jeudi 26 avril 2007

Lenses I've looked through: Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 VR Part 1: First impressions... no great shakes! This isn't a test or review... just a few thoughts on a new lens I took delivery of last Friday. For those who read something from me about this lens at the weekend... well, I posted some of the following text just before midnight Saturday (Paris time) but the images didn't load... I tried again, eventually deleting the incomplete piece so as to start afresh. Now I've taken well over 500 shots with the lens and have a better feel for how it handles and what it does to counteract my mishandling I will write more in another article comparing it with the four lenses it will replace in my optical line-up. The "AF-S VR Zoom-Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 ED-IF" lens (to give it it's full moniker) is big and heavy, but that is what I generally prefer with a lens... something solid to grip! I'm not going to write up my unqualified impressions of how it performs optically because I have no testing facilities bar an old lens resolution chart stored away somewhere which was given away free with the defunct "S.L.R. Camera Magazine" in the early 1980s and which I have never used. For those interested in technicalities, figures and graphs I recommend the highly respected test site Photozone Review which measures MTF (resolution), Distortion, Vignetting and Chromatic Aberration at various focal lengths and apertures in the lab. For a professional user's take on the lens (and many other Nikon cameras and lenses) Thom Hogan rates very highly. He rates this lens very highly too... "Sharp. One of Nikon's sharpest lenses ever. Sharp at every aperture. Sharp with teleconverters. And the VR helps you achieve that sharpness." Did he say sharp... or sharp? I have an unusual requirement of camera equipment... it has to be comprehensive enough to enable me to make and take a set of images which would be good enough for a printed magazine article hopefully using a double-page spread... the subject matter being broad, but centring around travel and what I see when doing that - I have to start earning my keep again as an un-retired freelance photographer! And it has to be minimalist because at the moment "travel" is done on a bike (fixed wheel - to make exercising more interesting) or pushing my wife around in her wheelchair. Both activities only allow me to carry a basic outfit in a small backpack... that is a camera body and a couple of lenses. However, although a small RV will soon be our permanent base, I will still be limited by what I can carry whilst pushing my wife around. My basic camera set-up for the past year started with a Nikon D200 and a 12-24mm f/4 Nikkor extra-wide zoom lens originally purchased with the body. Between then and now I have bought a 24-85mm Nikkor zoom to use as a "walkabout" lens. Now I have a near perfect partner for both of them (especially the extra-wide zoom) for my type of photography... a 70-200mm f/2.8 VR Nikkor tele zoom. It can be slung into my smallish back-pack and retrieved in a couple of seconds. It is heavy, so stays in the bottom of the sack without bouncing out (broken zip) when I regularly cross the tracks of a rural railway and numerous rutted roads, but is not a burden when cycling as the total weight is reasonable. Reading about photography is not very interesting without images, so... the photo of the railway-crossing sign was the first one I took with the new lens. I'd been cycling fairly fast for a few kilometres and was breathing quite hard... but no problem when one has a "Vibration Reduction" lens to take the shakes out of one's own system. Shooting at ISO100 the shutter speed reading said 1/100th of a sec, which is not very advisable when using a 200mm lens (best to use the reciprocal of the shutter speed - which is 1/200th with a 200mm lens)... but I framed the shot quickly and let the lens do the work. I know, small on-screen images look nothing compared to the full file... but the pic is good. And again a couple of minutes later when I heard a tractor speeding along the lane... same exposure... same very satisfactory result which would probably not have been achieved with an ordinary telephoto zoom lens under the same conditions (me out of breath). From the first few days of use I feel I will enjoy using this zoom lens. It is a handful... but it helps to make images which would be much more difficult under many other conditions. It was expensive... but I think it could be the second best photographic investment I have made in recent years (a Gitzo Basalt monopod comes first). It will have to earn it's keep, for sure... but it will help me earn mine where a lesser specified lens would have struggled. In a few days I'll write some more on Nikon's VR technology and how it helps photographers... it is an odd story which began, not with a Nikon compact camera from 1994 - the Nikon Zoom 700VR (dubbed the Nikon Zoom-Touch 105 in North America) - but in the late 1960s with Dynasciences Corporation who produced the gyro-controlled Dynalens for US Federal Government work utilising original Nikon 500mm and 1,000mm Reflex-Mirror lenses. 9:15:14 PM    comment []