Popular Photography has an excellent review on this lens. The shot at right was taken handhold months back in San Francisco at 0.04 second with focal length as 150mm. I am pretty happy with its optical performance and IS performance. Besides, it is lighter than its f/2.8 sibling. My neck felt much better after wondering around San Francisco for the whole day.

Here are fascinating reviews around the net on this lens:

1. Jim Doty’s Review
2. Nelson Wong’s Review
3. Photo’s Discussion

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At 7.6 ounces, the camera is light weight and compact, fit into a jacket/shirt pocket. It comes with a nice bright LCD display (see the image below). I like the black color, which gives me a more professional feeling. There are two major reasons behind my purchase:

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1. OIS (Optical Image Stabiliser): It works very well. OIS level 2 gives me sharp pictures when the shutter speed is as slow as 1/10 second. Compare the following two shots by yourself.
   

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2. 16:9 Wide Angle: It is actually slightly wider than 28mm. Read the discussion thread. With the camera, I could record diagrams from white board, and shoot pages of documents in minutes. Here, I took a cover shot of the latest issue of American Photo magazine with slow shutter speed at 1/10 second.

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Battery life is decent, 300-shot for a fully charged battery, which is not bad, considering the fact that LCD is always on for each shot due to lack of view finder. It takes less than 2 hours for a full charge. There is also a tiny button at the right hand side of the LCD display for people to quickly adjust picture parameters, such as aperture.

As a consumer level camera, it is slow to write pictures to SD memory card, especially when RAW is enabled. It is not that useful under ambient lights when ISO 1600 is required.

I will end this blog with a picture of yellow leaves that I took last fall. I’ve made it painting-like.

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In 1972, the small community of Grazie di Curtatone in northern Italy started the first International Street Painting Competition. In 1987, Executive Director Kathy Koury, a fundraiser for the Children’s Creative Project, launched the first street painting festival in North America — I Madonnari, in Santa Barbara, California. In 1994, Youth in Arts brought Italian Street Painting Festival to Mission San Rafael Arcangel, which is now the largest one in the United States.

The following pictures are from this year’s I Madonnari:

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Check out this site for galleries of street painting festivals and lists of events.

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The history of Santa Barbara started on Dec. 4th, 1602, when Sebastian Viscaino sailed into the Channel of Santa Barbara. Since that day is sacred to the memory of Saint Barbara, virgin and martyr, he named the place as Santa Barbara — the Spanish version of Saint Barbara, who is the patron of artillery and mining, and who helps against lightning and fire.

After the Civil War, people from the East began pouring in and Victorian houses soon outnumbered Spanish Colonials. However, on the early morning of June 28, 1925, a magnitude 6.3 earthquake woke up most of the Santa Barbara residents. Local towns folk realized that most of the Victorians had burned and most of the buildings left standing were the Spanish Colonials, that relied more heavily on indigenous building techniques. An ordinance is passed making the downtown area Spanish Colonial. Thus the 1925 earthquake is responsible for the distinctive architecture in the city that has made Santa Barbara a popular tourist destination for over 70 years.

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In the memorial day holiday, I visited Santa Barbara with my roommate. He had a nice family re-union while I enjoyed the beauty of the city. The following places are worth visiting:

• Old Mission Santa Barbara: It was originally built in 1786, labeled as the “Queen of the Missions”. Every year during Memorial Day weekend, there is a street painting festival called i madonnari.
• Shoreline Park: One could have a nice bird view of Santa Barbara Harbor.
• Stearns Wharf: Originally built in 1872, it is THE best place for a luxury dinner in the city.
• Palm Park: Every Sunday, there is arts and crafts show in this park along shoreline drive.
• East Beach: A beach full of activities, such as sand volleyball.
• The Santa Barbara County Courthouse: As THE most beautiful courthouse in US, it is a historical landmark for wedding pictures. From its tower , one can get 360 degree view of the entire city. Its gorgeous Mural Room presents the history of the city on the wall.
• UCSB
• Henry’s Beach: It is actually called Arroyo Burrno County Beach Park. It is the right place for sunset, where you can see the campus of UCSB cross the sea water.

[gmap name='sb' lat='34.419769' lng='-119.696747' zoom='12' desc='Santa Barbara, CA USA']

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As digital cameras prevail, even common people can get wonderful shots. But, on the other hand, pro-photographyers are telling us that digital shots/prints are flat, it is important to have accurate exposure and accurate color balance, and it takes a lot of time to do post-processing. More specifically, we are suggested not to over-expose or even under-expose a 1/3 stop. The article Expose (to the) Right (ETTR) uncovers the major difference between film and digital sensor, dated back to 2003 – 2004. ETTR has been rediscovered in the March/April issue of American Photo.

Each spot on the digital camera sensor can be treated as a bucket for water, where light is water. Buckets are always wet. There is always noise even without any light. Thus, we need enough light to avoid noise. Worse, once the bucket is full — white, it cannot contain extra light. Thus, we need to avoid over-exposure, which would turn everything into white. All in all, we need to push histogram to the right while not to over-expose shots, which is contrarily to film that could be pushed and is more tolerant on not-that-accurate exposures.

The digital new era means new ways of taking photos, and doing dark room processing. It is always important to understand the tools that we are using.

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Before we go further, let’s have a look at various types of distortions that we would encouter:

• Barrel distortion is a divergence from the rectilinear projection in geometric optics where image magnification decreases with increasing distance from the optical axis. The visible effect is that lines that do not go through the centre of the image are bowed outwards, towards the edge of the image.
• Pincushion distortion is a divergence from the rectilinear projection in geometric optics where image magnification increases with increasing distance from the optical axis. The visible effect is that lines that do not go through the centre of the image are bowed inwards, towards the centre of the image.
• Chromatic aberration is caused by the dispersion of the lens material, the variation of its refractive index n with the wavelength of light. The term purple fringing is also commonly used.
• Vignetting is a loss in clarity towards the corners and sides of an image (for example brightening, darkening, or blurring).
• Perspective projection distortion occurs in photographs when the film plane is not parallel to lines that are desired to be parallel in the photo. A common case is when a photo is taken of a tall building from ground level by tilting the camera backwards; the building appears to fall away from the camera.

The Lens Correction tool is Adobe’s try of killing all the birds by one stone. Now, let’s start the tool by choosing Distort > Lens Correction from the Filter menu. At the top left, there are cursor tools. Then, there is the picture that we want to adjust. At the middle bottom, there are options for preview and grid. All the correction controls are listed at the right panel: from top to bottom, we have Remove Distortion tool for both barrel and pincushion distortion, Chromatic Aberration tool, Vignette tool, Set Lens Default button, Tranform tool, including perspective correction and angle adjustment, and options for Edge and Scale.

The normal workflow is as the following:

1. Configure the grid to have the right size and color.
2. Reposition the grid along important lines in the subject.
3. Adjust the angle of the picture to make the subject’s important lines vertical or horizontal.
4. Use the Transform tool to correct the vertical and horizontal perspective.
5. Use the Remove Distortion tool set to remove barrel and pincushion perspective.
6. Correct vigentting if any.
7. Eliminate chromatic aberration if any.

References:

• Dpreview’s Photoshop CS2 Review.
• Tips for straightening things out with the Lens Correction tool – American Photo, March/April 2006
• Change Your Perspective – Popular Photography, March 2006
• Lens Correction filter in Photoshop CS2 – Photoshop CS2 Tutorial @ photoshopcafe

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In 1999, Nikon started the second run by announcing its breathtaking D1, followed by D1H and D1X, the next year, and D100, in 2002. For a while, Canon seemed to be lagging behind. However, this time, Canon took another detour by developing its own CMOS sensor technology. In 2001, Canon announced 1D, followed by 1Ds, the first full frame 35mm DSLR, in 2002, and Digital Rebel, the first DSLR under $1000, in 2003, along with 10D. Then, there were 20D in 2004, and 5D, the first full frame DSLR under $5000, in 2005. Would Nikon lose the battle again as in the film SLR market?

This time, underdog Nikon struke back much quicker. It announced D70, its $1000 camera, two years ago, followed by D2X, its CMOS based DSLR utilizing Wi-Fi technology, and D50, a cheaper version of D70, last year. This year, Nikon launched D200 providing less noisy pictures, while Canon only offered 30D having the same old sensor as in 20D, which disppointed a lot of users.

Well, the war continues. According to Thom Hogan, 2006 is the real year of the DSLR war. As consumers, we will all benefit from its outcome.

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