Back before the Nikon F changed everything and photographers adopted the SLR as the camera of choice, rangefinders dominated the world. In the late 1950s, Nikon set its sights on the top of the market — the Leica M3 — and created the SP which would go on to become the basis of the Nikon F.


The story of the SP as it relates to me is much less grandiose. I’m too young for it to be a purchase for nostalgia sake, and I have no desire to be a camera collector; my relationship with cameras is that I use them to take pictures. Now, I’m not saying that I’m abandoning my D700 for an SP, but I’ve not really shot with rangefinders before and I want to see what all the fuss is about. I could have gotten something much cheaper, but who could deny the allure of what may be the best looking camera ever?


The SP’s build quality is fantastic. Like a precision watch, it exudes a feeling of quality and purpose. Everything has a reason to be, the styling is defined simply by both the mechanics and how the photographer is meant to interact with it. I’ve used many manual cameras, and much of this is true of others, but the rangefinder mechanism is what really sets it apart from everything else I’ve used.


The front of the SP is dominated by this long viewfinder window. Something odd for any camera, and largely the reason I think it looks so good. The window is elongated because of another oddity: it has 2 viewfinders. The primary one, with brightlines for 50mm, 85mm, 105mm, and 135mm, and a smaller wide-angle finder for 28mm and 35mm lenses without an external finder. This allows it to have a nice massive viewfinder with a 1x zoom factor on the primary window, while still being able to frame for 28 and 35mm lenses. Though if you’re spending much of your time at the wider angles, that viewfinder isn’t nearly as nice. Having a 1x magnification finder means I can keep both eyes open while shooting and things look perfectly normal. I keep both eyes open on SLRs at times, too, but it’s much more natural this way. However, being left-eye dominant means I do have trouble focusing without closing the other eye.

I’m not sure how bright the rangefinder originally was on my SP, but I know they dim over time. I haven’t had much trouble seeing it to focus so far, but I’ve only had this camera a few hours.


In front of the shutter release in the picture above you can see this table saw-like device. This is for focusing the lens, something I find amusing to do from the camera body. Unfortunately, it also feels somewhat like a table-saw against my fingers; I hope originally it was a bit smoother to turn.


Now all that’s left is for me to load it up with film and do the one thing that matters: shoot with it. I’ve been looking forward to the digital mirrorless interchangeable lens camera market expanding (and can’t wait for the Fuji X100), but maybe if the SP helps me take photos that look as good as it does, I won’t need to wait.











Tiny link: http://taii.cc/4E

I can’t believe it’s been 2 months since I’ve posted here on my blog. Filterstorm has really been eating up that much of my time. If you’ve been following Filterstorm on Twitter, you know I’ve been talking a lot about Filterstorm 1.5 and all the work I’ve been doing on it. Well, today I’m renaming it Filterstorm 2, since it’s such a massive overhaul of the original version.

I’ll go through a quick sequence of screenshots of my process for a photo I took yesterday of a snow leopard trying to stay cool.


Above is the original photo, taken with my Nikon 85mm f/2.8 PC tilt/shift lens. It’s very low contrast largely due to the glass the photo was taken through.


Here’s the photo loaded into Filterstorm 2. The first thing you’ll notice if you’ve used Filterstorm before, is that the top bar is gone, and now there’s a bar on the side. Rather than buttons that reveal popovers which cover the image, this bar pulls out a drawer which covers the image.

In the old versions of Filterstorm, when you were making, for example, a curves adjustment, the popover would almost certainly be covering part of the image. If you wanted to see that part of the image, you’d have to exit the popover, and reposition the image. The new drawer can be opened or closed at any time, hiding the controls whenever you want to see more of the image.


Here I’ve pulled out the drawer, and opened up the Automations menu (the gear icon). Automations are saved sequences of edits that you can re-apply to any image. What’s showing here is “Enhance” and “Vintage”, what are for now the only built-in automations.

If you’ve edited an image in a way you will want to do to a number of other images, open up the automations menu, and hit the save button on the bottom. It will let you name a new automation based on what you’ve done to the image you’re working on.


Here I’m applying the “Enhance” automation, which applies some tone mapping and curves adjustment.


This is the result of my built-in enhance button. The contrast level is much better than in the original.


Here I’ve pulled out the drawer again, and tapped on the luminance button, to open up the luminance controls. I’m planning on darkening the background to make the snow leopard pop more, so I’ve pulled the curves down.

In Filterstorm 1, I would first choose brush mode, (or color range mode, or gradient mode), then set my adjustment to the way I wanted it, but things have changed in Filterstorm 2. Now the filter is always the first step. So when I adjust my curves, I have 2 buttons on the bottom to use to apply it. The “Apply” button applies the filter to the whole image, wheras the “Apply with Mask” button lets me use the brush, gradient, and color range modes.


Here I’ve hit “Apply with Mask”. You can see the toolbar has changed. This is what it looks like in what I call “masking mode” which contains all our old controls. The beauty here, is now I can switch between the modes and apply the same adjustment in multiple ways. I can apply it via gradient, and then take my brush and add the filter to different areas of the picture, too. I could also take my eraser, and remove part of how the effect was applied by gradient. This makes all the tool modes, especially color range mode, much more flexible and powerful.


Here I’ve closed the drawer (still in masking mode, you can see the indicator shows I’m brushing), and have brushed on my curve change to the background. Now the ground beneath the snow leopard is more natural, and the area above his paws is less distracting.


The check and x buttons at the bottom of the toolbar take me out of mask mode. The check button will approve my masking changes, and the x button will cancel them.


Another new ability in Filterstorm 2 is one a lot of people have asked for: text. I’ve opened up the text controls here, and you can see the default text has popped up. Like the default suggests, I’m going to use this for a watermark.


Here I’ve placed the text and am typing in my name.


The text tool has the ability to change the size, typeface, color, alignment, and opacity of the text. You can also use text in masking mode. This allows you to apply effects such as having the text fade in with a gradient. I’ve chosen a translucent green for this image. Text works with the automation tool, so if you tend to put watermarks on your image, you position the text the way you like it, and save an automation so you can do it quickly every time.




This “Save Large Image” button is a placeholder button for a very big feature of Filterstorm 2. Filterstorm 2 increases the maximum dimension of an image to 3048px, which makes the final version of this image 6.2 megapixels, good enough for web and print up to a pretty decent size.


iPad is very limited on RAM, so the export process takes almost everything out of RAM, including the image that was being displayed and shows you a progress indicator. This image took about 40 seconds to export.


And here it is, the 6.2 megapixel final image exported from the current beta of Filterstorm 2. It’s still a few weeks away, but is a fantastic update. I hope you’re looking forward to it!
Tiny link: http://taii.cc/4x

This is my first update entirely from my iPad. I edited the photos on the iPad on Filterstorm, uploaded them via FTP and FTPOnTheGo and am typing this up in Safari on iPad. Typing up the post certainly isn’t as convenient as on my Mac, but the rest of the process was a joy, and if I had my keyboard dock with me, this part wouldn’t be bad, either.

All photos were taken with the Nikon 300mm f/4.5 ED-IF


This is my first photo post in over a month. I’ve been concentrating so much on Filterstorm development in my time outside of work. Thankfully I was dragged out by some friends to this free Grace Potter and the Nocturnals concert outside Grand Central for Earth day.


I unfortunately didn’t really get the chance to enjoy the free concert very much, as my D700 was having problems. It won’t review photos on the LCD after taking them, won’t format the memory card, and won’t enter live view. I was shooting the concert in the hope the pictures were actually being saved. Thankfully they were.


If anyone’s experienced this problem before, drop a comment or send an e-mail. I’m gonna try a firmware update/restore and see if that does the trick. If not, I’ll be sending it out for repair.






Tiny link: http://taii.cc/4g

Filterstorm 1.0.3 came out today, and brought much needed speed improvements. I also submitted 1.0.4, which is probably about where I should have been a week ago for iPad’s launch. This means work begins on 1.1; finally I get to work on new features.

All this work has kept me from posting anything photography related here in some time, but I do promise I’ll get back to that once things settle down a bit.
Tiny link: http://taii.cc/4f

The Filterstorm tutorial I put on this site a bit ago now has a new incarnation, now with video of it being done on an actual iPad with Filterstorm 1.0.2 (available now).

http://filterstorm.com/tutorial.tai
Tiny link: http://taii.cc/4c

Looks beautiful, speed is okay, but it’s crashing when I try to load large images. This is why it’s free for now!

Edit: I take back what I said about speed, I don’t know what I was thinking. Anyway, Version 1.0.2 is under review now. It makes the UI a lot more responsive, and scales down large images rather than crashing when opening them.
Tiny link: http://taii.cc/4b

It’s been a long two months of work, but Filterstorm is finally available on iTunes. Free for a limited time.

Download From iTunes
Tiny link: http://taii.cc/48

As Filterstorm’s launch (hopefully April 3) approaches, I’ve been thinking a lot about pricing. Filterstorm was never meant to be a free, but it is going to be for a limited time. Without having ever used it on an actual iPad, it’s impossible for me to know how quickly it will run, and how the UI will feel. Beyond that, as I rushed to get it out the door for launch, there’s some bits of quirky behavior and missing features. Until I get these issues worked out, I will not charge.

Nikon 85mm f/2.8 PC tilt/shift

Once I do begin asking for money I expect to charge $9.99, but this is not final.

As to what features will be missing at launch, the most obvious one is image rotation, I simply haven’t yet had time to get to it yet. The cloning/healing tools are also MIA right now, and EXIF data is stripped from files when saved. Unfortunately, there’s no way I know around this limitation for when saving to the photo library, but I may add the ability to save files outside the photo library that contain the EXIF. RAW Support will not be in version 1, and probably not in version 2, either.

What is there, you may ask? Here’s a list:

• Brightness
• Contrast
• Curves (Luminance, RGB, Red, Green, Blue, Cyan, Magenta, Yellow)
• Hue/Contrast Sliders
• Saturation
• Black and White channel controls
• Vignetting
• Sharpening
• Box Blur
• Cropping/Scaling
• Posterize effect
• Brushes with adjustable size/hardness
• Color Range selection

In addition, all of the filters can be applied to the whole image, painted on via brush, or applied to the selected color range. You can see how some of it works in the tutorial I posted earlier.

For those of you who, for whatever reason, cannot yet get an iPad and don’t care about Filterstorm news but want to see the photo, here’s a larger version.
Tiny link: http://taii.cc/47

Last night I went to my first Roller Derby bout in Yonkers. Though the home team was beaten, and I still don’t quite get all the rules, it was a great night. Most of these were shot with my as-of-yet unreviewed Nikon 135mm f/2.8 pre-ai. It’s soft at f/2.8, but the focusing ring of this early 70s lens is smooth and precise.

Nikkor 135mm Q·C f/2.8 non-ai @f/2.8

The lighting was rather terrible but the D700 powered through in the ISO4000 range. I do really wish I had brought my 85mm f/1.4, though. the 105 or 135mm f/2 DCs would have been nice, too.

Nikkor 135mm Q·C f/2.8 non-ai @f/2.8


Micro-Nikkor 85mm f/2.8 PC @f/2.8


Nikkor 135mm Q·C f/2.8 non-ai@f/2.8


Nikkor 135mm Q·C f/2.8 non-ai @f/2.8

Tiny link: http://taii.cc/46

A few months ago I posted this photo shortly before my review of the Tokina 11–16mm f/2.8. I tend not to do too much post processing on most photos I put up here, and this one was more involved than most, so as part of my testing of my iPad app Filterstorm, I decided this would be a good image to recreate. I also figured it would be a good idea to share the how I did it to give people an idea as to how Filterstorm will work. This was all done on a pre-release build, so everything you see is subject to change.


Above is the photo I originally posted, below the version I created today in Filterstorm. I’ve improved upon the original, getting better dynamic range and avoiding the blackening on the top of the skyline like in the original.




Here is the original jpeg, converted from RAW using Aperture’s default settings. The sky is too bright, the rest underexposed, and the color isn’t nearly dramatic enough.


The first thing I did after opening in filterstorm is to go into the luminance filters popover, and adjust the curves as shown to bring up the shadow brightness. If you look at the top left, you’ll see the mode switch is on the leftmost option, full image mode. When on this mode you can pan by flicking your finger, zoom by pinching, and every adjustment you make gets applied to the full image.


If you look at the mode switch here, it’s now set to the brush icon. In brush mode, touching and dragging on the screen draws on the picture rather than scrolling it. What’s displayed on the screen when the popover is present is a preview of what the brush will draw. Here I adjust the curves to get good contrast on the water, and ignore the fact that the sky gets blown out, as I will paint this adjustment only onto the water.


Here you can see what happened once I painted on the effect. Everything is as it was before, except now the water’s exposure is better.


I’m still in brush mode, and now I’m focusing on the sky. I’m switching to RGB curves rather than luminance, because when pulling exposure back with RGB curves it will saturate the image more, something I want in this case.


Here I adjust the curves how I see fit for the sky, to get color and contrast that will give the feeling of the real scene.


I took this screen capture to show what it looks like while painting the sky, so you get a bit more of the process rather than before and after. Below is what happens once the sky is done.




I felt the color of the water was too cold for the scene, so I changed the color balance and painted on a bit of a golden sheen to it.




Final step here is to get a bit more contrast on the buildings, they were under-exposed in the original and had little dynamic range to them, so I bump up the contrast what’s left, and I’m done once I paint it on!




Once again, here’s the finished product. It’s not only better than my original version, it was also a simpler process. I used overlay layers to accomplish much of what I did in the original version, which has the advantage of being able to more easily go back and change things I later decide I don’t like, but the disadvantage of being a more complex process. iPad’s release is only 16 days away; with any luck Filterstorm won’t be far behind.
Tiny link: http://taii.cc/45