David's Images of the Day Photoblog
Views of the sun, moon, and stars
Silhouette of a sailboat passing in front of the sun at sunset from the deck of the MV Explorer. Crossing the Baltic Sea from Stockholm to Copenhagen.
Sunset in the Baltic Sea from the Deck of the MV Explorer. Image taken with a Nikon D4 and 80-400 mm VR II lens (ISO 800, 400 mm, f/5.6, 1/500 sec).
Today was a day at sea aboard the M/V Explorer as we traveled from Dublin, Ireland to Dover, United Kingdom. Most of my time was spent getting images ready for the Ultimate Travel Photography Workshop IV final show. Spencer compiled all of the selected images from the workshop participants for the segment 2 final show and added appropriate music. The theme for the show was Street Photography and Travel Photography. After presentation of the show to the ship’s passengers in the Union, I quickly went to deck 7 to see if the sunset was going to be interesting. The clouds were developing an intense orange color, but due to high winds, I was unable to get outside to take images. I decided to run down to my cabin to pick up the Nikon D4 camera body and the 80-400 mm VRII lens. As soon as I got up to deck 7 at the rear of the ship, I could see a cargo ship may pass directly between us and the cargo ship. One nice thing about the D4 camera body and new XQD memory card is the ability to take many more images before the buffer fills up. The following is an image taken just as the cargo ship passed between us and the setting sun
One of the issues I have had with the Nikon 1 “mirrorless” cameras is the lack of wide-angle lens options. The widest angle available with the initial set of lenses was 10 mm f/2.8 prime. This has a 77° field of view (FOV) equivalent to a 27 mm lens on a full-frame (FX) DSLR camera. I like taking wide-angle panorama landscape images when traveling. In order to do this with the Nikon 1 camera requires taking several images and then stitching them together during post-processing. Before going to Norway, I saw a note on the internet that the Olympus FCON-T01 Fisheye converter uses the same 40.5 mm thread that the Nikon 1 10 mm f/2.8 lens uses. The 0.74x adapter increases the FOV to something like 20 mm on a FX DSLR camera. I took this combo with me to Norway, and published an image of Greenland from 36,000 feet using the combo. (19-February-2013).
Since returning from Norway, Nikon released a new wide-angle telephoto lens for Nikon 1 cameras – the 6.7 – 13 mm f/3.5-5.6. At 6.7 mm this lens has a 100° FOV equivalent to a 18 mm lens on a FX DSLR camera. The following three images were taken with the Nikon 1 V2 camera 1) with the 10 mm f/2.8 lens; 2) with the 10 mm f/2.8 lens and the Olympus fish-eye converter; and 3) with the 6.7-13 mm lens at 6.7 mm. The wide-angle image with the 6.7 mm does not have the fish-eye curvature effect. Indeed, when in Norway I found that when I used the Olympus lens I would need to keep the horizon right at the middle of the image. I think that I will be adding the 6.7-13 mm lens to my light-weight travel kit.
Note: Nikon changed the threading on the 6.7-13 mm lens to 52 mm, so I can’t use the Olympus adapter with this lens 😉
Turkey Vulture and the Moon. Image taken with a Nikon D2xs camera and 80-400 mm VR lens (ISO 100, 400 mm, f/5.6, 1/200 sec).
