and it should be good enough for even a billboard hung a little higher (as usual)!


Exposure (Shutter Speed and aperture):

This is a serious matter if you are looking for serious photography. It is also a serious matter for those using cameras for fun. Sometimes it’s too difficult to have fun without knowing how to have fun, I have the experience! Shooting with DSLR could give worst results than a point and shoot camera if we missed a point or two. Besides several rules of photography and one’s personal ingenuity the basic understanding of light, exposure, camera settings is must and this is my humble attempt to share some of these with those in need, in a petit way. It took me months of reading, experimentation and interaction to know even this much. I don’t know how much I learnt and how much I should learn, but I’m already proud to have learnt one thing: you make the photos; camera just helps you to do it.

In any case, the quality of a picture depends on many factors; the most important factor is exposure. Exposure is controlled mainly by shutter speed and aperture. When you click a photo, the eye of the lens once opens and closes but don’t ask me why it is called click instead of wink. Anyway, the maximum opening of the eye is called aperture and is denoted by f1.4, F3.5, f4.6, f8, f9….f22 etc. Greater the opening (e.g. f1.4 or f 4.6), shallower the dept of field. Meaning, you have one object in focus, another in blur. On the opposite, smaller the opening (e.g. f22 etc.), greater the dept of field (DOF). Meaning, you have everything in focus, good for landscape photography.

Shot with Nikon D60at F22(small aperature opening) to acquire high depth of field (DOF)

You there? ok, the speed of opening/closing of the eye (shutter) is referred to as shutter speed. Shutter speed is denoted in seconds. Nikon D60 has shutter speed range of 1/4000 to 30 seconds, plus an additional feature called bulb. High shutter speed is good if you want to capture a moving object without any motion blur. A splash of water for instance, you can capture even a single drop by keeping shutter speed faster than 1/60 or 1/100 second depending also on the speed of the falling/rising drop. But higher shutter speed has to be accompanied by bigger aperture opening. The reason is simple, when you have higher shutter speed the lights coming from the subjects in front of your camera have less time to reach the sensor and if the opening of the aperture is not kept high, not enough light can reach the camera sensor and you end up taking an image that would be tagged as underexposed by critics. Similarly, you have an overexposed image when too much of light enters the camera (because of either slower shutter speed or higher aperture opening) in a ‘click’. It is, therefore, important to strike a balance between shutter speed and aperture opening while trying to control dept of field and motion blurs. How do we do that?
(A) By checking the light meter that D60 (or any DSLR for that matter) is equipped with (B) shooting in A mode or S mode. A mode is aperture priority mode. You give aperture value of your choice and camera will automatically take care of shutter speed to match the correct exposure. Similarly, S mode is for shutter priority, where camera takes control of aperture while you set the shutter speed of your choice. Full freedom is in M mode, where camera seems to have done nothing but wink as per your instructions, but even their you need its help to check light meter.

Some people might figure out option (C) an easy way to avoid all these hassles. Yes by shooting in automatic mode, but then a valid question pops up: why DSLR? Why not point and shoot?
Anyway, D60 has a good range (1/4000 to 30 seconds, plus bulb) of shutter speed to control how the pictures shape. And yes, aperture range is the feature that one should be looking in a lens, not in a camera. So, next time your friend’s boy/girl friend has a problem with dept of field, you can suggest them to check out the lens manual and not cry hoarse over D60!

Exposure bracketing:
Where there is will there is no bracketing. That’s right, if you are an aspiring HDR photographer, like me, sad news is Nikon D60 doesn’t have exposure bracketing, at least I haven’t found that function in last one year! But that doesn’t mean, we can’t do HDR with D60. I have done a couple of HDR following these methods:
A) By shooting an image in RAW format and developing pseudo HDR in photomatix/CS3. For the record, a RAW format is seen as digital equivalent of negative in film cameras and said to have contained more information than normal JPEG. That’s what every one says and I have a reason to believe: It occupies a huge space slowing my already wonky computer by a few seconds.

I shot this in raw format and then processed in CS3/Photomatix
B) By bracketing exposures manually. I keep camera in (M) Manual mode and shoot with the help of a tripod and for each shot I change the shutter speed (some people also call f stops) to a range of exposures both over and under. Then I process it normally in photomatix/CS3.


But even I feel exposure bracketing should have been incorporated by ‘them’!