Image Capture

Underwater photos

My favorite system for underwater photography was the Nikonos V camera with a 15mm lens and Iklelite 150 strobe. The 15mm is the most incredible lens with a 94° view. At f11, objects from about one foot away to infinity are in sharp focus. This allowed amazing upwards shots with an anenome (as an example) in the foreground with the dive boat 60 feet above as a secondary subject. I adjusted the aperature for a bright blue water background, then used the strobe to softly illuminate the foreground subject.


Sandy Spotting a Barracuda

For close-up photography, I primarily used either the 28mm or 35mm lens with extension tubes to achieve from 1:7 (film image is 1/7 of actual size) to 2:1 (film image is twice the actual size) images.

Equipment:

  • Nikonos IV & V cameras
  • U/W-Nikkor 15mm f/2.8 lens
  • U/W-Nikkor 35mm f/2.5 lens
  • U/W-Nikkor 28mm f/3.5 lens
  • close-up kit and extension tubes
  • Ikelite 150 and Nikon SB103 strobes
  • Nikon 8008S and 60mm macro lens mounted in a Tussey housing

Primary film: Fuji Provia and Velvia

Above Water photos

Above water, I eventually replaced my 8008S with an F100 and continued to shoot with Fuji slide film. A couple of years after acquiring the F100, I crossed-over to digital with the D100. In the spring of 2006, I upgraded my digital SLR to the D200. Why the Nikon digital SLR? Lens investment!


Small Waterfall in Zion National Park
  • Nikon F100
  • Nikon D200 (digital)
  • Nikkor lenses:
    • AF Micro-NIKKOR 60mm f/2.8D
    • AF-S DX Zoom-NIKKOR 12-24mm f/4G IF-ED
    • AF-S Zoom-NIKKOR 28-70mm f/2.8D IF-ED
    • AF Zoom-NIKKOR 80-200mm f/2.8D ED
    • AF VR Zoom-NIKKOR 80-400mm f/4.5-5.6D ED

Image Processing

Currently, I convert all slide film images to digital files using a Nikon Coolscan IV film scanner. A scan of a mounted slide image (approximately 1" by 1 ½") results in a file that measures about 5400 by 3600 pixels after cropping an inherent black border. The resulting scanned image size is equivalent to an image size that would be produced by a 19 megapixel camera.

As a contrast, the Nikon D200 is a "10 megapixel camera" which produces image sizes of about 3900 by 2600 pixels.

All digital image files are "developed" with Adobe Lightroom 2.0 and when necessary with an assit from Photoshop CS4. Digital processing is not as messy as chemicals and probably has less impact on the environment. I use Lightroom and/or Photoshop, as do most serious digital photographers to adjust tonality, contrast, hue, and saturation -- all adjustments that have been made for decades in the darkroom.

Most of the images displayed on this web site are as close as possible to the original full-frame aspect ratio (approximately 2x3). When a print is made from the digital file, the image may need to be cropped depending on the size print desired. As an example, to create a standard 16"x20" enlargement, the image might first be sized to 16x24, then cropped resulting in a loss of "4 inches" of the image. When changing aspect ratios, image content loss is unavoidable. If the content is important, I do not crop.

Computer Hardware

iMac

  • 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor
  • TFT active-matrix 24" LCD, 1920 by 1200 pixels
  • 2 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM
  • 500 GB Serial ATA 7200-rpm hard drive
  • Slot-loading 8x Optical Drive (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
  • 802.11n wireless, Bluetooth 2.0, 10/100/1000BASE-T Gigabit Ethernet
  • Mac OS X 10.6.2
  • external LaCie 1TB hard drive

MacBook Pro

  • 2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
  • 13.3-inch LED-backlit glossy widescreen display; 1280 by 800 pixels
  • 4GB 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM - 2x2GB
  • 250GB Serial ATA Drive @ 5400 rpm
  • Mac OS X 10.6.2

Background

Primarily due to my day job, I guess, I have always been a PC person, while my wife, Sandy, has used a Mac for years. Towards the end of 2007, I was getting itchy to replace an older DELL machine. I found myself waiting too long for Photoshop files to open and I was beginning to see the limits of my disk drives. I began to "shop" for a bigger and better PC -- faster processor, more memory, more disk space. The nagging concern in the back of my head was Microsoft Vista, the latest and "greatest" (?) version of Windows. All new PCs were at this time shipping with Vista, but there was not a single encouraging word from anyone about this operating system. I decided to check out the local Apple store, and I fell for the new iMAC with the 24" screen running Leopard, the brand new and latest version of OSX. While MAC advocates have been touting that Microsoft keeps trying (unsuccessfully) to do what MACs already have been doing well for years, it finally connected with me. Any concerns about day job compatibility vanished with the installion of a VM package called Parallels. Now, I can run Windows XP and Mac OS X on the same computer at the same time, and share files between the two operating systems. It's just magic. The only significant personal software I kept for the Windows environment was Quicken. According to all feedback, Intuit produces a terrible version of Quicken for the MAC, so I just run it in Windows. The only hardware that Parallels does not current support is Firewire. Because that is the only interface used by my Nikon scanner, I have kept my DELL PC for the purpose of scanning my slide library.

Now, Sandy's older G4 Mac has been replaced by an iMAC . . . right along side my twin iMAC.