Christmas is almost here! I’m trying to get some nice shots at my parents’ place. They have quite a few interesting decorations. This joker was hanging of a lamp and I loved the face.
Together with my acquisition of a D80 came the time to get a nice prime lens. I had been looking at the Sigma 30mm F1.4 for a while, but at a whooping £234 it is way more pricey than some of the alternatives. I therefore decided to go for the Nikkor 50mm F1.8 prime. The lens has a bit longer focal length than the Sigma, which (on my D80 with a crop factor of 1.5) makes it a nice portrait lens (~75mm). It has the added “bonus” of not having a build-in focus motor, which makes it cheaper and lighter (and unusable on my D40).
The Lenses
The lens comes in two “versions”. The first version, labeled the Nikkor AF 50mm F1.8 was made first released in 1986. It is easily recognizable by the large pushpin on the side.
The pushpin locks the aperture ring into place. On most modern cameras you will want to keep the aperture ring into the highest aperture number (F22) so it’s a bit big for such a useless function. The rest of the lens feels pretty solid, dare I say heavy.
The second lens that’s a interesting alternative to the Sigma is the Nikkor AF-D 50mm F1.8. Notice the little added “D” that was added tot he previous model. By specification the new lens (launched in 2002 and replacing the previous model) is exactly the same. The most noticeable cosmetic changes are the loss of the push pin and a more plastic (and lighter) casing.
Technically there’s one more important difference between the lens with and without the “D”, except for the fact that the earlier version has only one layer of coating. Which brings us to the showdown.
The Showdown
So what is the real-life difference between the two lenses? First off there’s a price difference of about £15 depending on where you get it. This doesn’t sound like much, but as the modern model goes for about £80 this sums up to about 18%. For a student or amateur on a budget the non-D version is therefore an interesting option.
In performance though, the lenses seem to be very, very different. I like most of Ken Rockwell’s articles on lenses, but in this case he seems to be rather wrong labeling the D functionality as a “almost meaningless feature”. To understand the difference between the single coated and multi-coated (D) lens you have to understand that lenses with large apertures quickly suffer from lens flares. Coating on a lens can help prevent the lens flares to some level and this makes a lot of difference.
Here is a photo I took with the single coated lens.
As you can see in the left bottom corner there’s a big lens flare. It’s not that much of a problem in this photo but it also shows up as a more annoying and larger flare in normal conditions (I couldn’t find any of the worst photos because I deleted them already).
The modern multi-coated lens still has this issue sometimes but not as large and intrusive as the single-coated version. It is for me at least the reason to get rid of the non-D version and get myself a D version. Even with a hood on the older version still generates massive lens flares and discoloration from time to time. A good example is this photo I took of Reinier:
Conclusion
It seems that the AF-D lens performs much better under low light conditions with consideration to lens flares. Yes, the older version can be found about £15 less but it’s definitely not worth the trouble of lens flares and lack of build quality.
Last weekend saw the first Liverpool Barcamp and I have to admit it was a great one. I gave two presentation, one on Saturday and one on Sunday. The Saturday one was an introduction to Facebook App Development and the slides can be found below. The slides actually made it to the frontpage of slideshare! On Sunday I gave a talk based on my blog post from a few days back on how to integrate OpenID in Wordpress.
I will be heading to Liverpool tomorrow with some other BarCamp veterans to attend the first BarCampLiverpool. They invited a few people with some experience at BarCamps to bring the spirit over to the North, so Mel and I were happy to go.
But what to talk about? I am currently fully with my head into Facebook development for my work at Nudge London. This might be very interesting although I probably have to think out how to limit myself to just 30 minutes. Alternatively (and unlike most London BarCamps) I can probably talk about some of the topics that I talked about before because they haven’t heard it in Liverpool yet.
So here are my ideas:
Want to use OpenID but not clear on what provider to use? Already have a Wordpress Blog up and running? Then why not use your Wordpress blog as your OpenID provider?
Since version 3.1 the WP-OpenID plugin comes with it’s own OpenID provider. Before 3.1 the plugin served as a consumer of OpenID for login and commenting on a Wordpress blog, but as of this version you can use your blog to login to other OpenID consumers. Just install the WP-OpenID plugin and make sure to enable the “Enable OpenID” option for your level of user (probably only administrator). This will allow you to log in to any OpenID enabled site with your blog url, or if you are not the blog owner with the author URL. In my case I can log in with http://blog.cristianobetta.com or with http://blog.cristianobetta.com/author/admin.
Delegation
I already had an OpenID with delegation setup on cristianobetta.com, with the OpenID being delegated to MyOpenID. I wanted to now delegate the OpenID instead to my blog but ran into some issues when searching for “wordpress openid delegation” on the internet. Most articles were on how to delegate from a blog to a different provider like MyOpenID, which was not what I wanted.
So here is the scoop. To delegate from any other url to your Wordpress blog, first install the XRDS-Simple plugin. This plugin will allow for XRDS discovery of all the relevant OpenID URLs on your blog. Then add the following meta tag into the header of the URL that needs to be delegated:
<meta http-equiv=”X-XRDS-Location” content=”http://blogdomain.tld/?xrds” />
or if you want to link to a specific user (admin in this case):
<meta http-equiv=”X-XRDS-Location” content=”http://blogdomain.tld/author/admin/?xrds” />
This line of code will tell any OpenID consumer to get the XRDS from your blog, and then process the OpenID transaction according to the details found in the XRDS response.
I love my Nikon D40
Photo: Nikon D40 by Allen Qu
The Nikon D40
The Nikon D40
This low price does come with some clear disadvantages for any amateur that wants to bring his/her photography to the next level. Most importantly the Nikon D40 doesn’t have built in focus motor, which means that it will only auto focus with the relatively new AF-S (since 1992) or AF-I (since 1998) lenses. To make things worse, none of the ultra-light sensitive and affordable prime lenses like the 50mm F1.8 (about £60 on Amazon)
Upgrades
So given the fact that you like the D40, and most likely already have one, what are the options for well priced upgrade? This is exactly the question I ran into when I decided I could spend £250 on the Sigma 30mm 1.4 lens, or £75 on the Nikon 50mm 1.8 AF-D instead and invest in a second body. The options for a second Nikon body within a relative specification and price range of the D40 were the D40x, D50, D60, D70, D70s and the D80. The D40x and D60 are no real contenders as they are nothing more than some very badly designed upgrades of the D40 with the same inherent problems. The D70 and D70s, though interesting, where not on my shortlist because of numerous reasons, ranging from the fact that they used CompactFlash (not SD), had very small LCD screens, where relatively expensive to the other models, and were generally regarded inferior to any of the other cameras. So that left me between a D50 and a D80.
Nikon D50 by deleepgeorge
Nikon D50
I actually managed to get my hands on a Nikon D50
Well, unfortunately that assumption is wrong. Because it was the predecessor to the D40, it has most of the specs of the D40 in a more bigger and professional body, but with the obvious drawbacks of it being a camera thats an entire generation older than the D40. The white balance is awful, especially inside or in cloudy conditions. Most of my photos ended up greenish, leading to me just shooting everything in RAW and setting the white balance by hand afterwards. The auto-focus is horribly slow and inaccurate, and the menu system is no way near as intuitive as that of the D40. In general the entire camera just felt like a lesser product than the D40, which is not the feeling you want to have when spending this much money.
Nikon D80 by Allen Qu
Nikon D80
Lucky for me the D50 had some other technical issues which meant it had to be send back, allowing me to reconsider my options. I had a look on Amazon this time and found a Nikon D80 body for only £300
I must admit that I have fallen in love with the D80 about as much as I have with the D40. Although it only offers a few major upgrades from the D40, the superior (more pro-like) body makes and the full range of modern features make the camera feel like a D40 in a superior shell (call it the D40Pro). The body (although from plastic) feels very solid and has mostly the same button layout as the D80. Furthermore, the images (besides being 4MP bigger) are quite similar as on the D40. The camera seems to have the same tendency to overexpose so I set my camera to -0.6EV and the white balance is often spot on.
Nikon D40 vs D80 by Allen Qu
The only problems with the D80 from a D40 perspective are related to size. First of the camera is quite a bit bigger (522g vs 668g a.k.a. 0.74l vs 1.04l) but the image file sizes are also considerably bigger (6MP vs 10MP a.k.a. 5.5mb vs 12.4mb). Still, I take it you chose for this when considering an upgrade, and realize that most DSLR cameras are actually of the same or similar size.
Additional links
Nikon D40 vs Nikon D50 vs Nikon D80 specification on DPReview.com
I have been running with the idea of a PhotoCampLondon for a while, and under pressure of some friends I decided to finally go with it. So what can I tell you for now? Actually, not much yet, but I can point you to the website and I can you tell you this.
When, where, what, how?
So the idea is to have a photo themed, BarCamp-like, unconference, somewhere in Q1 2009. The photo theme will extend to everything related to photography, ranging from the actual photography, to third party services that provide creative outlets for your photography, to law and copyright. We want to get people from as many different photography and photography-related areas to come and attend.
While it being a BarCamp style event, I doubt we need to make it a true BarCamp with a sleepover (unless demand says otherwise), but I still have to figure out if we want to make it a one or two day event. I think one day should be enough but if we can get enough people attending and a big enough venue two days might just be possible.
Attending
The most important thing that anyone interested in PhotoCampLondon can currently do is put their name (or pseudonym) on the PhotoCampLondon wiki so that we can get a rough estimate of how many people are interested in this event. I also set up a blog on the PhotoCampLondon site so subscribe to that RSS for more news.
Organising, Sponsors, and Venues
The second most important thing you can do is help out organising this event. There is already a few great people helping out, creating a permanent look for the website and designing a real logo, but we need more. The most important thing for now is to probably be able to get our hands on a venue, but I think that highly relies on first getting some fix on the number of people that might want to attend.
Finally, we’re looking to get in contact with as many potential sponsors to see in how far they are interested. We’re not just looking for random sponsors to pay for food and t-shirts, but also for sponsors interested to bring valuable knowledge and hardware to the event. it would be great if it would be possible to get some major market players to come and give a large group some kind of workshop.
Further Information
If you want to know more about PhotoCampLondon, have a look at the site or contact me on cristiano[at]photocamplondon.org.
Cristiano on Tech/Life 
