December 2005 Archives

Concerned about the occasional reports of Nikon D200 geometric vertical stripe noise "banding" problems I've been reading about, I was eager to get a lens and take my own camera out for a spin. I ended up getting the Nikon AF-S Nikkor 17-35mm f/2.8D ED-IF and shooting a bunch of initial photos in various lighting conditions.

I'm pleased to note that so far I seem to have no such banding problems, and I'm very happy with the camera. I'm looking forward to using it in concert with the soon-to-be-released Maxwell Renderer.

UPDATE 12/31/2005

I followed the procedure outlined by jmeagher in post #45 of this thread: http://www.nikonians.org/dcforum/DCForumID202/15664.html and I got the stripes myself. Here's a 100% crop:

I shot at ISO 400 with a wide open aperture and exposed for a foreground object in front of an open window.

I'm not sure what to do now. Send the camera back? Or avoid such extreme lighting ratios under those conditions.

I'm keeping track of my experiences with the banding issue here.

The latest issue of American Drama just came out. It features a caricature I did of playwright Thornton Wilder on the cover.

I redesigned the 10th anniversary issue of American Drama back in the winter of 2001. At that time I replaced the scholarly journal's relatively conservative design with a pretty zowie illustration of David Mamet, and I've done every cover since then.

Photoshop CS2 contains a versatile tool for correction certain problems caused by camera lenses. You can find it under Filters > Distort > Lens Correction.

One option for this tool brightens and darkens the corners of images in order to compensate for lens vignetting.

The nice thing about this tool is that it acts as if all images are actually square. The lens vignette tool is not fooled by widescreen aspect ratios. Lenses are round, and so is the vignette correction.

You'd think Photoshop would adopt this outlook for the other related tools as well. Oddly enough, it does not.