Seb Rogers: mountain bike photography

Nikon D800: lots more, for the same. But how much is enough?

Unless you've been asleep under a bush for the past couple of days, you've probably noticed that Nikon's completed its pro dSLR one-two with the announcement of its D800. It's the 5DII-killer that Nikon shooters have been clamouring for for the past couple of years. In fact, given its specs and price, Nikon clearly expects it to be a 5DIII-killer too. Canon will have their work cut out to match expectations, now that Nikon has shown their hand.

In case you haven't seen the specs, the salient points are thusly:

- D700-ish body with some styling tweaks and a small drop in weight (yay!)

- 36mp at 4fps, with a 15mp DX crop mode that actually looks like being genuinely useful

- all the weather sealing and robustness you'd expect (though not quite as much as a D3/D4)

- nearly all the D4's video cleverness

- price back to D700 price at launch

In other words, it's one heck of a lot of camera for a price that, although not a trivial sum of money, actually gets you an awful lot of very solid performance. What particularly interests me is the DX crop mode, which offers more pixels than my D300 and is therefore genuinely, supremely useful. The AF sensors cover almost all the DX frame. See where i'm heading with this?

However. 36 is a very big number indeed when we're talking millions of pixels. You don't get something for nothing, so anyone expecting a D4 sensor in a small body is going to be disappointed. Specifically, the D800 loses out on high ISO (though it's likely to be at least as good as the D7000 in this respect - which is to say, very good indeed, though not quite up to D3 levels). It's also not particularly fast, although 4fps is perfectly useable. Anyone wanting more than that out of a high pixel count camera needs their head examining... 9fps @ 36mp is getting on for 1Gb per second. 

There are also the tangentially related issues of lens performance and diffraction, as well as the weakest link of all in the image quality chain - technique. I'll make a prediction now: an awful lot of D800 buyers are going to be disappointed with their results unless a. they own absolutely stellar lenses and b. have the technique to get the best out of them. The intersection of those two groups is a fairly small number...

From my point of view, as intrigued as I am by the D800 it doesn't actually solve any of my needs. There's no way I - or the vast majority of my clients, the vast majority of the time - need anything like that many pixels. If I were habitually making A2 or bigger prints, on the other hand, i'd be lining up to buy one straight away. It's certainly a lot of camera for the money.

Nikon D4: a video camera with a dSLR bolted on?

Nikon's D4 has been officially announced. Headline specs, in case you missed them, include the following:

- 16mp FX sensor with EXPEED 3 processor

- 10fps with full AF and AE; 11fps without

- tweaked 51 point AF system with more sensitivity

- ISO100 - 12800 native; expandable to ISO50 - 204800

- 91,000 pixel RGB sensor to replace the previous 1005 pixel version

- lots of ergonomic tweaks including illuminated buttons and two extra joystick controllers

So far, so evolutionary. The D3/s have a devoted (and deservedly so) following. They're accurate, reliable and capable of turning out incredibly clean files in all sorts of challenging situations. Nikon would've messed with that succesful formula at its peril. Still, taken on their own, there's not really enough here to persuade a happy 3-series owner to upgrade. A few extra pixels, a tiny bit more speed... at the price Nikon's asking ($6000 or £4800) those incremental extras are looking expensive.

Oh, and inevitably the forums are already full of doom and gloom about the fact that Canon's forthcoming competitor is, apparently, better (summary: 'OMG the Nikon D4 is 2 smaller and 2 slower. WTF?'). Can I be the first to point out that this isn't remotely like the D2H vs the 1DII? (in case you weren't there, Nikon's 8fps 4mp D2D was launched weeks ahead of Canon's markedly superior 8fps 8mp 1DII, although it wasn't the pixel count that killed the D2H. But that's another story).

The real story is away from the internet sideshow and the D4's basic specs. The real story is video. Because Nikon has been working hard to build as much video goodness into the D4 as it possibly can:

- a full set of 1080p and 720p output options inluding 30, 25 and 24fps (60fps only at 720p, though)

- reduced rolling shutter effect thanks to faster data processing

- B-frame compression to improve H.264 output

- uncompressed video output available via HDMI port

- stereo headphone jack

- stereo mic jack with manually adjustable level

- video-specific controls 

- full manual exposure via shutter speed, aperture and ISO

- full-time AF with face detection

- full HD integration with crop modes (1.5x and 2.7x)

It's an impressive feature set, for a stills camera at least. If you need to produce video as well as stills, it's possibly worth a look. But (unfashionably) I'm still not convinced by video in dSLRs. The biggest problem, as I see it, is that dSLR ergonomics are just plain wrong for video shooting. The D4, as a stills camera, is designed for fast, portable operation. Decades of design experience have gone into the user interface (I can trace the basic design of many of the D4's controls back to my 1989 F801). It's a camera that'll work very well indeed on the fly, off a tripod, with a photographer who's not afraid to follow the action. I can say that with confidence because, in all important aspects of design, it's barely different from my D3.

Switch to video and it's a different story. A video-enabled dSLR really needs to be tethered to a tripod - and a solid one, at that. While you can certainly make the case that that's good practice for any video shooting, dedicated video cameras are at least useable handheld. A dSLR? Not so much. The ergonomics for video are just plain terrible, and that's not really surprising. I'm as impressed with video in a dSLR as I would be with a stills function built into a video camera.

Much of the original impetus for incorporating video into a dSLR came from big news organisations, who were clamouring a few years ago for multimedia content. But the revolution never really happened, partly because (surprise, surprise) the budget wasn't there. It may sound attractive to a commissioning editor to ask for video and stills from a single photographer, but have you ever tried shooting both at a single event? It's not easy. And, contrary to popular belief, simply having a video mode on your stills camera doesn't actually make it any easier.

So I'm left with the feeling that video is an extra that relatively few photographers need, let alone know how to make effective use of. If you strip away the big sensor / shallow depth of field thing (which has become so over-used in the past few years that it's now a visual cliche), the only remaining 'benefit' of incorporating video into dSLRs is the 'two into one' argument. And, as I've just argued, I'm not sure that's compelling either commercially or in ergonomic terms.

None of which would matter much, if it weren't for the fact that video is clearly eating up more R&D resources and almost certainly adding to production costs.

Will I buy a D4? No. Would I buy a D700 with the D4's sensor (and no video) in it? Probably.

The Nikon D4 is coming. Lock up your credit cards...

Hot on the heels of Canon's pre-announcement of its new, all-things-to-all-pros full frame 1DX, Nikon is scheduled to announce the D4 this Friday. Unsurprisingly, the rumoured specs are very close to the new Canon. If you're comparing to the D3(s), there's more of everything. More speed. More pixels. More high ISO capability. More video gubbins. You get the idea. (Inevitably, the spec-sheet doomsayers have already decided that there's not enough more-ness, but that's another story).

I'll have more to say when the launch is official and all the specs are confirmed. For now, though, I'll just point out that, barring surprise spec details that haven't been leaked, this is to all intents and purposes an incremental upgrade. Successive generations of Nikon's top pro dSLRs have, until now, offered substantive gains over their predecessors. Given the stellar and proven performance of the D3, though, the new model has its work cut out to persuade working pros to upgrade (and that's before we know the price. If Nikon matches Canon's new price point there'll be a lot more credit cards staying warmly nestled in wallets).

As for the rumoured D800 with 36mp... it occurs to me that many of its target buyers are likely to bolt it to a tripod, stop the lens down as far as it'll go and lose much of the extra detail advantage of all those pixels in diffraction (which may account for the rumoured anti-alias-less version). But who am I to argue? I'm sure it'll go down a storm.

Check back on Friday for more...

Canon 1DX: finally, fast full frame

Canon's pre-announcement of their new range-topping 1DX will have that there internet awash with commentary. Much of it, inevitably, will be predicting the imminent demise of arch-rival Nikon if it doesn't immediately launch a competitor that does everything Canon's camera does, plus make the tea. So, for what (very little) it's worth, I thought I might as well add my ha'pennorth:

1. Canon got there eventually

There's nothing magic about full frame. DX works just as well, most of the time, and has a significant cost advantage. But Canon and Nikon both have many thousands of pro users out there with large collections of legacy full frame lenses. A fair few of them have even been around long enough to remember film. And there's no doubting that if you want to go wide AND fast, full frame is where it's at. Plus, of course, all else equal, bigger sensors work better in low light.

For years, though, Canon users had to choose. Full frame, slow and expensive... or cropped, fast and (marginally) cheaper. Canon has cunningly simplified the choice to one. Full frame, even faster and, er, expensive. Cunning.

2. It's gonna cost

Yep, that's the big downside of the new camera, as far as I can see. The asking price is around the same as for Canon's high pixel count 1Ds series of old. There'll be a lot of pro snappers wincing at that price tag. It always was a bit of a reach, but in the past you could opt for the slightly less wallet-pounding option instead. Not any more. With pro rates stagnant, clients' budgets stretched and more competition than ever, pro snappers with their heads screwed on will be pausing before reaching for the plastic.

3. More, bigger, faster

Not that there won't be plenty of takers. The 1DX is all about more and bigger and faster. 50% more pixels than Nikon's D3S (note that that doesn't mean 50% more resolving power, though). 33% faster frame rate. More AF sensors. Faster processors. And all that jazz.

Does any of this mean better pictures? Nope. It's all predictable, evolutionary stuff that'll have little noticable impact for most photographers (see also 'it's gonna cost', above).

4. Video yawn

Inevitably, it's got video. And, inevitably, it's got pretty good video. But it's still not a video camera, and the very companies that were clamouring for video-and-stills a few years ago (think big print media organisations) are now backing away from the idea. Is it cheaper than a RED? Sure. Is it as good as a RED? Doubt it. 

Personally, as a stills snapper, I'd rather have the option of a 1DX without video... and pay less for it. But that's not going to happen anytime soon.

5. Everything's different. Everything's stayed the same

A new camera with bigger stuff, more widgets and faster things always gets people excited. The thing is, though, the cameras we're all using right now didn't suddenly get worse. For all the upgrade frenzy, these are straitened times for western economies in general and pro photographers in particular. The 1DX was bound to happen. But it won't revolutionise photography.

Nikon V1 and J1 - THE compact to have?

Earlier this week Nikon launched an entire new camera system, focussed around the compact V1 and J1 and a clutch of lenses and other accessories. With a sensor halfway in size between m4/3 and high end compacts, it looks like a decent stab at carving out a chunk of the new compact, interchangeable lens market. You can read all about it here... and Thom Hogan has, as always, a few pithy comments to make too.

It's always rather hard to judge a new camera just from a press release and a few images, but most of the early signs are fairly promising. The small sensor and modest pixel count make quite a bit of sense, differentiating the Nikons from their competitors and allowing - in theory at least - Nikon's designers to capitalise on smaller sizes and lower weights. If that means a true system camera that's really portable, I'm all for it.

The higher end V1's specs aren't too bad, either. The J1 is out of the running for me with its 1/60sec flash sync speed, but the V1's mechanical shutter boosts flash sync to a respectable 1/250sec. The claims for AF performance are pretty bold, so I'll reserve judgement on that. It'll have to be good, though, because using an EVF to focus manually is usually an exercise in frustration.

Which brings me to one of the potential sticking points. The EVFs I've tried so far don't have a refresh rate anywhere near fast enough to make panning action shots a viable proposition. Nikon appears to have crammed a fair few pixels into the V1 - let's hope they also packed enough processing power to refresh them at a decent rate.

The other thing that's likely to make me hold back, at least for the moment, is lens range. I like the sound of the 10mm f/2.8 (27mm equivalent), but it's not wide enough. Nikon needs to produce a good ultra-wide zoom to persuade me to take the plunge... and it wouldn't hurt to have some faster options on the long lens front, either.

But that's the trouble. Nikon hasn't designed the V1 for me, or photographers like me. PASM modes are accessed through menus, not via a dial. iTTL isn't supported. Three of the four launch lenses are slow zooms. And so on.

Still, let's not get disheartened. Frankly, I was expecting much worse. The fact that the V1's piqued my interest at all is an achievement. If the EVF is reasonable, the AF is up to snuff and Nikon manages to follow through with more lenses... I can see the V1 potentially finding a place in my bag at some point in the future.

I'm back...

If you're one of my regular readers you can't fail to have noticed the lack of posts over the past couple of months. There are a number of reasons for this, largely centred around the fact that the past 6 months have been by far the busiest of my 15+ years in pro bike photography. To cut a long story short, over the summer of 2011 I was either working flat out or spending time with my family. And when I say flat out...

Something had to give, and in the end it was the blog. When you're faced with not enough days in the week, you're freelance and all of your free time is taken up with family commitments (which I don't begrudge in the slightest, incidentally), it's the non-paying activities that go to the wall first. And, although the blog is a source of enjoyment for me and also forms part of my (not especially well thought out) public profile, I just couldn't make the time for it.

But that's enough mea culpa. I'm back, the blog lives, there'll be stuff to read again. Really, this time.

iPhone 4 Flickr's most popular camera: official

The iPhone 4, after months of snapping (pun intended) at the heels of Nikon's D90, has finally overtaken the popular dSLR as Flickr's most popular camera.

To which I can only add: told you so. If that doesn't make the world's camera manufacturers sit up and take notice, I don't know what will.

iPhone: all the camera you need?

I wasn't kidding when I wrote the other day that Apple's launch of iCloud should have the camera manufacturers worried. The iPhone 4 - which is 'just' a phone, remember - is already perilously close to knocking the Nikon D90 - a bona fide dSLR, natch - off top spot as the most popular camera for Flickr users. That's right. A camera phone is challenging a real life dSLR for top honours on the world's biggest image sharing site. 

Who would have predicted that, even as recently as a couple of years ago?

Have iPhone, will take snaps...

It's not just the camera manufacturers who should be thinking about the consequences, either. Having spent years deriding the addition of token cameras to phones, I've found myself using the camera app on my iPhone more and more over the past 6 months. Initially it was just for family snaps and the like, but then one day I found myself arriving on location... without my camera bag.

Yeah, I know, that sounds terribly amateurish. In my defence the job in question wasn't primarily a photographic one. But anyway. There I was, a minimum 3 hour round trip from my normal tools, with a job to do and only my iPhone in my pocket. Figuring that I could get the bulk of the rest of the job done anyway, I decided to take the pictures I needed with the iPhone and then evaluate them back at base to determine whether a return visit was called for.

They were fine.

Train journey tedium relieved...

I should probably qualify that. The subjects in question weren't moving (at all), there were no complex lighting or depth of field requirements, and I knew that the resulting images would be running at less than 1/4 page in print. But still. I didn't do anything other than convert from sRGB to Adobe RGB in Photoshop and send them on their way. On the page you'd never know they were shot with a phone.

So I took that experience to its logical conclusion. The next similar job that came my way was even further from home but, knowing that my iPhone was up to the job, I left behind my camera, laptop and dictaphone too. Apple's tiny box of tricks helped me navigate my way around an unfamiliar city, recorded my audio notes, gave me web access when I needed it and recorded the images that I needed (which, at risk of labouring the point, will appear in print alongside images shot on my £3500 dSLR with £1500 lens). 

I think that's pretty remarkable. And I'm not the only one to have used the iPhone's camera to earn my living. During a Twitter conversation the other day a fellow freelance bike journo admitted to having had iPhone images published in National Geographic Adventure. NG sets notoriously high standards for its images. Publishing iPhone pictures demonstrates both how times have changed and just how good, within its own limitations, the iPhone is.

Gale force winds not pictured

What makes the iPhone's appeal even more incredible is that a camera with an equivalent feature set (fixed lens, no exposure control, touch screen interface only, etc.) would hold no appeal at all for me. The iPhone wins me over in spite of its features, because it's there already. I carry my phone habitually, in the same way that I carry my wallet and keys. Carrying an additional compact digital camera means remembering another object, finding room for it, remembering to use it. Given that the iPhone is already adequate for the job - just - an extra camera would need a very compelling feature set indeed to find room in my pocket.

Which leaves the market wide open for Apple to exploit. The launch of iOS5 gives a hint that Apple is beginning to realise the potential of the iPhone's camera. With a direct shortcut from the lock screen and a dedicated 'real' shutter button, the iPhone just got a step closer to the ergonomics of a proper compact. Want to put money on the iPhone 5's camera functionality being a whole lot better still?

I'll not be buying a new compact just yet, I don't think. Not until I see what Apple's up to. Yep, I'm waiting for a computer manufacturer to produce a camera. Strange how things change...

iCloud and iPhone: your camera is now obsolete

Nikon expert Thom Hogan has some interesting things to say about Apple's announcement of iCloud. In typical Apple fashion, the seamless integration of users' Apple devices with automatically uploaded iCloud content looks like being a game-changer. Apple bashers will doubtless point out that it's not a new idea, which is true. But it's the execution that's important. Synced content that you don't even need to ingest is something the camera manufacturers haven't even begun to address, as Thom points out:

"Consider this: you and I are the first two people to show up at some spectacular news event. You've got a new D4, I've got an iPhone 5. Whose images do you think will show up on CNN first? Oh oh. That's not a good answer for the camera companies, is it?"

More on Thom's front page.

The trouble with compact cameras

As i write this there's a 3 megapixel relic of the digital age sitting next to my keyboard. It's an Olympus Mju 300, a little all-weather (read: will resist the odd splash of water) compact that I bought around 2004, or thereabouts. It doesn't get much use now, although the fact that it's still here 7 years on says something about its appeal. 

By modern standards it's no great shakes. The screen is tiny, there's a token (and all but useless) optical viewfinder and, of course, the pixel count is lower than the cameras built into most phones these days. But it's small(ish), the clamshell lens cover is clever and, provided you use it within its limitations, it's perfectly capable of turning out decent prints up to around A4.

I mention it because recently I had the opportunity to test half a dozen of its more modern counterparts for a brief magazine review. In the time since I bought the little Olympus things have moved on. Deeper menus, bigger screens and more pixels - a lot more pixels - are the most obvious changes. And yet... there was only one camera in this (hand picked) selection of current compacts that I'd spend my own money on.

One.

That's not particularly impressive for nearly a decade of development. And it begs the question, why?

There are, as far as I'm concerned, three main issues:

 

1. Megapixel overload

The cameras I reviewed boasted between 10 and 14 million pixels. On paper that's enough to embarrass the expensive dSLRs that I use every day to earn my living. But of course not all pixels are created equal, particularly in cameras where they're crammed onto a tiny chip. Without exception, the 12 and 14 million pixel cameras' image quality was demonstrably worse than the best of the 10 Mp crop. I knew this would be the case, but I was shocked at how bad the results were, even at base ISO. Although I didn't get around to trying it, I'd put money on my 7 year old 3 Mp camera equalling or bettering the 14 Mp newcomers in an A4 print. That's progress?

Less is most definitely more, but the depressing reality is that camera manufacturers - with a few honourable exceptions - continue to chase more pixels. Truly a case of marketing over engineering - and in what universe do Facebook uploads need millions of pixels anyway? Bonkers.

2. Button stabbing madness

I'm old enough to remember when the first 35mm film SLRs started appearing with buttons instead of dials, back in the '80s. It was hailed (more accurately, marketed) as an advance. We had to suffer through a few years of cameras looking increasingly like pocket calculators with a lens grafted on the front before sanity returned and the wheel was quietly reinvented. Dials - or, with more complex cameras, buttons and dials together - rock.

Dials move, natch. And I suspect that makes them too expensive for most compacts, which increasingly look like (small) pocket calculators. If you're going to ask users to change settings via a menu accessed through a series of buttons, the UI becomes very important. And it's just not an area that many camera manufacturers get even close to right. Sorry, but a camera that forces me to press several buttons just to change (say) ISO or white balance isn't going to get my vote.

Funnily enough, the camera that emerged on top had both a well-designed menu system and a couple of concessions to old-school dial settings.

3. Press.................click

Nearly a decade of processor development, and yet we're still stuck with cameras that impose a significant delay between pressing the button and anything useful actually happening. Whether it's because there are more pixels to interrogate or some other arcane electronic engineering hurdle that I'm not aware of, the end result is the same. Unless your subject is anchored to the spot you're more likely to miss the shot than get it.

Before anyone accuses me of setting unrealistically high standards for cameras that are aimed at the mass market, I'm not just talking about bikes here. Most people use their cameras for people pictures. Some of the best people 'moments' are spontaneous. How are you going to capture them with a camera that doesn't take the shot when you ask it to?

 

You could reasonably infer that I'm not especially impressed, and you'd be right. What I see is a market driven by marketing rather than engineering, squeezed at the bottom end by camera phones and at the top by the new breed of EVIL cameras and cheap dSLRs. The result isn't pretty. It's certainly barely an improvement on what we had at the beginning of the last decade.

Oh, the camera that I'd actually buy? Canon's Powershot S95. It's a long way from perfect, but it stands head and shoulders above most of the competition.