I have heard of using Vaseline on clear filters and seem some amazing photos taken with that technique. It seems they put Vaseline around the outside of the filter to blur the edges. That is another thing I have to try someday. Another good topic for a thread. Lots to do with this hobby. So much to do and so little time. I am sure the D400 will be here long before I get to my nylon and Vaseline experiments!

I just bought a D600 with the ME-1 and am also experiencing a very noticeable hiss with the audio. What a disappointment, as I was explicitly purchasing this setup to get reasonable video and audio.

Is this a known defect with the mic or cameras?

When Ritz Camera went under, on the latter days the filters were a dollar each. So, I grabbed a few including the soft focus ones, and even a few extra for use as Vaseline bases.....one can be far more creative with Vaseline than almost anything else when used properly.

Right, digital imaging is so, so cool because the the immediacy of seeing your results, the ability to manipulate the image after taking it and the ability to share images electronically.

I should try some of those nylon stockings over lenses sometime. That would be an interesting subject for a new thread. What type of images can everyone produce with that technique, try it and post them in the thread.

donaldejose said:
Admittedly, I have seen plenty of wonderful portraits taken with "hazy" lenses which do not produce sharp eyes. […] I think some lenses were even once developed and marketed to produce hazy portraits for a more "dreamy" look.

That's cool, but messing up the image quality is not something that I'd pay over 450 bucks for. After all, it's also easy to degrade a picture in the post. In the 60s, the often uses nylon stockings in front of the lenses. (I heard. I wasn't there :-) But my old photography books in the 80s always said that.)

Right, right, right! The first think I look for in a portrait is tack sharp eyes (both of them). The eyes engage me first. The expression engages me second. Perhaps that is just me. Perhaps I can be accused of having an eye "fetish." Admittedly, I have seen plenty of wonderful portraits taken with "hazy" lenses which do not produce sharp eyes. Blur or overall haziness has been a deliberate portrait technique I first became aware of in the mid 60's when I was looking at senior portraits. I think some lenses were even once developed and marketed to produce hazy portraits for a more "dreamy" look. Lensbaby produces some today.

donaldejose said:
...just for portraits once in a while where the subject often does not want every pimple showing maybe it is fine to keep using the old D version you already have.

Sort of... :-) Just looked for my test shots with the 1.8D, but unfortunately I seem to have deleted them.

No, I wouldn't say the lens is good for making skin look better. I already saw that in another thread, I find it rather strange to "blur things up" to make skin appear cleaner. This is a case for good retouching, not for hazy lenses or modes that lose detail. I would rather say, practice how to properly retouch skin – not with fully-automatic barbie-skin tools like Portrait Professional, but with Photoshop. Yes, it does depend on the job and whether you have the time for it or not, but I personally would rather have one really great-looking image than ten fully-automatic barbie-skin-retouched images.

Plus, when I shoot at 1.8, I still enjoy a tack-sharp lens; you would look for very shallow DOF, but not for hazy eyes (the point of focus), right?

Chris: Good to know. Thanks. So to paraphrase your advice: if you are buying an 85mm now, get the new G, don't buy the old D version, the new G is a better lens for about the same price. If you already have the old D version and are not going to shoot at f1.8 often or many just for portraits once in a while where the subject often does not want every pimple showing maybe it is fine to keep using the old D version you already have.

Emceee said:
Which 85 are you talking about?

Sorry... Edited that post now :-)

chris_weinert said:
Just saw this excellent thread now, great work (and 'idea'), donaldejose!

Concerning the 85D and G version comparison: I had the two lenses here to compare a while ago, and I thought the D was a really nice lens, until I noticed that it's quite sensible to bright light when open wider, produces quite some haze and is rather soft. The G version was a lot better in this regard, and a lot sharper wide open. Since the price tag isn't that different, I'd (and did) really choose the G.

The actual performance improvement is a lot more than the 50D vs 50G, for example (where in my eyes it's actually debatable whether that was an improvement at all).

Which 85 are you talking about?

Just saw this excellent thread now, great work (and 'idea'), donaldejose!

Concerning the 85/1.8D and 1.8G version comparison: I had the two lenses here to compare a while ago, and I thought the D was a really nice lens, until I noticed that it's quite sensible to bright light when open wider, produces quite some haze and is rather soft. The G version was a lot better in this regard, and a lot sharper wide open. Since the price tag isn't that different, I'd (and did) really choose the G.

The actual performance improvement is a lot more than the 50/1.4D vs 50/1.4G, for example (where in my eyes it's actually debatable whether that was an improvement at all).

As promised some time ago, here is the 85mm f1.8 D lens on the D600 body.

More portraits taken with the old 85mm f1.8 D lens on a D600 are posted in this thread. http://nikonrumors.com/forum/topic.php?id=15698

Sorry, don't have one to try but I see it has had some good reviews. Plastic and light should fit well with a D600 as a light travel combo.

Has anyone tried the AF 28-200 f/3.5-5.6 G? I'm considering to buy it as a travel lens instead of the 28-80 f/3.3-5.6G in order to get a little more reach, but am unsure about the image quality comparison. Any real world experience would be helpful.

I'm using a AF 20mm 2.8D on my D600 now, which is an excellent lens for the price. I thought about buying one of wide zooms, but am glad I sticked to "cheap" approach... :)

TaoTeJared said:
If you are using Lightroom that would help a great deal. Due to my "laziness" and as a gap fill before I get a new computer I had to move my older files catalogue to an external drive - Now it feels like I am trying to walk though 4 feet of mud to edit anything. That just showed me the extreme on the slow side where speed improvements can exist.

Sounds to me like all you are using your catalogue for is to keep the picture-edit-history, like all the other >90% of photographers do (me included).

I found there is a workaround to that. I use a temporary catalogue that i clean up after processing a photo shoot (just remove all the pictures). If you enable the "Automatically write changes to XMP" option in your catalogues Metadata configuration setting then all those edits (exposure/whitebalance/brushes/cropping/etc) will be saved in a seperate XMP file. So there is no need for keeping the catalogue anymore. If i want to re-edit an old shoot i just import the pictures again into my temporary catalogue and the XMP file will be automatically applied, nothing will get lost.

By using the XMP option you can get rid of your lightroom catalogues, no need to waste your storage with them (they do waste a lot!) and no need to back them up anymore!

The point is that a 7200rpm 3.5 inch drive performs better than 7200rpm 2.5 inch drive, not to mention having larger capacities. Adding that additional speed to a hybrid drive would give your system even more of a boost.

Of course that is more of an issue for single drive systems (all in ones), than standard desktop PC's, which could easily have an SSD as a boot drive and then have additional traditional hard drives for storage.

PB PM said:
I think it is too bad that there are no desktop variants yet...

There are many 5.25"/3.5" bay mounting kits that you can get in order to mount one of these Hybrid Drives's within a desktop PC.

Hybrid drives are really worth looking at, especially if you have a notebook. Seagate has had several on the market for a few years now, and they are known to preform well. I think it is too bad that there are no desktop variants yet (that don't require a PCI-E slot).

Another option for some to consider are Hybrid Drives. Apple has introduced there own called Fusion Drive. These drives are basically flash-base storage in conjunction with a standard hard drive. The flash storage range from 8gig to 128Gig while the traditional HD storage range from 1-3 TB, combination.

Here are some data for your viewing pleasure.

http://www.ocztechnology.com/products/hybrid-solutions.html
http://www.seagate.com/internal-hard-drives/laptop-hard-drives/momentus-xt-hybrid/

Cheers....

mirtos said:
Actually, its not BS at all. Apple is consistently behind on upgrading their chipsets, their MOBOs, and ESPECIALLY their graphics cards.

Apple excels at using the latest in what the user directly experiences, and pushing their software to get the most out what the user doesnt directly experience. It is a fallacy that apple uses the latest technology though. Think about how long it took them to upgrade to i5/i7. Especially in their desktop models. Their laptop models might/are a different story because they realease updates so much more often than the desktop lines. But because apple doesnt tend to support the new chipsets until they release the new model, it means upgrading apples is a pain in the ass.

Who cares about BluRay? Well, depsite what you think, a lot of people still deal directly with discs. Apple has chosen not to support BluRay for whatever reason. It took apple a LONG time to accept that HDMI was something they had to support. The reality is when you buy apple (and i do, i have both apple and PC), you are buying into their vision of the future. They havent always been right. They were when it came to smartphones and tablets, they were wrong when it came to other things. When they are wrong it takes them a long time to admit it.

Also their hard drives are almost always substandard.

Yes Apple has slower upgrade cycles for some products (yearly), but when the new models are released they do use the latest chipsets. Why Apple does that? Profit plain and simple. I agree that the Mac Pro is very out of date, but then again so is the whole Xeon platform that it is based on, when compared to consumer chipsets.

Substandard hard drives, what are you talking about? My iMac has a WB Black drive, so how is that substandard? In the notebook space they are a little slow (why 5400rmp?), so I wont argue there. Then again they were one of the first brands to push SSD's in a retail notebook.

If you haven't noticed Apple is removing optical drives from all new Macs, so there is no chance of Blue-ray ever coming. In any case Blue-ray as a platform is DOA, like any new optical disk media coming out in this digital age (unless you are over 40). Don't get me wrong, I still use optical media for some clients, but I might burn 2-3 DVD's a year compared to 10+ a few years ago. More clients seem to want data on a USB drive these days, basically negating the need for optical media.

Anyway, lets back on topic (I'll do that now). As for SSD vs hard drive, for editing. I don't think it makes a huge difference in the speed of the editing process itself, but it makes accessing files much faster. SSD's perform best when put into a RAID array, where they will max out SATA3's throughput.

Just a minor nit, but 15,000rpm HDDs are available and offer 50% better seek latency (obviously). SSDs are still faster, but as many have mentioned, limited by bus speed. Thunderbolt on the apple is rated for 10 gigabits/s. (technically 20, but the other channel is used for display). Third party blu-ray players work fine on the Mac.

Just clouding the issue with a few facts :-)

Now to the actual topic of this thread: if you could somehow separate the catalog and the data onto separate I/O channels, that would be the best performance. On a desktop this would mean buying an additional PCIe card to drive an SSD just for the catalog and using the embedded I/O channel for the rest of the data.

Backups are essential no matter what physical media is used. I've seen plenty of catastrophic HDD failures without any warning.

one thing about SSD. Its important to remember, that while its ALMOST as reliable as HDD technology, two things you need to consider before using it: 1. there is almost no warning sign that it will go. 2. when it goes, its EXTRAORDINARILY expensive to recover data, and its much more difficult. I do all my editing on SSD as well, but its important to keep that in mind.

Actually, its not BS at all. Apple is consistently behind on upgrading their chipsets, their MOBOs, and ESPECIALLY their graphics cards.

Apple excels at using the latest in what the user directly experiences, and pushing their software to get the most out what the user doesnt directly experience. It is a fallacy that apple uses the latest technology though. Think about how long it took them to upgrade to i5/i7. Especially in their desktop models. Their laptop models might/are a different story because they realease updates so much more often than the desktop lines. But because apple doesnt tend to support the new chipsets until they release the new model, it means upgrading apples is a pain in the ass.

Who cares about BluRay? Well, depsite what you think, a lot of people still deal directly with discs. Apple has chosen not to support BluRay for whatever reason. It took apple a LONG time to accept that HDMI was something they had to support. The reality is when you buy apple (and i do, i have both apple and PC), you are buying into their vision of the future. They havent always been right. They were when it came to smartphones and tablets, they were wrong when it came to other things. When they are wrong it takes them a long time to admit it.

Also their hard drives are almost always substandard.

Apple uses the latest Intel chipsets in new machines, just like any Intel based Windows PC, so this nonsense about Apple using old tech is simply BS. SATA3 chipsets (6GB/s) have only been shipping in 2009, so it is impossible for your 6 year old machine to have a chipset that supports SATA3. It likely has SATA2 (3GB/s), but nice try.

As for Blu-ray, who cares? I haven't bought a DVD in years, let alone have any interest in Blu-ray. When there are digital services like Netflix (for example) who needs a crap load of disks filling up their house?

TaoTeJared said:
Most all PCs are 6gb/s and have been for years. That is one of the "apple" secrets that they still use old tech - kind of like no blu-ray anything. ;)
I have a 6yr old machine and it has it. Now whether your drives are 6gb (including your SSD) that could be a good question.

With all do respect, Apple does not use "old-tech" they use and incorporate many of the newest tech within their computers. As for Blue-ray, I have not found a need for any optical drive for many years. Hence, why I pulled mine out and put in the second hard drive. If I want to watch a Blue-Ray movie, that is what my home theater is for. On my laptop, I find the ripped version of the video in 1080P and I'm all set.

SATA Ver 3.0 /w 6 Gbit/s data throughput was introduced in July 2008, and it was fully adopted by computer manufactures in May 2009, thus I question your 6 years old motherboard in having it. Moreover, it was not until late 2009 that hard drives were introduced that could take advantage of such read/write speeds.