I’m giving a Nikon D5000 a try. From everything I’ve read, it’s most competitive with the Pentax K-x (about which I’ve written) in most regards, and you can see the AF point in the viewfinder. (More on that in a second.)

I spent some time handling a Canon PowerShot G11 and PowerShot S90 a few nights ago, and I was very tempted to go back to a high-end P&S. But in a week I’ll have a very specific need to do some indoor shooting that has to be better than I can reasonably expect from a P&S. I also want more reach on the zoom than I can get with anything besides one of the super-zoom P&Ses (e.g. the PowerShot SX20).

So while I wandered from display to display trying to make up my mind, I spotted Nikon’s 35mm F1.8G DX lens, which is pretty affordable and provides something I’ve been wanting for a while anyhow and couldn’t get very cheaply for a Pentax. I even got $20 off the sticker price because the only one in stock had been opened but still seemed to be factory wrapped on the inside. So while a longer zoom than the 18-55mm kit lens is on the shopping list, a decent normal prime that can do well indoors is higher up on the list. The professional reviews are good and the user reviews are stellar.

There are rumors that Pentax will be correcting the whole AF point issue in an upcoming low-end DSLR, but prime shooting season (for me, anyhow) is here now and that 35mm lens I got for the Nikon is a powerful enticement to make the move either way.

Initial Impressions of the Nikon D5000

I haven’t taken many shots with it yet, and I’ve spent a lot of time going through Ken Rockwell’s user’s guide, which has taught me a lot more than reading the manual probably will.

Some things I really like:

• Since low-end DSLRs tend to keep the number of physical knobs low, you end up spending a lot of time in the on-screen menus. Nikon solved some of this hassle by including a flexible menu item that either a. shows the most recent settings you’ve changed or b. shows some favorite settings you want to be able to get at quickly (“My Menu”). That’s pretty handy.

• I’ve got an Eye-Fi Pro X2, and the D5000 knows when I’m using it. It provides a pulsing Eye-Fi logo in the information display to show when files are being uploaded (so I know not to power off the camera). I haven’t even scratched the surface of the Eye-Fi, but I’m glad the camera can talk to it.

• The informational display provides a reasonable simulation of the top LCD you get on higher-end dSLRs. There’s a lot of useful information at a glance, including ISO, white balance, flash settings, etc. One button press allows access to all those settings without drilling down through the traditional hierarchical menu structure.

Some things I’m not so sure about:

• The rear display can be flipped out (from a bottom hinge) and moved around or closed against the body, and it provides a live preview mode. People say that’s good for macro and tripod photography. I’ll be interested to see if I develop any habits around that. I understand autofocus in live preview is terrible, limiting it to something you’d use for very static shots. I’ve lined up a few shots with it, but I haven’t taken it walking around the neighborhood yet.

• There’s a video mode. Nobody seems to think much of it and it doesn’t sound very flexible. Ken Rockwell calls it “a goof.”

On Nikon’s even-more-budget D3000, which I shot with for a day after returning the Pentax, there’s no video mode (and no live preview). Personally, I’d rather Nikon had left both off the D5000 and merged the D3000 and D5000 into a single model priced closer to the D3000. It feels like the D3000 was rushed in to defend against stuff slightly cheaper than a D5000, which had stuff it shouldn’t have had in the first place. The video and live preview really do feel like “everybody else has ‘em, too” features. Or worse, “if we add them now, nobody else will have them yet, even if they suck.” I think that’s just life down in the entry-level dSLR world. They’re all trying to figure out how to pick off people wandering over from the P&S world, defend themselves against the micro-4/3 cameras, and provide just little enough functionality to suck people up-market.

Something I learned about after buying and like a lot:

I ended up with this camera because I wanted to know where my AF point was through the viewfinder. I’m sort of crabby about where the AF point is because I hate popping a flash and that means I typically have to trade away depth of field when I’m shooting indoors. The traditional “focus and recompose” approach can be problematic in situations like that. So, the thing I think is cool about the Nikon:

It has a “3D focus tracking” mode that allows you to focus and recompose. You pick an AF point, depress the shutter button half way to get a lock, then recompose. Rather than keeping the AF point locked, the camera shifts the AF point as you move the camera, keeping the object under the AF point locked by shifting the active AF point to follow. Nikon touts the feature as a way to control focus when doing sports photography or tracking a moving object. Since it respects the manually set AF point, it doesn’t seem like there’s a lot to lose using it: Either set the point, hold position and shoot; or set the point and recompose and let the AF point shift as needed. There’s a certain amount of automation that I’d normally mistrust, but it feels like there’s just enough user control over how it works to make it worth experimenting with. Even if the focus point wanders off somewhere The Digital Brain told it to go for no good reason, it can be brought back by re-setting the AF point.

Getting to Know It

Every time I buy a new camera, there’s a feeling-out period that’s sort of an emotional rollercoaster. During the first several days, I’m always thinking about whether I put the packing material back in the box and made sure not to tear the cellophane on anything, because I could stumble across something at any point that bothers me enough to take the camera back.

Since I was a Canon loyalist for a long time, it took me a while to get used to the Pentax, which didn’t do as well when it came to menu design. There were a few points in the first few days I had the Pentax home that I was second guessing myself for not going with a Digital Rebel, which would have felt more familiar. When I got a PowerShot G9 as a less bulky compact to go with the Pentax, I felt a lot more comfortable picking it up and using it because of my familiarity with Canon menus.

I feel a lot less jittery with the Nikon. Some things are a little strange on it (the lens release button is on the other side of the body, for instance), and the menus feel busier, but nothing gives me that moment of heart-stopping pause where I think “Oh, man … I’m gonna have to take this thing back.” I hate taking things back. Once I got used to my old Pentax K100D, I knew it was a camera I’d be able to keep for a while. I already have that feeling with the Nikon. It would be nice to chase features up to the D90, and it would have been nice to have a Pentax K-7 in my budget, but this is the second dSLR I’ve ever bought and it has taught me that low-end dSLRs pretty nicely match my experience and patience to futz with a camera. If I didn’t their indoor speed so frustrating, I’d probably feel like higher-end P&S cameras were more to my taste.

Oppressed Consumer Groups

Everything’s a fuckin’ travesty with you, man! And what was all that shit about Vietnam? What the FUCK, has anything got to do with Vietnam?

— The Dude

One thing I’m pretty sure I’m happy to leave behind about the Pentax world: All the photography board fulminating about “sheeple” who buy Canons and Nikons. I have no idea whether the Nikon People harbor their own number of Canon haters or maybe some elaborate grievance narrative — I haven’t been subscribed to enough boards long enough to find out. For now, I’ll be glad to be away from all the whinging about “Canikon losers.”

Seriously … Ted Stevens was right when he said the Internet is not a big truck. He was wrong when he said it was a series of tubes. It is really a giant conveyor belt that carries people with a lot of emotional baggage straight through my eyeballs and into my brain-hole.

I played with a Pentax K-x for a few hours yesterday, hoping it would replace my slightly busted K100D. Wow. It takes some beautiful pictures for an entry-level SLR, and it represented the first time I’d be able to bring all my lenses along from one camera to the next. I was really looking forward to a return on my investment in lenses. Plenty of flexibility and control, just like you want in a dSLR. As much as people complained about the loud shutter, I found it more quiet than the K100D’s, and when I tested for the infamous “shutter slap/blur” problem, I couldn’t reproduce it.

However:

Reviewers spent some time dinging the camera for one of its tradeoffs. To get the size of the camera down, Pentax had to jettison the ability to preview autofocus points through the viewfinder. On the K100D, you can move the autofocus point around with the d-pad on the back of the camera, and you see a red LED light up the active focus point in the viewfinder. If you take a lot of low-light photos where you’re opening up the aperture and decreasing depth of field, the traditional “focus, recompose” approach can be problematic. Being able to position the autofocus point while composing means you don’t risk the important part of the image falling out of focus. One answer to that problem is to stop down enough that your depth of field is more forgiving, but at some point I came to trust the camera’s program mode enough that I don’t always think to switch to Av mode when it’s important to do so.

The closest you can get to feedback through the K-x viewfinder is the autofocus indicator. If you take your eye away from the viewfinder, you can identify the focus point on the LCD. You can also set the camera’s green multi-purpose button to recenter the focus point. But there’s no way to easily set the focus point while looking through the viewfinder, and there’s no way to know where the autofocus point is set without taking your eyes away from the viewfinder.

I read a few hands-on articles from photographers who said they eventually got over the issue. Some of these people were looking at the K-x as an auxiliary camera to their “real” dSLR, in which case their willingness to deal with that particular tradeoff made sense, the same way I trade down from my Pentax to my iPhone a lot of the time and don’t complain because the iPhone doesn’t offer Av or Tv modes. I also read comments from people who said that refusing to trust the K-x’s five- or eleven-area AF settings was some sort of luddite pose, and that was irritating but caused me to rethink my reflexive disdain of self-styled “typography nerds” who claim to become physically uncomfortable when confronted with poor typefaces. How is it I’m 42 years old and still need to be reminded that not all preferences I don’t share are stupid? Some days I feel like I need to go back to Decent Human 101 for a refresher course.

In the end, I gave the camera a shot hoping I’d also adapt, but decided it’s not something I want to get over. I don’t trust completely automated autofocus, especially in available light situations on a camera that doesn’t have an AF assist lamp, so having a quick way to set the AF point (and confirm that it’s set where I think it is quickly) is important to me. Too often over a few hundred exposures I found myself deciding to just center the AF point and get the shot, seldom recomposing because I’ve got an ingrained bias against risking the potential focus problems and my habits have led me away from more rigorous use of aperture priority (which I used to rely on a lot in my film SLR/newspaper days).

Life After the K100D

Picture-taking is all about tradeoffs, and when you get into the realm of low-end dSLRs, you become acutely aware of hardware tradeoffs:

• When you stack low-end dSLRs up against the higher-end cameras, you lose some overall speed, ruggedization and control.

• When you compare low-end dSLRs to to the high-end point-and-shoots, you expect to have more speed (both from shot-to-shot and in the time it takes to get the first shot), an edge in image quality, and a bit more control than all but a few (like the PowerShot G11/S90 or Lumix LX3).

If you’re forced into a situation where the act of composing an image involves an extra second or two of latency between identifying the shot, confirming the AF point is where you want it to be, composing and shooting, you’ve lost part of the low-end dSLR’s speed advantage over the high-end point-and-shoots.

That puts me in a weird place where Pentax cameras are concerned. I’m not ready to invest in a K-7 (the next up from a K-x), and I’m really hoping that Pentax rethinks the size tradeoffs it has made. I don’t want to lose my lenses and I don’t want to be forced up to a $900 body. The thought of stepping back down to high-end point-and-shoots if my K100D decides to fall completely apart while I wait around for Pentax to maybe change its thinking isn’t very pleasant, either, and it makes me a little sorry I didn’t truly splurge for a K10D back in the day, because they seem to be the better-built camera of the period.

It also causes me to wonder if the newer micro-4/3 cameras aren’t more up my alley. The bodies tend to be priced in that border zone between high-end point-and-shoots and low-end dSLRs, but they offer better image quality than the P&S class, along with the lens flexibility of dSLRs. Maybe the question there is the long-term viability of that format. Probably the next thing I ought to read up on.

The Haunted Town
Ben Hall, 2009

I sometimes wonder if Ben picked up his thing about clowns from an aborted visit to a clown show Sven was in. We never actually saw a clown perform because Ben deemed the performance space itself a hair too heavy to deal with.

Clowns didn’t come up again after that until just recently, when Ben announced that I was free to remove Pee-wee’s Big Adventure from the Roku because it had clowns and so was not acceptable viewing.

There was a period where it was fashionable to bash mimes, and where scenes of mimes being beaten or merely told off for comic effect seemed sort of common. And when I wrote a short story about two little girls who acted as avatars of rapacious capitalism and knee-jerk fashionista Marxism, I used the drug-wracked body of a heroin-addicted clown as their ideological battlefield (before he turned the tables on them both and injected them with a powerful cocktail of narcotics and hallucinogens).

That was years–decades–ago, though. I no longer think anti-mime humor is particularly funny, and we’ve had decades of degenerate, menacing or deadly clowns parading around in assorted media, so there’s no way to squeeze a frisson out of the subversion of neutered Ringling Bros. clowns. Bereft of any particular emotional reaction to mimes and largely shorn of the kind of rough, inchoate anger that fed on smudging up cheerful circus clowns, I’m left looking at Ben’s picture and trying to figure out what I make of the presence of clowns.

Don’t know yet.

The Other Creepy
Ben Hall

My employer was selling off surplus computer inventory, so I got an old 1.25GHz G4 Mac Mini for cheap. I bought a 17″ monitor for it at FreeGeek ($15!) and set it up in Ben’s room.

No “restricted Finder” or any of that: I just cleared the dock of everything but KidPix, an educational game that involves some sort of burrowing rodents who speak with Canadian accents, chess and TextEdit. There’s no network connection for it (for now, anyhow, since this isn’t one of the minis with built-in Wi-Fi), but that’s o.k.

That’s a white door dripping with brown slime with a rainbow doorknob in the side of a black house dripping with green slime, by the way.

Sven’s birthday present to Ben was a portrait to match the ones he made for Al & me. He blogged a little about the process today (and there are links to his entries on the other two portraits in that post). I’d wanted to blog about it myself but figured Sven might eventually post something, so there you go.

The only problem I have with the work is going to be figuring out how to get him to do them all again in a few years. We’re going to be moving in a few weeks and we’ve already talked about the exact right spot to put them. Whatever we decide is the best spot in the house is where they’re going.

One of the big lures of the Pentax K-series dSLRs is their backward compatibility with a huge range of lenses made for Pentax film cameras. With a few caveats, you can take a lens that worked great with your workhorse K1000 and use it on a K10/20/100/110/200. Because the camera’s shake reduction is built into the body instead of the lenses, a 20-year-old lens gets the benefits of newer tech, and the user gets to enjoy lenses with decent optical properties for a lot less than a new digital lens.

I’ve been on the lookout for a decent wide angle prime for a little while now, and noticed an SMC Pentax-M 2.8/28mm come through Citizens Photo last week. It was still there on Saturday, so I picked it up. It’s faster than the kit 18-55mm zoom that came with the camera and provides a nice general purpose focal length for carrying around.

There are some tradeoffs involved with this and other older lenses. It’s a manual focus lens, and it doesn’t support automatic aperture settings, so you have to take a few steps to get it to work. This is what it took for my K100D:

1. Under the “C(ustom)” section of the menu, scroll down to “Using aperture ring” and set it to “2.” That allows the camera to recognize that the aperture ring is in use. Otherwise, it will ignore that setting.

2. If you use the camera’s built-in shake reduction, the next time you power it up you’ll get a screen that asks for the lens focal length. Use the left/right buttons on the d-pad to scroll through your choices and use the “OK” button to finalize your selection.

3. Set the camera to manual focus. (On the K100D, that’s on a switch to the left of the lens.)

Shooting with manual focus is not as bad as I thought it might be. You just tap the shutter button and use the focus ring. If you’ve got the camera set to beep when it gets focus, you’ll hear that. If you don’t, you can always keep an eye out for the focus hex next to the shutter speed in the viewfinder. When it goes solid, you’ve got focus.

The focus ring on the lens is a lot nicer than it is on any of the made-for-digital-autofocus lenses I’ve got. There’s just enough resistance that I don’t worry about overshooting or accidentally jostling it out of focus, and it’s very smooth. It’s a little odd to shoot manual focus without the traditional split-prism focusing screen, so I think some of the proceeds from the sale of my Canon PowerShot G9 might go toward a Katz Eye focusing screen, which provides a split prism and removes the need to either keep the focus beep turned on or consult the focus hex when composing. Considering the way some of my other lenses take forever to find focus, I think it’ll be a relief to get back in the habit of focusing manually.

One other drawback of shooting with an older manual lens is the lack of feedback on the aperture. You have to set it by looking at the actual ring because there’s no viewfinder or LCD indicator for it.

From the inauguration edition of Boston Globe’s characteristically wonderful “Big Picture”:

Three must-attend events this weekend for lovers of the undead (and Ben):

• The Boo Train in Canby

• The Portland presentation of Thrill the World, which is an internationally coordinated performance of the “Thriller” dance. It was held down in the hangar at Oaks Park. (My Thrill the World photos)

• The Portland Zombie Walk, also part of an internationally coordinated effort that involves dressing up like the living dead and hanging out. We also got a second performance of the Thriller dance. (My Zombie Walk photos)

Ben was deeply concerned about getting zombie blood on him at the Zombie Walk, but he had a pretty good time once we put mittens on him.

There were Mormon zombies, Tippi Hedren zombies, baby zombies, Santa zombies, and a Starbucks fan zombie:

Free Software Foundation – Anti-Features:

“I was excited to find CHDK recently. In a nutshell, it is a free software firmware add-on for certain Canon digital cameras. I couldn’t help but notice that the top item on the CHDK feature list is the ability to shoot RAW.

“RAW is a sensor specific set of formats for digital cameras that, in many situations (but not all) boils down to a set of minimally processed readings off the sensor in the camera. RAW data is usually uncompressed. While RAW files are not usable without processing — they’re like negatives in that regard — I am told that professionals and most serious amateurs swear by them. RAW is one feature that camera companies use to differentiate their high-end and low-end cameras. Sensors, processors, and even lenses might be similar or identical in two cameras priced USD $100 apart. The difference frequently lies largely in the software, or firmware, that runs on the cameras. Expensive cameras have software that will produce RAW files. Low-end cameras will only give you the preprocessed, compressed, JPEGs.

“Now, what’s so interesting about RAW as a high-end feature is that the data often exists (almost unprocessed) in the camera’s memory for every single picture taken. In so far as RAW is raw sensor data, it exists every time the sensor is used. In high-end cameras, users are given the option to process that data and send it through a JPEG compressor. In low-end cameras, there’s no option; the data is processed and compressed and the raw data is thrown away.

“RAW is an example of an anti-feature. Anti-features are sold to customers as features but are fundamental or unavoidable aspects of systems that can only be removed or withheld through technological effort. Unlike real features, producers of anti-features charge customers for not inhibiting access to their products’ full functionality. Technological and legal barriers that keep anti-features away from the users of intentionally less featureful end up costing all users their freedom. It is more difficult for Canon to make cameras that output JPEGs than cameras that output RAW, and it’s not significantly more difficult to offer users a choice.”

I don’t know who’s more willing than me to complain bitterly about the way camera companies control features. On its face, RAW is a perfect example of something being kept from consumers for little more than a way to differentiate high-end point-and-shoots from even low-end dSLRs. It was very frustrating to see Canon insist on its exclusion for the PowerShot G7 and I would have preferred to see RAW in the S-series PowerShots.

But RAW is a problematic example, too:

On my Pentax k100d, which shoots at a relatively petite 6 megapixels, a RAW file consumes 11MB of storage space. The highest quality JPEG consumes 3.1MB.

Here’s one way those file sizes make a difference:

It takes a lot of time to write RAW out to storage. I can fire off three consecutive shots with RAW, then the camera stops responding as it writes to the SD card, and I’m lucky if I get a shot a second until it catches up. JPEGS might take more processing power on the image processing side, but they don’t tie up the storage bus. I can get five or six consecutive JPEGs, and the camera takes less time to recover from writing them out.

Here’s another:

When I shoot JPEGS, I can fit 167 images on a single 512MB SD card. It can even be a fairly crappy, off-brand card. I can only fit 46 RAW images on the same card and it needs to be a fast one or the camera becomes even slower.

RAW files come with expense, too. It takes software to process RAW photos once they’re off the camera. That software costs money to develop. Yes, Adobe Camera RAW probably processes just about any widely available RAW format on the market, but it isn’t free and there’s no guarantee any given customer has it. Yes, your camera manufacturer could license it, but there’s some expense, there, too.

And where Canon’s concerned, I’m not even sure I buy the idea that RAW is used as a huge price differentiator. MSRP for a PowerShot G9 is $499.99. MSRP for a PowerShot S5 IS is $499.99. One has RAW, one doesn’t. When people went bananas about the PowerShot G7 dropping RAW support, Canon put it back in for the G9.

Why was it out in the first place? Maybe to protect dSLR sales (I definitely believed that right up until it reappeared), or maybe because Canon didn’t think the demand was there to begin with.

While a lot of people like RAW (me included), many reviews (and plenty of gadget bloggers) decry RAW as a bit of gearhead fetishism that creates unnecessarily complex workflows for most peoples’ needs. Some of that is geek condescension, some of it is just true.

So we’ve got a file format that:

1. Adds complexity to the workflow for a technology people are definitely embracing, but with some reservations about added complexity.

2. Places extra and sometimes performance-hampering demand on system resources both in terms of space consumed and storage processing costs.

3. Is scoffed at by even the enthusiast press at least half the time.

It’s not a shoo-in for an Industry Conspiracy Anti-Feature of the Year Award.

But we haven’t gotten to the whole “choice” thing. People should, in theory, be allowed to choose to deal with the added complexity, hampered performance and increased storage costs. I’d put myself in the set of people who’d prefer to make that decision for themselves.

At the same time, if I get a low-end point-and-shoot, see the option to toggle RAW and do so, I’m not going to complain about how the camera has too many menu options, eats SD cards like bonbons and takes extra time to process. I’m not sure the average point-and-shoot customer is going to be as forgiving and I’ve read enough utterly schizophrenic reviews from the likes of Popular Photography to know that choice is a liability to some reviewers, who will add “large files” to the “cons” column of a review if they can’t think of anything else to say.

So maybe RAW’s an anti-feature, maybe it’s a feature the camera manufacturers don’t perceive demand for, and maybe it’s something deliberately excluded in the name of “protecting the user experience.” That last irritates and frustrates me because I prefer to make my own tradeoffs. I don’t think, however, that most people do.

Lest I be accused of missing the larger point of the essay, which was about how DRM is bad … no I didn’t. I just don’t think leaving RAW out of consumer-grade cameras is at all like technologically circumventing fair use.

(found the link via ed)

I’d ordinarily linklog this, but it’s so cool I CAN’T CONTAIN IT IN A MERE SIDEBAR!

Eye-Fi Wireless Camera SD Memory:

Never scrounge around for a USB cable again! Eye-fi is a magical orange SD memory card that will not only store 2GB worth of pictures, it’ll upload them to your computer, and to Flickr, Facebook, Picasa (or 14 others) [including SmugMug -mph] wirelessly, invisibly, automatically!

This little guy looks like a normal 2GB memory card and works with nearly any camera that takes SD memory. There are no antennas, no protrusions, no subscription fees, and no cables.

Works with Macs, too.

It would be really fun to have something like this as part of a deliberate project, dialing the camera down to relatively modest capture settings and letting fly, Crapshoot-style.

If you visit that link, consider subscribing to PhotoJojo’s free newsletter while you’re there. I wrote Amit, one of the proprietors, to tell him his newsletter is one of the few I remain happy to see every time it lands in the inbox. They maintain a positive, pro-creativity buzz in the newsletter that almost always manages to restore my good feelings about picture-taking when it arrives after the latest Popular Photography, which usually manages to drive my inner censor to new heights of anxiety.

PhotoJojo is where I learned about the photo blocks project: