Rodney Campbell's Blog

Another friend has kindly loaned me his Nikon 16-35 f/4 VR lens also for a couple weeks to see if this is the ideal replacement ujtra wideangle lens for my new D600 (to replace the Tokina 12-24/4 I’d been using on my crop sensor D7000 – it has an approx equivalent focal length of 18-36mm).

After picking up the lens in the city I took a slight detour on the way back to the office to try it out for a little city shooting

Note: These images (especially the wider shots) look much better when larger – so click any of the images below to see larger versions in an inline overlay slideshow gallery viewer.

Handheld at 16mm and f/4 – the distortion auto corrected quite well in Lightroom

Mystic Herbs

NIKON D600 + @ 16 mm, 1/15 sec at f/4, ISO 1600

I got so lucky with the timing on this shot – I wasn’t actually planning on the soaring bird but I’ll take it :). I loved the texture of this old ramshackle stone building sandwiched between the two monoliths of glass and figured I’d do a shot pointing almost straight up (whilst trying not to get run down in the middle of the road :)) and into the sunburst reflection no less. No flare – probably the Nano coating.

The Bird

NIKON D600 + @ 18 mm, 1/320 sec at f/4, ISO 100

For this last I headed underground and shot some handheld HDR brackets. This set was taken at 16mm at f/4 with the 0EV shot at 1/15 sec at ISO 560 whilst the +3EV shot was at ISO 4500! – with no noticable noise none the less! Again LR4’s lens correction has done a marvellous job with the distortion at the wide end

I tried two different processings of the image…

The first a more muted rendition of the grimy underground tunnels (and probably my own favourite)

In the Bowels of the Spaceship

NIKON D600 + @ 16 mm, 1/15 sec at f/4, ISO 560

and this second a more heavily tonemapped but still not over the top grungy, noise and halo ridden psychedelia rendition

NIKON D600 + @ 16 mm, 1/15 sec at f/4, ISO 560

Perhaps if you’d indulge me and tell me which of the two versions you prefer (or none if that’s your choice :))?

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