Monday, December 6, 2010

Impulse--thy name is empty the checking account.

Don't even want to look to see how many months ago I said I would be blogging more often. So on to the news of the day

Bought a Nikon D7000 today complete with the 18-105mm kit lens.

Was I planning to do it. Yes, after reading the early buzz I told myself, and my wife, that in some far future when the D60 died, died (I'm up around 40,000 shutter actuations) I be looking for deal on a good used camera. One like the D7000. But not now.

After all, it's the photographer not the camera that takes.....blah, blah, blah.

Then this weekend when I was down with a cold, I decided to toss in my two kopeks into a flickr discussion on RAW workflow and histograms. Before I started to write that post I needed to check a few facts about Raw Therapee, the free GIMP converter.

I was not expecting to see much new so I was pleasantly surprised to discover a group of camera hackers were hard at work on version 3. An alpha hack at the moment but near a beta release, I download the latest build. And since dpreview had the D7000's noise images up on their site and RAW Therapee handles jpgs like they are RAW I downloaded dp's ISO 25,000 noise test.

And after I pulled that image into RT and ran the default noise routine to see... HOLY DAMN DOGGY.



The screen crop is a bit hard to see and having the globe in the center of the gray scale didn't help, but you get the idea. The noise reduced ISO 25,000 line profile is on the right. Old Scrib didn't pound the noise in the ground either. He had to stare hard to find traces of smudged detail in the cleaned up image.

Today started as a future planning day. Up at auction was an Nikon 85mm f1.8 with a price that hadn't quite reached the e-bay stratosphere. One of the earliest non AI mount ones. Since I had to go by the Camera Company on another errand, I packed up a Viv Series I AI lens and a non AI lens and decided to stop by and take a few test shots.

And--the only problem is that the West Side Camera Company was sold out and I must wait til 10:00 tomorrow to pick up the one that is coming in from the East Side store.

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