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Some notes from the field

There's nothing like using equipment in the field to find out what works and what doesn't.

Camera Body

The Fuji S2 Pro has proven itself to be an excellent digital SLR camera. I managed to break mine by letting it fall about four feet onto a concrete floor whilst on holiday in the Canadian Rockies. The repair cost was £700 as the whole flexible PCB/Wiring system had to be replaced! Thankfully the insurance company covered some of the cost.

The S2 does suffer a couple of problems. It's not really a weather proof camera which means care must be taken when using it in the wild. In particular it's all to easy to end up with specs of dust on the CCD sensor when swapping lenses and this looks really nasty in final images. I'm always nervous about water ingress so I keep the camera protected in a Lowepro waist bag as much as possible.

The Mamiya 7II is a very compact medium format rangefinder. With the 80mm lens it weighs less than the Fuji with a lens and it feels much better balanced. It's more or less fully manual although it does have a basic centre meter. The camera is a joy to use in most respects but it does have some annoying foibles including the fact that it's generally impossible to read the exposure value in the view finder and because it's a rangefinder it's all too easy to take a shot with the lens cap on!

Lenses

The Tamron 28-75 Di lens is absolutely superb. It is a sharpest lens although it doesn't have the sharpness of the best Nikons. It's relatively light and small and so it's the lens I use a lot of the time.

The Tamron 19-35 is a slower lens which can be a problem withe S2. Why? Because the viewfinder is quite small and dark and so seeing details in less than perfect light is made more difficult the slower the lens is (by speed I mean the lens' f ratio, i.e. 3.5-4.5 compared to 2.8 for my other lenses). The 19-35 is also noticeably less sharp than the 28-75 but its colour rendition is very nice. The lens is very good value but in the end I decided to replace it with a Nikon 12-24DX.

The Nikon 12-24DX is a digital-specific lens that offers excellent sharpness at its long end and very good sharpness at its ultra-wide angle end. It can produce chromatic abberations but in general the results are excellent. The opportunities that the wide angle open up make it almost a necessity for digital users with a 1.5x focal length multiplier. Unfortunately it's an expensive piece of kit which will limit its take up.

The Nikon 80-200 I bought secondhand and is excellent value when bought in this way. The lens is in perfect condition and performs flawlessly. It focuses quickly for such a big lens and its images are sharp with very good colour.

Tripod and Head

The Gitzo 1128 is the third tripd I've bought. I should have bought it in the first place! Although expensive it is very light and immensely rigid even when fully extended. It copes with either camera and any of my lenses although the 80-200 is a bit wobbly mainly because there isn't a mount on the lens.

The Slik 400DX is the second tripod I've bought. I made the mistake of buying a Velbon tripod with flow head which lacked rigidity and weighed a ton. The Slik is light (little more than most carbon tripods) and compact and has useful foam covers on the legs which makes handling it bearable when it's cold.

The Slik is very rigid so long as you don't open up the third leg section at which point it gets a bit flexible. I don't know how this compares with more expensive mounts but for £60-£70 the Slik is exceptional value.

The Slik came with its own pan and tilt head which is stable but heavy and the control levers catch on everything. I bought a Manfrotto 486RC2 head to replace the Slik and have found it to be a reliable and effective head for my lightish camera and lenses. The Manfrotto's only real problems are that it is very difficult to adjust without loosening tension completely which makes fine adjustments difficult and can lead to the camera and lens flopping down on your hand! It also exhibits some small movement when the shutter is released and only just manages to support my 80-200 lens.

I replaced the Manfrotto quick release clamp and plate with a FOBA pair that are of the Arca Swiss style. These clamps and plates are industry standard and open up opportunities for all sorts of specialist adapters. I find this system extremely easy to use and much sturdier than the Manfrotto equivalent.

More recently I replaced the Manfrotto head with a full Arca Swiss B1. This head is considerably bigger and heavier than the Manfrotto but it holds the camera much more steadily and, more importantly, allows me to adjust the camera's position with light touches without losing its hold. In general it makes life much easier though I don't find it 'silky smooth' as some users seem to report and it is pretty large which can be a handicap.

Filters

The Hoya S1 Pro circular polariser is a very high quality (and expensive) filter. It's thin so it doesn't cause vignetting and it transmits 99.7% of the light which is important if you're handholding the camera since polarisers will add 1.5 or 2 stops to an exposure. The polariser brings out the colour in vegetation and the sky when the sun is at right angles to the lens and can cut reflections in water. I find I use the polariser a lot for landscape work though not so much in winter when light is at a premium and colour is generally lacking in any case. I recently bought a B+W polariser for the Mamiya and I have to say that the difference in quality between the B+W and the Hoya is astounding. The B+W is a joy to use and it produces a cleaner blue in the skies than the slightly grey Hoya.

The Lee Filters system is a quality system of large filters that provide excellent control of contrast in images. Although a large product set, Lee do lack a few specialist filters that I'd like to see added such as a reverse ND grad to deal with sunrises and sunsets.

Image Processing

Adobe's Photoshop CS is the latest version of the default choice of software for digital image processing. I find it a powerful and useful tool but only when used with a few plug-ins, namely Photowiz Colorwasher and Focalblade. These two plug-ins allow me to bring out the true colour of an image and to sharpen it extremely accurately without too much time and effort. The results are excellent.

NeatImage is a superb plug-in that allows me to reduce noise in longer exposure, high ISO images. I generally use this only for astrophotography but it's also useful when working with images taken with our digicams (an older Canon Ixus 330 and newer Nikon Coolpix 4300) where noise is an ever-present nuisance.

Qimage is, as far as I'm concerned, the only program for printing quality photo images. Qimage uses a unique Vector algorithm to scale images to the chosen print size and the results far surpass standard 35mm photo quality up to A3. Qimage also has its own image processing tools and quite often the results are superior to those achieved in Photoshop. In particular, Qimage's 3D Sharpening tool works superbly well to maximise the apparent depth in digital images. The tool works by sharpening the red, green and blue elements to varying degrees based on the relative population of red, green and blue photo sites in a Bayer type sensor as used in most digital SLRs (Bayer sensors use a grid of red, green and blue photo sites in a pre-defined pattern with more green sites than red or blue).

Cameras	Fuji S2 Pro Digital SLR 6.17 Megapixels, 12.3 Mega Pixels output Super CCD Mamiya 7II 6x7 Medium Format Film Camera
Lenses	For the Fuji: Nikon 12-24 f/4 DX Tamron 19-35 f/3.5-f/4.5 (prior to getting the 12-24 above) Tamron 28-75 f/2.8 Di Nikon 80-200 AF-ED f/2.8 For the Mamiya: Mamiya 80 f/4
Tripod and Head	Gitzo 1128 Carbon Fibre Tripod Arca Swiss B1 Monoball
Filters	Hoya and B+W Circular Polarisers Lee Filters 0.3, 0.6 and 0.9 soft ND grads Lee Filters 0.6 hard ND grad Heliopan UV filters
Image Processing	Adobe Photoshop CS Photowiz Color Washer Photowiz Focalblade Neatimage Qimage for printing and '3D sharpening'