New technology releases

[Garth Herrick]

I am so impressed with the new Nikon D200. It makes the old D100 look pretty crummy by comparison. Here's a big plus:

I am delighted to find there is terriffic exposure latitude, allowing for great highlight recovery when an image has been mildly overexposed. The image as shot has losses in the highlights, as all digital cameras are prone to. On my old D100, I might have to kiss an image goodbye if it was even a little overexposed. But the D200 has a great deal of highlight data retained in the RAW file. Thank goodness!

Yesterday we had a spontaneous street fair, including the world's first organic pie eating competition! It made for some great shooting opportunities to try out the camera, and I took full advantage. Along the way i got thirsty and made a donation for a glass of lemonade, which resulted in this shot of the little vendor, below.

The color rendering is just superb with this camera! The exposure is a little brighter than I am accustomed to (at 0 EV), so sometimes like this time, I seemingly lost some highlights critical to the image. However my fears were allayed upon the discovery of tremendous latitude latent in the image file, as I adjusted the exposure in Aperture (a RAW file photography application utility for the Mac, only). All the "lost" highlight information was in there!

Taking the original file and a mildly darkened exposure adjustment from Aperture into Photoshop, I overlayed the images to come up with an acceptable compromise and image recovery. This overlay adjustment can be manipulated any way to one's own liking and preference; and I was trying to retain the freshness and brightness of the original exposure as closely as possible, in my adjustment.

For comparison, below are the original exposure, te maximum exposure adjustment (2 stops) in Aperture, an adjustment of about minus 2/3 of a stop used with the overlay in Photoshop, and the result in Photoshop of the original at 50% in the overlay.

This is an example of how one can recover a paintable image from one that was overexposed. Very important in our business!

By the way, I just noticed I shot this at ISO 320. It would be even cleaner at the best setting of ISO 100 (still, it looks pretty good to me).

Garth