Tokina 16-50 is finally coming to the USA!!!

Adorama is finally listing the Tokina 16-50 f/2.8 DX, and it is scheduled to ship in early June.

The good news? The surprisingly competitive price, $660!!!

The bad news? My next wedding is June 9th, and I don’t know if I can get the lens in time, let alone come up with the money for it!!! (More about that on my photo blog in a little while…)

Photoshop CS3 ROCKS!!!!

In other news, I’m now running CS3 FULL version, and it is blowing me away. A few quick bonuses-

1.) SPEED. It is way faster than CS2, and even faster than the beta of CS3 I think. Especially bridge, bridge is just amazingly speedy now. Snappy and responsive, that’s a good way to put it!

2.) CONTROL. Bridge has fantastic RAW (and JPG) editing power, it is almost identical to Lightroom in many ways, and better in some ways. (Though LR has it’s advantages of course, and I’ll get to that some day…)

In addition to the 100% loupe that allows me to quickly sort out the bad images, bridge’s RAW converter now has a re-touching tool for spot removal!!!

(FULL SCREEN CLICK HERE)

You can actually set it to show where each clone is, and you can GO BACK AND CHANGE THE CLONE!!! (Each little circle in the above screenshot is where a spot used to be, but isn’t anymore. )

There is also a red-eye tool, but I’m not sure if I’ll ever need that lol…

3.) The presets in Bridge just rock. They replace a handful of the actions that I’ve been using in Photoshop, and it saves a LOT of time because instead of waiting around for an action to play, I get to apply presets nearly instantly, and then when it comes time for Bridge to do the actual editing and saving, it can do it all at the end in one big chunk, allowing me to get up and go do something else… (although BTW, Scott Robert’s are going to be 2-3x faster in CS3 too! Sweet!!!)

4.) Compared to the beta of CS3, the final version has an even sweeter interface, both Bridge and the RAW converter. The layout and the buttons are clean, simple and intuitive. I think I prefer it over Lightroom, which feels “overly complex” to me. I like simplicity but I need versatility, and control is of course paramount. I think CS3 is the perfect balance of simplicity, intuitiveness, and RAW (pun intended) power…

Take care all!
-Matt-

PS: Oh, by the way, that 100% crop that I posted was from the Olympus E410, 10 megapixels at ISO 1600. Makes you think twice about marketing hype and who has the best high ISO performance, eh? Personally, I think that Olympus has a really good thing going with their 4/3 system and the pro level lenses… (with the best weather sealing on the market!) If they can really do well with their next generation pro camera, I’ll definitely be buying into it in the future for my nature photography!

Guessing Game!

I’m going to play a very cruel trick on you, to prove a point…

Can you guess which camera this ISO 1600 shot came from? Hint: It’s an 8-12 MP camera. Not bad, eh? The sharpness is there, the color is great, and the noise is pretty low.

Go buy your copy of CS3 now!!!

Well, ladies and gentlemen, CS3 is now “in stock” at B&H, Adorama, and Amazon. Adorama has the lowest prices BTW. Mine is in the mail and on it’s way!

Take care,
-Matt-

PS: I just made one of the most BORING purchases my photography business will ever have to experience: MS Office for Mac. Eesh, $399… I am so underwhelmed… At least CS3 will cheer me up. But that’s $600 together, ouch… Oh well I’d rather be legit than bootleg. Even though these companies don’t need my money…

Fuji S5 Pro, here I come!!!

Yesterday I treated myself to a two hour romp in Samy’s Cameras in Santa Ana. I looked at a whole ton of cameras, lenses, old used classic gear, camera bags, I checked rental prices, I found which external HD I want to get, annnnnd…

I test-shot the Fuji S5 Pro versus the Nikon D200!!!

I don’t know what the heck everyone online has been trying to do by posting all those horrible, horrible test shots from the S5, but WOW, that is one high-performance sensor! Of course we all know, and especially the wedding photographers know, that the Fuji sensors are fantastic at outputting images with amazing skin tones and ready-to-print quality JPG’s… I was more interested in the high ISO performance. And upon testing? The high ISO performance is just fantastic. With many Nikon sensors, when you use the highest two settings the camera tends to render some pretty nasty digital artifacts, even in RAW files. The S5 images however, in addition to being low-noise overall, render the noise exactly like film grain, all the way up to 3200.

Here’s the test grid. The S5 is on the top row, ISO 400-3200. On the bottom is the D200 with equivalent ISO’s, and that oddball in between the two 1600 shots is an image from my D70 at 1600, for comparison.

In Bridge I barely applied a minimal amount of NR, mostly to keep the color noise down because that is such a non-issue now with Adobe’s fantastic RAW converter, even for JPG files. With the S5 images you can see that ISO 400 and 800 shouldn’t even have had NR applied at all, and the ISO 1600 looks like the ISO 100 of digital cameras just a few years ago.

And what’s more, this isn’t even with Fuji RAF files (RAW) being native in Photoshop; I had to convert them to DNG before I could open them. I imagine when Adobe finally cracks the S5 RAW files and gets them native into Bridge, there could even be a slight improvement in image quality!

I can’t save up $1,900 fast enough!

-Matt-

Click HERE to view the true 100% image

Break-Neck Processing Speed!

I just “developed” over 300 photos, out-putting the 70 best in just a few hours. Ask any professional photographer who uses photoshop to enhance all their photos; “just a few hours” for 70 images must be some kind of world record!

I honestly have never had such an accelerated processing experience before, nor have I had so much fun and gotten such good results!

How did I do it, you ask? Well, the answer is tripartite and very simple: Bridge CS3, Photoshop Actions, and of course EXPERIENCE.

In Bridge CS3, I can keep such good track of which photos are good, bad, halfway processed, outputted, and uploaded, all without creating a million different folders or remembering anything. And when I’m browsing my photos, I can immediately narrow things down thanks to the completely customizable viewing settings, and also the 100% loupe that I have been raving about so much:

Have you ever taken a half-dozen photos of the same exact thing, and just wanted to keep the sharpest one? Now you can do that 10x faster than ever before. Or you can check facial expressions, high ISO noise, ANYTHING!

Also, Bridge CS3 is opening up a whole new world of processing presets, thanks to the new processing parameters such as split-toning and high-tech B&W converting. With ONE click, I can go from THIS:

…to THIS:

Or from THIS:

…to THIS:

(You can see the little list of presets that I have, and which one was used for each photo…)

Of course, I don’t go the mindless, automated route and just spit these images out after that one click… In fact each photo gets a lot of minor tweaking because each one is indeed unique and the “look” of the final image needs to be just right. But the time I save is still astronomical because I don’t have to build the foundation of each image one at a time…

And of course as we already know, having automated actions in Photoshop is making things go ultra-fast. But with this latest batch of photos, (Taken at the Renaissance Fair, click on my Photo Blog to view images) …I’m especially thrilled because I believe I have reached a certain level of perfection with the actions I’m using. Especially with Scott Robert’s amazing actions and techniques; everything just flows so well.

There is a very big grey zone between mindlessly spitting out automatically processed images that all have the same few effects applied, and creating tasteful, captivating, artistic images. Sometimes I have to stop and catch myself, re-think a photo, asking myslelf “okay, this special effect LOOKS nice, but why did I just use it? Does it go well with the intention of my image? Or does it actually make little sense? If I take an objective look at an image and it just doesn’t have an impact or a reason behind the processing, I scratch it all and start over. But again, with just one click I can see how each different processing “direction” would look, and the whole workflow is so much faster because of it. Before I would spend hours on just one photo, painstakingly editing it one way and then not liking it…15 minutes down the drain! Well, not any more. With Bridge CS3, some finely tuned Photoshop actions and some experience, things can get MUCH faster…

Take care all,
-Matt-

The Dark Side…

I went on two VERY different outings last weekend, and I noticed they had at least one thing in common, other than me being there:

A LOT of Nikon DSLR’s are out there now! In fact, I’m seeing far more D80′s and D50′s and D200′s than I’m seeing Canon Digital Rebels, 20D’s and 30D’s. No, I wasn’t counting, and yes, there were a few pros at these events and they were all shooting Canon except for this one Olympus guy with literally $10,000 in camera gear, and maybe one Nikon shooter. BUT, the majority of the amateurs / advanced amateurs all had Nikons. D40′s, D50′s, D70′s, D80′s, and D200′s. Everywhere I looked, there was one around someone’s neck or shoulder. Once I realized how many I was noticing, I actually had to stop and search rather hard to find a Canon-shooting amateur…

WEIRD!!! I thought Canon was king? What’s happening?

I’ll be the first to admit that Canon’s pro lineup definitely rocks, and if you can afford that big honking 35mm DSLR then you’re all set, but to be brutally honest: in the land of APS-C, the pickings are getting pretty slim for Canon shooters.

If Canon wants to maintain it’s seat in the top spot in ALL areas, it needs to release an entry level DSLR that rivals Nikon’s D40, which I can get WITH a lens for just $550! The 400D at almost $700 (WITHOUT a lens) and ten megapixels is just not going to attract many first-time buyers at all… I think it may be Canon’s downfall that they keep trying to put more megapixels into each new beginner DSLR; a brand new 10 MP sensor’s price will just not be able to compete with the tried-and-true 6 MP Nikon CCD. I think Nikon’s move with the D40 + D40X pair of beginner DSLR’s is BRILLIANT, and Canon should take notes…

THEN, they need to start offering a completely new DSLR, something above the 30D that has more pro features like pro autofocus and weather sealing etc. etc, and of course without those silly “scene” mode settings. A Canon equivalent to the D200, so to speak. Maybe at one time Canon was dreaming that “FF” would take over and APS-C would die out, for professionals that is, but that is just not going to happen. “DX” is a very powerful professional tool, and sensor / lens technology will only get better!

But that’s just my opinion, based on going out to just two events and seeing a lot of Nikon cameras. No scientific study here folks, just theory.

Take care,
-Matt-

PS: Maybe I should explain the “Dark Side” phrase with regards to Nikon VS Canon- You see, Nikon has all-black cameras and lenses, and Canon opted to start making white lenses, also offering a camera line with the name “Rebel” in it, thus very closely resembling (or at least making people think of) the Rebel Alliance from Star Wars. lol.

Adobe Photoshop CS3 has officially been released! It will hit the shelves on the 20th, which is just nine days away…

I’m so excited! Mostly, I’m excited about the new Bridge CS3, actually. If you have the new Adobe Lightroom, you have a good idea of what the new Bridge CS3 is like. It takes picture organization, browsing and processing to a whole new level. (Lightroom goes further for presentation, and has a SWEET slideshow feature, but Bridge CS3 has a higher quality RAW converter, and a LOUPE!)

In case you don’t know me that well, I’m more of a camera geek and far less of a computer geek. In fact if it weren’t for Apple and Adobe, I would say that I utterly abhor computers and software. But thankfully, my Mac gives me far less trouble than my PC does, and Photoshop + Bridge make a breeze out of that big, annoying task known as WORKFLOW… Sure, I absolutely love the artistic side of photoshopping, and I love to create works of art that are above and beyond what you could possibly capture in a straight image. But I definitely do NOT consider it exciting to sit in front of the computer for hours doing the mundate stuff… So, the quicker I can get through it all and have more time to get back out and take more photos, the better!

Of course with any upgrade, there are many things I now have to update. With Bridge CS3 there are a whole new set of processing parameters, and my processing presets are going to get a LOT better thanks to all the new stuff in Bridge. Go hunt down David Jay’s video on Bridge CS2 to get a general idea on saving presets. Like David Jay, I have processing presets for all kinds of situations, from outdoor direct sun portraits to indoor ambient light images, and so on… In CS3 I’m going to have to record some ALL-NEW presets as well, to go with the full-blown B&W converter and toner that is AWESOME. (kind of like actions that automatically take your normal photo and make it look like it was taken 50 or 100 years ago, cool effects like that.)

There is also a slightly updated organization layout, including a much better filtering system and one thing I’m totally obsessed with: A LOUPE! Allow me to demonstrate:

This is going to DRASTICALLY speed up my workflow, if nothing else does. As someone who is still addicted to RAW processing, I need all the time-saving tools I can get.

Although that does bring me to the next thing- Bridge CS3 will allow you to effortlessly process your JPG images almost as if they were RAW files! Of course you don’t get back the TRUE presets like WB etc, but you get to edit the settings with the same dialog which means two things: un-harmed originals, and SPEED. Lightroom offers this feature too, and people are loving it… I honestly cannot imagine editing photos any other way, seriously. And if I got myself a Fuji S5 pro, I would be all set to once again be a JPG master!

Then in the actual Photoshop CS3 program, there are lots of new features and parameters, although none are too exciting unless you are a SUPER geek. (smart filters, yay!) Except of course the very powerful B&W conversion tool; it’s nice to see digital B&W making a comeback after being so butchered by in-camera B&W effects that almost always looked horrible…

I’m taking actions to the next level in CS3, too. There are new tools that I’m going to use on a very regular basis, and like I just said on my photo blog- I can’t imagine NOT recording actions for everything I do. Doing everything “manually” without actions is suicide if you are a professional who does a lot of computer work.

Of course unless your name is “Dan from Brooks” ( ) …you’ll have to go record your own actions.

Or even better, you could go to a photoshop workshop and buy Scott Robert’s actions which are WAY better than mine anyway! Just visit his blog and hunt down some of the “before” pictures and compare them with the final result image, or visit my photo blog and check out some of the few I’ve put up. Heck, as a bonus to my camera geek friends, I’ll actually post two photos HERE!

Nikon D70, Tokina 17mm, Sigma EX circular polarizer.
1/3000 sec @ f/3.5 & ISO 200.
JPG image processed with “Outdoor Wedding 01″ preset back to JPG.
(Click HERE for original)

Nikon D70, Sigma 50-150 f/2.8 EX DC HSM.
150mm, 1/500 sec @ f/5.6 & ISO 200.
JPG image processed In Bridge CS3 beta 2 with “Old B&W Film 03″ preset back to JPG.
(Click HERE for original)

Alright, I’ve got to get back to deciding what piece of equipment I’m going to purchase next. The long-awaited, glorious Tokina 16-50 f/2.8 DX is hitting the shelves in Japan and the preliminary reviews are coming in very mixed. Some report the lens to be stellar, some report huge issues with chromatic aberration and distortion..errr. Aughh!!!

-Matt-

Rumors now have no less than FIFTEEN new lenses coming out soon! Sounds completely wild but if it’s true, remember that you heard it here first, folks!

I think I’ve posted about it before, but here’s what I’m hoping for if Nikon’s going to come out with a whole slew of new lenses:

First, convert the classic f/1.8 and f/1.4 primes to AFS DX. Meaning, a ~17mm f/1.4 AFS DX, ~35mm f/1.4 AFS DX, and a ~55mm f/1.4 AFS DX, to roughly match the 28mm f/1.4 AFD, 50mm f/1.4 AFD and 85mm f/1.4 AFD. Of course if they TRULY want to match these lenses, (meaning match the DOF and not just the view angle) …they could make some f/1.2 primes as well. But I wouldn’t be buying those probably, because they would be expensive and possibly slow to focus due to having so much glass.

I’d also like to see some specialty lenses made, most notably a ~17mm f/3.5 TS. And that fisheye zoom that other manufacturers are making now sounds pretty cool, too!

Then of course I’d like to see the DX equivalent to the 70-200 f/2.8 VR that we’ve all been waiting for, a 50-135 f/2.8 DX VR. (Although unless it is just mind-bogglingly good AND affordable, I’ll probably stick with my excellent Sigma 50-150 DC…)

Then, personally, I’d like to see a better version of the 18-70 DX come out, that is closer of an equivalent to the awesome 24-85 series- a 15/16-55/60 f/2.8-4 AFS DX! (without VR, to save cost)

Can’t really think of anything else!

Of course, if Nikon is indeed going the FF route, I hope (for the sake of those who will be buying into such a system) that Nikon will be converting it’s current AFD lenses straight into AFS lenses, and beefing up it’s WA offerings, for example with an competitor to Canon’s 17-40 f/4 L…

But I’m quite confident that if there’s 15 lenses coming out at once, most of them will be for DX…

Also, rumors are growing again that the D3 release is coming soon, whether or not it will have a 35mm sensor is unknown.

Rumor has it that Nikon is sorta dropping “hints” these days. Very subtle ones, but here’s the quick and dirty-

For a long time, Nikon has asserted that the 35mm DSLR frame was not necessary to obtain great image quality, and the DX sensor is “here to stay”…

Now, they’re starting to say things along the lines of- they’ve been waiting for the technological flaws to be worked out, (wide angle vignetting and softness) …or for the price to be affordable enough.

We can only assume that either this year or early next year, Nikon will feel that they have a satisfactory product to deliver, and we’ll finally see a 35mm DSLR body made by them.

Of course I still see a use for my DX system, and Nikon has no plans to limit it’s DX offering, ever. Not to mention the fact that unless I become very rich very soon, I won’t be affording a “D3F” any time in the near future!

Take care,
-Matt-