Google snowmobile, Photo: Pontus Johansson

Google Sweden has a specially designed snowmobile that they are using with the google camera technology to creat a first person view of all the ski slopes in Sweden. The snowmobile has been spotted in several different ski slopes, large and small, documenting the whole slope.

You can expect an integration in “StreetView” with the swedish ski slopes soon. Something that I believe ski enthusiasts will be happy for. You can virtually visit the ski slopes before you pack your bags and go there in person. Very handy…

You get this. Watch it and enjoy.

There are many advantages to this of course, any lens made since 1956 or so can be used on modern cameras wich means the used lens market is huge. You might not get metering or autofocus but if you are prepared to do some of these things in manual mode then this is for you.

Canon changed their mount with the introduction of the digital cameras to their EF mount. There are even two types of EF mounts, one for the small APS-C sized digital cameras and one for their “full frame” counterpart, the reason being that because of the tightness between the lens aft parts and the mirror some lenses designed for the 1,5 crop format would actually touch the mirror when it flips up if mounted on full frame cameras.

I have used older lenses with mechanical autofocus on my Nikon D70s and D300 cameras and both makes great use of them. I have even tested fully manual lenses and they work pretty well if you take the time to focus properly or use a sufficient large DOF of course

The drawback is that the standard F-mount puts the lens a bit further from the focal plane than Canon and some other makers does, this means that it is not possible to use say Canon lenses on Nikon bodies while the reverse can be done with some success.

So happy birthday F-mount!

Google it here.

I decided against the D700 for several reasons and the most important one was the lenses. DX lenses won’t be able to work very well on the FX sensor in the D700 and I like the DX lenses for two reasons, they are sometimes half the price of the comparable FX lenses and they are lighter to carry. The last point is important because I love to hike and bring the camera gear with me. 

The D300 is also a fair bit lower priced than the D700 which meant I got a nice kit including three lenses and an SB-800 for just a little more than what the D700 house would have cost me so I am really happy with it. 

The main reasons for my upgrade was the following

• The small display on the D70s makes macro work difficult
• There is no mirror lock-up function meaning mirror slap shakes when using long exposures and tripod.
• The noise at higher ISO on the D70s is shameful compared to the modern cameras, in reality anything above ISO 600 is unuseable.
• D-Lighting exposure control in the D300 and newer cameras is fantastic in some difficult light conditions.
• 14 bit RAW format (12 in the old cameras) meaning 12 dB better image dynamics per colour!
• No vertical grip for the D70s (that is seriously useful), the MB-10 battery grip for the D300 is awesome!
• Faster serial shots, lovely when shooting animals like birds. 8 frames per second on the D300 is a vast improvement from the D70s.
• Larger buffer memory also helps with serial shots.
• Easier controls on the camera – even if the D70s had nice controls the D300 is not only nice, they are seriously well laid out and though through.
• Faster in every aspect.
• Has PC sync connector on camera

Here are some test shots, these are taken handheld in the middle of the night just using existing light. Yes there is noise, but not much and the pictures are actually quite nice. The D70s would come nowhere near this and would not even reach ISO 3200.

SLR Gear >>>

Learning to read the diagrams here is a bit tricky but there is a wealth of information on almost any lens you can think of getting for your camera and also other stuff. But I really love it for their lens reviews.

• Continuous shooting (Ch or continuous high)
• Tracking autofocus
• Aperture priority
• ISO200
• Center focus
• Matrix metering
• White balance daylight/cloudy
• RAW format

Here are my arguments for each of these settings.

Continuous shooting this is great because if something happens unexpectedly you just point and keep shooting frame after frame and you might get that special picture even if you was not ready to compose and wait for the moment. Things happens fast in the street so be prepared. A useful lens to have mounted is a superzoom, 18-200 mm or similar, they give you great range and can handle almost any urban situation. The drawback is of course that superzooms are a compromise and may lack sharpness for example.

Tracking autofocus this means the camera keeps focussing all the time even if you keep shooting frame after frame. This is good for tracking moving objects but you have to be aware where the focus points are in your frame. On Nikon cameras this is AF-C (Autofocus continuous). Single time focusing is called AF-S.

Aperture priority or the “A” mode on the camera. This allows you to select the aperture for best depth of field and focus and the camera will automatically pick the apropriate shutter time for a good exposure. This means you don’t have to worry about the exposure and you still maintain a high level of control. Most lenses are sharpest when they are stopped down 2-3 steps. For most this means that f/5.6 – f/11 is probably the best choice in broad daylight. As your light diminish, keep shooting but open the aperture to f/3.5 or f/2.8 or even further if your lens supports it! Most superzooms can not open byond 3.5 at their broad end and 5.6 at their far end.

ISO200 this is a good setting because it minimises the noise from the sensor. If the light conditions are low, raise it but do it with caution since it can produce severely grainy images. Some cameras are much better than others though, you may want to experiment with this. But if your light conditions do not require it—keep your ISO low.

Center focus is preferred because thats where you aim. Use the AF-L (autofocus lock) button to lock if you wish to recompose. The reason center focus is so nice is that if something happens quickly you tract it the focus system has a better chance of concentrating on the object you are tracking. On Nikon cameras the 21 point focus system is great. On the older models as the D70 that has a very limited number of focus points use the single center dot.

Matrix metering means the camera is ready for most light conditions. Activate the “highlight” function on your display to see if the metering has overexposed the picture, then use the exposure compensation setting +/- to change, recompose and take another shot. Using spot metering it may be very difficult to get the right exposure when there are multiple light sources as it generally is in the city. Centre weighted can sometimes be useful but most of the time matric metering is the best.

White balance does not matter too much if you are shooting RAW which you should be anyway… you can always correct this afterwards in your post processing because RAW files keep the sensor data as it was while JPEG will apply the white balance to the final picture. If you are shooting JPEG then set your WB accordinly, if you are shooting RAW you may do so but auto is usually fine as well.

RAW format is great because it allows you to adjust exposure and white balance with the maximum dynamics in the picture. In RAW you can easily correct 1 EV underexposure but if you attempt to do this on a JPEG the picture usually does not fare well.

JPEG format is not listed above but still very useful in certain situations… There is one time I will flip to JPEG when shooting street phot and that is when I will be taking long series of pictures of some event such as marathon runners or similar. The reason is that when I shoot RAW my camera buffer overloads after a few pictures and the camera can not fire as rapidly as in the beginning because it has to wait for the memory card to “swallow” all the data. Since JPEG images are pre-compressed before they are written to the memory card they are smaller and thus allows me to shoot very long series of pictures before the camera memory buffer is full and it starts to “stutter”. Don’t forget to set it back to RAW when you are done!

If you are not familiar with these topics, then it would be better if you familiarized yourself with them before. There are a number of articles you can find that will take you through this of course.

What is infrared light?

Infrared light is light that has a frequency that is lower than the visible light in the spectrum. We can also say that the wavelength is longer than the visible light. Infrared light have various properties that are different from visible light and it reflects and refracts different from visible light through the camera lens.

Here is a diagram that shows how the infrared spectrum relates to the visible light spectrum. In this article we will only be talking about photographing in the infrared spectrum that is close to visible light, between 1200-730 nm roughly. Infrared photography in this aspect is not to be confused with heat signature cameras and systems such as FLIR (example below) which are used for example to detect body heat. There is also the “far infrared spectrum” said to have medicinal use and influence for example the production of vitamin D in the skin of humans and a few other species.

Radation in the thermal heat range and the far IR range does not really affect the result of IR photography as we have limited our reception range to the near visible light IR spectrum. The sensors in a digital camera is also not very sensitive in ranges under 1000 nm so it makes little sense trying.

This shows the spectrum of electromagnetic radiation. Source: Wikipedia Commons.

Looking at the picture above we can see that the visible light spectrum ranges from around 730 nm to about 370 nm. Above we have X-ray and gamma rays, nasty stuff to us humans but below is the infrared portion of the band.

Thermal Image of a Dog. Source: Wikipedia Commons.

Here to the left is a picture taken with a different technology (FLIR) that captures the heat radiated from a body.

We can here see the lighter areas correspond to hotter parts of the animal. This is a technique that is quite often used for tecnhical purposes such as trying to find leaks in insulations and heat pipes and similar.

This is known as thermal imaging but is the area around 100 µm and photographic sensors for normal cameras don’t work well in this range. This is however what most people think about first when subjected to the term “infrared photography” and it is important to distinguish between the two.

So the infrared spectrum we are interested in lies between the lowest portion of the visible light spectrum around 730 nm and down to perhaps something like 1200 nm. This light comes normally from very “hot” sources, such as the sun, or a light bulb perhaps.

Those of you who are physiscists may remember the black body radiation formula and put it to use here

In this picture it is possible to see the difference between the visible light spectrum and the IR spectrum. The left hand picture is shot with infrared filter and the right hand side is a normal visible light picture that has been shot in B&W

What is needed for digial infrared photography?

You need a digital camera, preferably an SLR type camera because we will be attachning an IR filter to the camera lens. Some point and shoot cameras also allow you to attach filters and should work similarly as the digital SLR type cameras.

Different cameras have different sensitivity for IR in their sensors. Some cameras will therefore need much longer exposure times than other cameras, and the results may be quite differnet depending on choice of IR filter and camera type.

This photograph shows what happens when a digital sensor photographs something with such an intense IR radiation that it overloads the sensor.

You will need a tripod to mount the camera on because a normal digital camera has a sensor that is so sensitive to IR light that the camera is equipped with an IR blocking filter just in front of the sensor.

This blocking filter is there so that IR will not disturb the normal function of the camera sensor. If a digital camera IR filter is saturated with IR so that some of it gets through and starts interfering with the normal imaging processing then we may get something like the photo to the left.

If you look at it you can see that the cinders are not in the correct colour, the sensor chip is “blooming” because of the extreme infrared radiation from this and if the camera did not have this IR blocking filter then any picture in daylight would suffer from the same problem.

What we will do now is to take a filter that blocks visible light and allows IR to pass through. This filter will be mounted on the camera lens and then even if the camera has an IR blocking filter we will increase exposure until we get a reasonable image.

We may expect exposure times between 5 seconds up to several minuted depending on factors such as, sensor sensitivity in the infrared range, the IR blocking filters effectiveness in the camera, camera ISO setting, type of IR filter being used on the lens.

To summarize, this is what is needed for digital infrared photography:

• Camera with lens suitable for landscape photography, a nice wide angle is a good starting point.
• An infrared filter. They are usually something like €60 and upwards depending on quality and the exact type.
• A tripod to mount the camera on because of the long shutter time.

How to set the camera up for IR photography

First of all there are a few things you need to know about IR light in order to set the camera up properly. IR light is not visible so it means you must actually work in the dark so to speak. When the IR filter is mounted on your camera you can not see anything through the viewfinder of the SLR camera.

If you have a live-view on your camera you might actually see something, it depends on how sensitive your sensor is to infrared light. An un-modified camera blocks most of the infrared light on the sensor with a blue filter so the levels reaching the  sensor is very low for this reason.

Tripod

Shooting IR with a camera that has not been modified for IR photography only needs to be put on a tripod or similar. You are looking at exposure times from seconds up to minutes even and this is not really something even the best would attempt hand-held.

A good steady tripod is therefore recommended and you should also consider having a remote shutter release connected to the camera. There are good IR remotes and there are also tethered release cables that are very useful. This way you do not have to touch the camera at all when exposing the picture.

If you do not have a remote release then you can use the camera self-timer. Set it for about five seconds, that shoud do the trick. Then when you press the shutter, the camera will wait five seconds, allowing the vibrations from your touch to subside before the shutter actually opens. Hence sharper prictures.

Mirror slap vibrations is not normally a problem with shutter times in the range of several seconds. The reason for this is that the vibration rings out so quickly that it will subside in the first 5% or so of the exposure, then for the remaining 90% the rig will be steady so it will not show much in the final picture. Mirror slap is mostly a problem with shutter times around 1/15 – 1/2 second.

Manual mode

You need to work most cameras in manual mode for this time since metering and autofocus will not work properly. You will have to rely on the histogram to make the exposure correct. Read more about the histogram here.

A starting point for my D70s in manual mode and nice sunshine is generally f/8 and 10s exposure time.  Then I check the histogram, determine how much under/over-exposure there is, adjust the exposure time to compensate and take a new picture.

Most of the time the second or third picture is dead on!

Getting it sharp

You will also need to know that your lenses focuses differently in IR compared to visible light. This used to be widely recognised and prime lenses had usually markings showing where the IR offset was. Take for example this lens, it is the Nikkor AF 50/1.8D lens which is a favourite for sharpness and good quality. This lens have a hyperfocal marking for f/11 and f/22 and it has a line to show where the current focus is set. On the side of this line is a small dot, this dot signifies the corresponding focal point in infrared!

To focus this lens in infrared you can focus it in visible light, check where the line is aligned with and then manually turn it so that the dot is aligned where the line used to be. Now you have achieved the same focus in the infrared wavelengths.

Since most lenses do not come with this feature these days – most of them have no hyperfocal mark and zoom lenses normally only got distance markings which generally only are correct at one focal length. So in order to focus properly we have to focus the lens either manually or find some way to make sure that we are in the focal range. To do this we can use a hyperfocal chart and focus manually, something that requires a bit of practice (and knowledge about hyperfocal charts and how they are calculated).

The second way is to use an aperture that gives a very deep focus. Using an aperture of f/8 or f/11 should be quite enough for most lenses. This means we can focus the lens before we mount the filter, then when the filter is mounted we leave it focused in visible light and because of the large focus depth we can assume that most of our picture in the infrared will be in focus anyway.

This trick is pretty good with wide-angle lenses and up to say 70mm focal length or so, after that you will have to experiment with manual focus since f/11 may not be enough. Going to a higher f-stop such as f/22 or f/32 can be done of course but there are limits to this because of the extreme shutter times you will have to endure. Most digital cameras don’t like more than a couple of minutes of exposure time, their sensors goes hot and starts showing hot pixels.

Infrared focus index

Some lenses have an infrared index mark on them. Today this is becoming rarer, but most older lenses do have this mark and if you look on your focusing scale you might be able to locate it. It is usually a line or dot in a different colour next to the normal focusing mark.

Lens with IR focusing mark. It is the round dot to the left of the normal focus line here. Most lenses focus closer in IR than in visible light. This is the Nikkor AF 50/1.8D lens, a very good choice for IR photography actually.

If you are using a zoom lens there is usually no IR index on the more modern lenses although some older lenses can have IR index markings for their shortest and longest focal length. When the lens is zoomed to something in between you will have to guess and estimate the actual focus point.

This is usually not a problem unless you are shooting the lens wide open. For example my 18-200/3.5-5.6 lens is pretty sharp no matter where the focus is set at the 18 mm end most of the time. When using this I just dial in f/8 in the aperture and I get pretty sharp pictures in IR as well.

If you want to experiment you can take a series of pictures with slight adjustment to the focus in between. This way you will be able to find the sweet spot for your lens at infinity for example and at a certain focal distance.

The IR index changes when you zoom the lens. If you find the sweet spot somewhere to the left of the normal focus at 20 mm then when you zoom it to 200 mm it may be very much different.

How to take the picture

Here is a procedure on what I do when I take the picture:

• Put the camera on the tripod.
• Set the camera to RAW mode. You will be needing to adjust the white balance in the post processing and this is best done in RAW mode.
• Dial in APERTURE priority mode and set the aperture to what you consider useful, something like f/8 or f/11 on a sunny day should be fine. The aperture mode is usually referred to as “aperture priority” on Nikon cameras and have the “A” symbol. Canon cameras usually have the “Av” marking instead.
• Compose your picture carefully and focus. You can use autofocus if you want.
• Put the focus switch to manual mode (otherwise the camera may try to re-focus after you put the IR filter on it).
• Take one picture without the filter.
• Switch to manual mode, this is usually marked as “M” on most cameras. Now we can set both aperture and shutter time manually. Leave the aperture at the same as you had before.
• Set exposure time to something around 10 seconds.
• Take a picture.
• View the histogram, if the picture is underexposed, increase the exposure time, one EV underexposure is double the time one EV overexposure is half the time.
• Take another picture and repeat until you have found a good exposure for your picture.

It is not so difficult once you have practiced a few times and it becomes a second nature. But remember to turn off autofocus or else the camera may start “hunting” for focus once you press the shutter release half-way down when you have mounted the IR filter on your lens. This will of course result in a very blurry picture.

Sorunda Church photographed in infrared. Slight colorization in the post processing.

When to use Infrared photography?

IR phtotography is at its best when there is an abundance of sunshine around. This will really bring out the special IR effect when using the IR filter as well as shorten the exposure times (unless you have a proper modified IR camera).

Normal visible light photography is usually best in the mornings and evenings as the sunlight comes from the side and lower at the horizon rather than shining straight down from above creating very harsh conditions.

But now you can use these times of the day since the light mid-day is perfect for IR photography and it makes it stand out. The contrasts is not a problem for IR the same as for normal photography in the same way.

Sometimes infrared gives very unexpected results. Take a look at this picture here:

This is an example of the IR effects that we can see. Her clothes here is actually black but not in the IR spectrum. A black sweather with white print, black track pants and a backpack that is black and rust red.

What to photograph

Green plants becomes white in IR so they are quite interesting and really bring out that special IR effect that you are looking for. Whater becomes very dark and moody, the sky is dark but clouds are very bright and because of this you can compose a lot of mood in the picture by using the following elements:

• Trees and foliage
• Water streams
• Clear skies
• Clear skies with a bit of cloud
• Stone walls, buildings, ruins

If the sky is grey and cloudy the IR effect will not be as pronounced but that does not mean that you can do it. Au contraire my friends, you should experiment. Winter landscapes and snow can be very effectful as well.

I have also found that stone buildings such as old churches, ruins and so on are very interesting to use for IR photography. Experiment and please leave feedback here on what you think about it!

Photographs in nature and in the city scape will be quite different in IR than in visible light so experiment with both there are many many interesting things to take pictures of.

You can also use IR photography indoors but the exposure times can easily be several minutes unless you are using a converted camera. This picture is a picture that I took in my kitchen where the exposure time was about 2 minutes and the only thing lighting the scene was actually a lamp in the window.

My kitchen in Infrared. Check out the plant in the window where you really can see the IR effect.

The post processing

The post processing of the images is a bit of a trick. Depending on what software you are using you may have to work to set the white balance right.

Infrared pictures straight out of the camera have very weird colours usually in the red end of the spectrum and in order to have colourized IR pictures you may have to set the white balance manually.

I am using Adobe Lightroom to post process my pictures and I have to set a custom white balance that is very cold, around 2000 K or so. Some softwares may not be able to go this low so you will have to work with this.

If you are shooting and going for B&W IR photos then this is not a problem since you can just filter the photo to B&W later as you want and it will be great, you then don’t have to worry about the white balance at all.

Unprocessed IR picture. This is straight from the camera (just converted from RAW to JPEG format for the web)

Infrared with whitebalance adjusted. Here the WB has been adjusted to around 3000 K. You can now see there are some variances in the red and blue parts of the spectrum here. I have deliberately not postprocessed the picture further.

Black and White IR. Here I have also neutralized the colours by shifting the green/purple balance and the result is an "almost B&W" rendition.

In this picture I have preserved some colour and enhanced it by increasing the saturation many times. It does give me a feeling of nuclear disaster or something... what do you think?

Convert your camera

If you are serious about infrared photography and wish to pursue this you can have your digital camera converted for IR photography alone. This means that the IR blocking filter inside on top of the sensor is removed and replaced by a filter that blocks visible light.

The advantage here is that you may still compose your pictures as normal, looking through the viewfinder now works as before, you can focus and work around most obstacles here and then when you press the shutter release you get and infrared photograph instead of the normal one.

Shutter times wiht this solution will be similar to normal visible light shutter times and you can use the camera’s noramal metering. You will have to dial-in some exposure compensation however, perhaps -1.5EV or something similar but that is not terribly different to visible light photography!

The back side is of course that your camera can then not be used for normal light photography.

And the focusing mechanism of the camera still works in visible light which means that you still have to take care of the focus offset. The focal point of the camera can be adjusted but only to a certain extent because different lenses at different focal lengths have different IR focus index points means that there is no simple fix that will work for all lenses at all focal lengths.

One of the best camera fixers out there is actually LifePixel [lifepixel.com] who can convert your camera or sell you a conversion kit if you are handy enought to do the conversion yourself. For less than $200 you can have a new hotmirror filter installed in your camera and then take IR pictures free-hand. Lots of people buy a spare body from Ebay or similar places (A D70 is a great camera for IR by the way) and have it converted while they keep their main camera unconverted.

I will be converting my camera when I invest in a new camera house.

Some more pictures

Here are some pictures that I have taken and I like. They have all been taken with a Nikon D70s and B&W 87C infrared filter. This filter removes all visible light and actually the top part of the near visible light spectrum also of the IR. This means that if you want to take IR pictures with more colour you should rather get a Hoya R72 filter or similar that works from 720 nm and down to about 1000 nm. This filter starts at around 830 nm and thus is better suited for B&W IR photography.

Lake muskan. This photograph has been post processed with a bit of colour added to it.

Grödinge Church in Infrared.

Railroad being built close to Segersäng train station in Stockholm. This is a combination of IR and visible light.

Church in Sorunda in IR

Stones in Ängsjö by the waterline. Because of the long exposure the water becomes very very nice...

Sundbyberg City. Infrared plus natural light in combination. A calm very serene picture emerges.

This article will start off on the D70s camera that I have, but should work very similar on most Nikon digital bodies. It may also be the same for Canon and other brands although I have not verified it. If you know, please leave a comment to this effect!

Most people are probably aware that in the camera CSM menu item #15 you can control what this button actually does. The obvious choices here are the following:

• Lock exposure and auto-focus at the same time (AF/AE mode)
• Lock only auto-focus (AF mode)
• Lock only exposure (AE mode)

What people generally do not know is that there are two more modes that are very useful in certain situations. These modes are:

• Auto focus ON mode (AF-ON mode)
• Flash metering off mode (FV mode)

They are not so well described in the manual and so you may want to practice a bit with using them! The rest of this article is to describe some situations where they are quite useful:

Auto-focus mode

This moves the autofocus from the half-way pressed shutter release button to the AE-L/AF-L button on the back side of the camera. Why do you want that?

There are several situations when this is handy. If you have pre-focused the camera and don’t want it to change focus you can prefocus with the AE-L/AF-L button and then keep pressing the shutter release. If you press it half-way the camera will meter but not refocus.

In the menu this is called AF-ON (auto focus ON).

With lenses that have VR (vibration reduction) pressing the shutter half-way engages the VR function (when it is turned on). This function draws lots of juice from the camera battery so it is a good thing to not engage when not needed. If you are using the AE-L/AF-L button for focus then you have managed to separate focus function from metering and VR function and thus you can use the auto-focus happily without using the power for the VR of the lens (and withoug having to turn it off on the lens side-button meanin that if you want to take the shot you can just do so, the lens and camera is ready).

Premetered Flash mode

This is even less obvious for most people. Have you ever used the Nikon i-TTL system to take flash shots of your pets? Then you know that the camera sends out a pre-flash to meter on just before the main flash is sent out. This makes cats and dogs and other animals with good reflexes to close their eyes and you end up with a picture that’s not so good.

If you scroll down the menu you will find an entry there that say FV-Lock. The way this works is ingenious. By pressing the AE-L/AF-L button you can control the pre-flash used to meter before the main flash is used. So this is what you will do:

1. Frame and compose your shot carefully
2. Focus automatically or manually as you prefer
3. Press the AE-L/AF-L button, the flash will flash and the camera will meter and remember the flash value.
4. Now, wait till the right moment and take the picture. The flash will go off without pre-flash and you will have a perfect picture of your pets!

This is also very useful when working with still pictures, it saves energy in the flash head and especially when working with a flash through an umbrella that means you may go much further on one set of batteries!

Remember that you need to do another pre-flash when you re-compose the picture, change angles or anything else that affects the light in the picture!

There is a lot of confusion among people on the net who recently bought a Nikon digital camera. So I was trying to clear up this concept once and for all. Please link to this site if you run a mailing list or similar where this question comes up now and then.

Nikkor is the brand of lenses produced by Nikon corporations. A lot of people refer to them simply as Nikon brand lenses or Nikon lenses. Don’t get confused, the trading name these lenses are sold under are Nikkor.

Over the years Nikon have mande many different types of lenses, some are compatible with your digital DSLR, some can be used with some effort and a few are not useable or is painful to adapt to the DSLR.

Nikon is however the camera manufacturer with the best compatibility of old lenses on new cameras. Most of the lenses since the fifties and forward can actually be used on a modern Nikon DSLR, I am talking about the D70(s), D50, D100, D1x and such cameras. I personally own a D70s and I am very happy with this camera, it is a great photographic instrument. Perhaps matrix light metering may not work or you have to focus manually but the lenses would actually fit with a few exceptions that you can find in the table below.

I will skip some historical lenses from the eighties in this article, because you will most likely never have to deal with them, and if you do you can always check this article out where the author discusses this problem in more detail. This article is just to give you a quick summary and help at a glance.

Nikkor lenses have a lot of different designation letters to tell the user what type of lens it is, what kind of glass, type of focus and so on and pretty much any other feature. I will try here in a form of a table just very briefly try to describe the different versions and I will not go into too much detail. After all this page is just trying to answer questions like “Will my lens of type <insert type here> work with my Nikon DSLR” and “I have this Nikkor 35-70 mm AF-S ED lens from my old Nikon F-series camera, can I use it with my new D70?”. So here we go.

Lenses and Mechanics

These describes the mechanical differences between the lenses made by Nikon over the years. Almost all lenses can be used with a modern digital body, however you really want the autofocus lenses with built-in motors. They are great in the field and manual focus lenses is only really practical in a studio environment because they do not give you proper metering cababilities with the camera.

Optical differences

These should not impact the compatibility on your lens, they are mainly to do with the optics itself and how to distinguish a more expensive lens from a cheaper one

Help me update this list if you find any omissions or errors, please let me know immediately. Thank you.

More information here.

One of the most useful features of the digital camera is the histogram. This is a diagram that shows how you shot was exposed after you take it. It is invaluable to avoid over- and under exposure, but also when shooting in manual mode because just looking at the LCD is most of the time very difficult to see exactly how the exposure works.

How to find the histogram

This is different on different cameras. You may have to consult your manual. On most NIkon digital bodies you can do the following. Take a picture and press the “view” button so that it shows on the LCD. Then use the 4-way button, keep pressing the “right” on this button and it will cycle through various modes showing different information. When you see the following you have found the histogram:

What the histogram shows

D70 Histogram Page

As you can see the histogram shows the distribution of dark and light pixels in the picture. Some camera models has separate histograms for red, blue and green. My D70s has a single histogram showing the combination of these colours.

Notice the vertical red lines in the histogram? They are “f/stop” indicators. An f/stop is a doubling or a halving of the light that comes in to the camera. Looking at this histogram you can see that we are exposing pretty well. If the yellow curve is squashed to the left hand side it means that the picture is under exposed. If the histogram is squashed into the right hand side then you are over exposing the picture and need to decrease the shutter time or stopping down the aperture a bit.

How to compensate when you read the histogram

The way it is organized is that usually three “ticks” of the wheels that controls exposure / aperture is equal to the distance between two red bars. If you want to move your exposure curve up one “f/stop” (or 1EV which is a terminology I like better, it is the same thing, EV means Exposure Value).

If your histogram shows 1 EV underexposure then you can compensate by either

• Increasing the shutter time 3 “steps”, this should double the exposure time, for example if your exposure time is 1/250 s then 3 steps longer means 1/125 s.
• Opening your aperture, this means lowering the f/stop value, if your aperture is f/8 then three steps down is f/5,6.

There is also a third way to compensate for under exposed pictures. You can increase the ISO setting of your camera. The D70 camera normally works at an ISO setting of 200. Increasing this to 400 represents 1 EV also. Increasing to 800 is 2 EV.

How to work in manual mode

Start by setting reasonable settings. On a sunny day you may wish to start with say f/8 and 1/500s. When you look in to the view finder there is a coarse over/under exposure meter. It looks a little like this:

 3     2      1    + 0 -    1      2     3
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There is a bar that shows how your current setting reflects the cameras own meter. If the bar is growing to the left (+) then you are over-exposing. Rotate your thumb or index finger wheel to change the shutter time or aperture until you are close to the middle (0) where exposure is judged to be correct by the camera. The numbers above the bar indicated EV or f/stops.

Take a picture.

Then take a peek at the histogram. How does it look? Does it look nice and centered or is is definitely sqashed to the left or right? If it seems that the exposure is wrong, try to judge by the red vertical lines how much. Then decide if you want to compensate by using shutter speed, aperture or changing the ISO setting.

When you have found the right settings this way take the picture you want. After each exposure check the histogram, compensate as you go, keep shooting. This way you have full control over the exposure in the camera.

This may take some practicing to get used to and to understand properly but after a while it will become second nature to you.

When to use manual metering

If you wish to take infrared pictures then you must practice this because with the IR filter on the camera it is not possible for the camera meter to work properly and this means that you can not use the cameras automatic metering. And because in difficult conditions when you are shooting the camera normal exposure compensation functions may be wrong, manual whooting will give you better pictures once you are used to it.

The only drawback here is that it may take a few seconds for you to find the correct setting for a certain scene to photograph. So if you are shooting some action shots you may be better of using the camera own metering.