Category: pictures

For those of you who don’t know (or haven’t heard), the new version of Adobe Lightroom came out Sunday. My copy is still in the mail, but I’ve been playing around with the trial until my serial number arrives. All in all I’m really enjoying it, and the final additions from Beta 4 to 1.0 are, in my opinion, the two features I felt lacking in the earlier versions.

First, Lightroom now includes snapshots, where you can maintain multiple versions of your raw files as you work. The upshot of this is that you no longer have to deal with multiple xmp files for different versions of your files. Instead, you can maintain and adjust multiple versions – say one in color, another in black and white, and a third with a higher contrast setting. The second useful feature is a dust removal tool. What this basically means is that you really never have to send your images to Photoshop – Lightroom can basically serve as your one stop processing shop for RAW files of all types.

I think I’m going to like it.

I played around a bit with using the SB-800’s for macro stuff. The Carlsberg bottle was all I could find on short notice.

So I have been known at various times in the past on multiple occasions to disparage Nikon’s Creative Lighting System (CLS) as a feature that was nice, but really not terribly necessary for the average photographer. After using the old SB-28 and then my Novatron strobes, I didn’t see how any shoe-mount flash system would be able to give great results consistently, unless paired with PocketWizards and used in manual mode. After looking at a couple of demo videos and seeing some test shots, Lisa and I decided to order a couple of SB-800’s and Gary Fong Lightsphere II diffusers for our future wedding shoots.

They arrived today, and I have to say… even after 5 minutes of use, I’m fairly impressed. They haven’t failed to go off, and the results are fairly good, right out of the bag.

Possibly more to come later on…

Something I’ve been meaning to post for a while, that I’ll probably follow up on in the future.

The LX-2 is a great camera (for what it is), but several people have been concerned about the noise. I thought I’d take a series of pictures at various ISO settings to compare noise levels and then post them here.

These shots are all posted from RAW images, no noise reduction, no exposure compensation. Clicking on the images will get you the full-sized image, and I’ve done it sans-lightbox so that you can actually download/pan/see the image. I suggest looking over near the right side of the keypad for a fairly representative sample of noise in the images.

ISO 100

ISO 200

ISO 400

ISO 800

ISO 1600