Nyhavn in the Morning – Improving the sky

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Nyhavn in the Morning In the heart of Copenhagen in Denmark lies Nyhavn (New Port). It used to be a port for trading goods, but now it's a place, that the people of Copenhagen gather for a cold beer or a homemade Ice cream during the summer. The canal tours also have their starting point here.

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It’s tough being a photographer when midsummer is close. You really have to get up early in the morning to capture the sunrise. But you are rewarded with a wonderful experience. This morning I drove to the center of Copenhagen, I had a few photo projects I wanted to complete, one of wich was to get a good shot of Nyhavn (New Port). Nyhavn is in heart of Copenhagen in Denmark. The tourists and the locals mingle on sunny days, get a beer or a home made Ice cream. Nyhavn is just great!

About the post-process

The photo is a 5 shot HDR photo. I made three candidates, that I used to mix into the final image. Two different ones in Photomatix and a third one in Lightroom. At some point, I tried changing the hue of the image, into something more golden, bringing it further away from the original shot, but bringing it into the peaceful atmosphere there was on this very early morning. This is the 0-exposure:

Nyhavn in the morning - before

A side effect from the tone mapping in Photomatix is, that the sky is full of noise and there is some ghosting in the clouds which I didn’t like too much. In this case the clouds are shaped like long threads, and I decided to use a radial blur to emphasize the long soft threads. This also removes the noise in the sky – a side effect from using radial blur. But before doing that, I cleaned the sky for masts to be able to get good looking radial blurry clouds. If I didn’t do this, I would get the masts blurred into the clouds too. I used the Healing brush in Photoshop to remove the masts, it didn’t have to be a perfect job, because the radial blur will smooth everything out.

Step 1 select radial blur

And then I selected Zoom in Radial blur, and moved the center. It is important that the center gives lines, that matches the lines in the clouds. And after that I merged the blurred clouds into the final image.

Step 2 use radial blur

Giving the result below. By mixing this sky into the master image I get a great looking sky, with no noise and no ghosting in the clouds.

Step 3 only use the sky

How to make double tone mapped HDR photos

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Bean at Night The in Chicago is an awesome pieace of art. Though I only had very little time in Chicago I managed to get by it three times, the last time was at night time. The bean is a huge mirror built in steel, and then shaped like a bean. Everything reflects in the bean but in strange ways, because of the curves. It's very fascinating.

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The Bean in Chicago is an awesome pieace of art. Though I only had very little time in Chicago I managed to get by it three times, the last time was at night time. The bean is a huge mirror built in steel, and then shaped like a bean. Everything reflects in the bean but in strange ways, because of the curves. It’s very fascinating.

The photo is a 5 shot HDR shot with my Nikon D800 and the Nikon 14-24mm lens, which I love to death. When I processed this photo I made both a tone mapped version and a double tone mapped  image in Photomatix Pro and then I have blended them in Photoshop. The double tone mapped image I have primarily used for the ground, because it emphasize the texture and details.

Double tone mapped HDR images are often very easy to recognize. They push the image beyond a natural looking image, into a much more painterly world. They start to look like paintings rather than photos. Some like this, others don’t. I do like it. But exactly what effect you get when you double tone map an image, depend very much on how the light was when you shot your photo. A city night shot like this of the been, is excellent for double tone mapping. Here are some other examples of double tone mapped images:

The Royal Stables

The spider at the gates of the old Citadel

University of Copenhagen

As you can see they have a look and feel in common. That is the because of the double tone mapped image made in Photomatix Pro.

What a double tone mapped image does, is to exaggerate the texture and details enormously, which can look very cool if applied to all of an image, but you can also use it much more subtle, like in the two images below. In both I have applied a double tone mapped image to both on the rocks in the foreground and to the house in back ground, but the rest of the images are mostly other normal tone mapped or maybe just even one of the original shots.

Church of the Good Shephard

The old hammer mill

As you can see, they are very rich in detail on the rocks as well as on the houses. This is because of the double tone mapped.

How to make a double tone mapped image

The idea of the double tone mapping is that, you first do one HDR photo and tone map it in Photomatix using the option “Tone map” and “details enhancer”:

Step 1 Single tone mapping

and the image that you get from that process, you tone map too.

Step 2 Double tone mapping

This is simply done by pressing the “Tone mapping” button once more. A side effect of the double tone mapping is, that you get a lot more noise (grain) into the image and a wildly saturated image. The noise you have to clean up with a tool, but not necessarily all of it. The noise adds some of the grittyness to the image, which is part of the effect.

Step 3 double tone mapping

As you can see this is wildly saturated, so I slide the saturation slider to the left. I also do that to the luminosity slider. The Luminosity slider is very potent now, and I select something that I like, which is usually on the far left. And this is the result I get:

Step 4 double tone mapping

When you try to do this, try some of the other sliders too, and see how they affect your photo. When you are done, you have your double tone mapped image.

The way I process my photos, I will only use a portion of the photo. I never use what I get from Photomatix 100%, I always mix a bunch of images into the final image. I have a pool of candidates, the double tone mapped image is just one candidate.

If the double tone mapped effect is too strong, I will only mix it in with perhaps 50 or 75% opacity (see my tutorial on blending and mixing layers in GIMP or Photoshop).

This is the basics of double tone mapped image. You do need to have Photomatix Pro to do that. If you use this coupon code “caughtinpixels” you get 15% discount, and you can Photomatix Pro here.

The Hammer Mill

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 Nikon D800, Nikon 24-70mm, ISO 125, 24mm, f/8.0, 1/500 sec

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The old hammer mill, used by the Hammer Smith to create weapons amongst other things in the old days. The house is from 1765 and now house a small museum and a nice cafe. The mill is a water mill.

About the composition

I have build the composition up around some repeating objects, the boulders in the front, and then the reflection in the lake. The three stones in the foreground repeat a shape and points to the house, which also works as a repeating object.

The eye can also follow the lake shore around and get to the house. This way there are several leading lines for the viewer to follow.

The photo does have a lot of detail, and is best viewed in a large version. This is both good and bad.

Before photo

The before photo looks like this:

The old hammer mill - before shot

As you can see much more flat. The HDR has put a lot of detail in to the trees and the boulders in front and in general made the photo pop a lot more.

On a tight budget? Use GIMP instead of Photoshop!

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Sunset From the Old Mound Not far from my home town Roskilde in Denmark, lies this mound from the Bronze Age. From this place you can see for many miles around. This photo I have created using Lightroom and Gimp.

You don’t have to spend a fortune on software to make great photos. There is only one piece of software, that you really need to buy and that is Adobe Lightroom. And it just got released today in version 5. Lightroom not only organizes your photos, it also gives an incredible power to post process your photos and combining it with GIMP, which is totally free, you get an amazing powerful set of tools.

Learn how to make the photo below look as great as this HDR photo by using Lightroom and GIMP. You find the GIMP tutorial here.

Denmark - Sunset from the old mound

This photo I shot from the top of an old mound from the Bronze Age. It’s located just out-side Roskilde. I shot seven bracketed shots using my Promote Control and a Nikon D600, but I ended up using only three.

Understanding crop factor, wide angled lenses and tele lenses

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Not so hidden passage When I shot this photo I was worried about the bum walking in the far end of the passage, but because I used a wide angled lens, he got pushed so far away, that he grew so small that it didn't matter. It is a shot from the back side of the National Museum in Denmark.
Not so hidden passage

When I shot this photo I was worried about the bum walking in the far end of the passage, but because I used a wide angled lens, he got pushed so far away, that he grew so small that it didn’t matter. But when I shot this shot, I didn’t really understand what was going on and because I have spend quite some time thinking about it, I will share my thoughts on the topic.

When I bought my first DSLR back in 2007, a Canon 400D, I was told that I had to multiply my mm on the lens by 1.6. And because I had a 300 mm lens, that was equivalent of 480mm. I found this odd, but that was cool because I had a 70-300mm, which was really a 112-480mm. The crop factor made it an  even more extreme tele zoom lens. That was cool. I learned too that there are different crop factors, e.g. Nikon has a crop factor of  only 1.5, so I thought Canon was just a notch better than Nikon at this crop factor thing. Later I found out, that this was one big misunderstanding.

To fully understand this I have to explain several things, I will:

  • Explain the difference between a camera with an APS-C sensor and a camera with a full frame sensor.
  • Then I will explain how conversions between the APS-C sensor and full frame sensor work.
  • I will also explain how wide angle and tele lenses work and what lens compression is.
  • And last I will explain a bit about what effect this while crop factor thing has on bokeh (out of focus back ground).

It’s actually less than a year ago I figured out how it really works and that it is a big mistake, to think of it as ‘equivalent’. It was after I bought my Canon 5D Mark III and a bunch of lenses, that I learned how it really works (you might also like to read my Review of Canon 5D Mark III vs Nikon D800 and Nikon D600).

A cropped sensor (APS-C sensor) vs a full frame sensor

Inside a digital camera, there is a sensor that captures the light that comes through the lens and translates that into an image. Sensors in DSLRs most commonly comes roughly in two different sizes, the APS-C sensor and the full frame sensor. The smaller APS-C sensor is approx 23mm x 15mm, while the larger full frame sensor is about 36mm x 24mm. The exact size varies from brand to brand. The full frame sensor corresponds to the old 35mm films.

Size of Full frame vs Cropped sensor

When you attach a lens to a camera, a lens does not change how it works, whether it is attached to a full frame camera or an APS-C camera. A 15mm lens is defined from the way the glass is constructed and placed in the lens. By moving it to from one camera type to the other, does not change the lens or the glass.

The difference lies in what is captured by the sensor and because the APS-C sensor is smaller, it also captures a smaller portion of the scene that comes through the lens, while a full frame sensor captures a larger portion of what comes through the lens. And this is very important to understand! If you didn’t quite understand it, I encourage you to try to read it again.

If I shoot a scene with a 15mm lens on a full frame camera body and I then move the lens to an APS-C camera body and shoot the scene again, I will get a smaller portion of the scenery with the APS-C sensor. If I cropped the image I shot with the full frame camera in Lightroom or Photoshop in the post-process, I would get exactly the same image from the two cameras (probably in different mega pixels, but otherwise the same image).

If I want to capture the same scene on the APS-C camera, I would have to compensate, for what the sensor crops away. There are two ways of compensating, one is to move further away and the other is use a wider lens, which captures more of the scenery. Let’s stick with the wider lens.

Now the crop factor comes into play. It is calculated like this using the width of the sensor 36mm / 23mm = approx 1.5. And remember the exact numbers vary from brand to brand.

So if I used a 10mm lens on an APS-C sensor, that would compensate from what the sensor crops away, because 10mm x 1.5 = 15mm. The is the reason for the confusion of the lenses being ‘equivalent’. But let’s not forget, that it is not longer the same glass in the lenses. On my full frame camera I have a 15mm lens and I have a 10mm lens on my APS-C camera and they do produce different images, as you will be able to see further down in this article.

And these two lenses behave different because of lens compression, which brings me to the other part.

Understanding lens compression (Wide angle and tele lenses)

The human eye sees the world much in the same way as a 50mm lens does. That’s probably one of the reasons, why 50mm lenses are popular among photographers. Almost every camera brand has got a fairly cheap and excellent 50mm prime lens.

Wide angle lenses are shorter than 50mm, while tele lenses are longer than 50mm. Both wide angle and tele lenses comes with a zoom (e.g. 16-35mm and 70-200mm), and there are lenses that works in both areas, like the very popular 24-70mm zoom lens. Every brand seems to have a superb 24-70mm, as well as they have a 50mm lens.

But what happens when you get a longer lens? Or shorter lens? In terms of millimeters that is.

Let’s start with the tele lenses. You most probably have realized, that they enlarge things, but something else happens too. Things get compressed. Even though things you have within your frame, are far apart, can suddenly look close to each other. This is called lens compression.

And what happens with a wide angle lens is, the exact opposite, things get pushed further away, than they really are. And when you get to the extreme wide angel things in the corners gets distorted too. So a wide angle lens decompress or expands a scenery.

This calls for some examples to get the grip of it. I found a bridge here in my hometown, and then I shot this bridge as the primary object in my photo, and kept it approximately the same size, and different focal lengths. This is something, that you can’t do with your own eyes, but your brain knows how to translate it.

I have tried keep the frame of the bridge in the same size, and started at 14mm, in which case I had to actually stand on the bridge, and then I moved backwards and took shots at 24mm, 50mm, 70mm,100mm, 200mm and 300mm. And that gives this sequence of photos:

Lens compression 14mm moving14mm. Can you spot the tree in the center?
Lens compression 24mm moving24mm. You can see a small tree in the center now.
Lens compression 50mm moving50mm. Now the tree is clear, but still small. This is the way the human eye sees it.
Lens compression 70mm moving70mm. The tree grows.
Lens compression 100mm moving100mm. The tree now fills the inner frame of the bridge.
Lens compression 200mm moving200mm. The tree has grown out of the inner frame of the bridge.
Lens compression 300mm moving300mm. Now you can’t even see the horizon.

Lens compression 14mm fixed location

And this final image is back to the 14mm, taken from where I took the 300mm shot.

As you can see things change quite dramatically. As you get longer focal lenths, things that are further away suddenly seems closer. The tree in the back ground, suddenly grows big.

This you can use as a feature, when you compose your photo, either by pushing something further away or pulling something close. If you use a tele lens to shoot mountains, you can make them look bigger, than they really are.

Lens compression on cropped and full frame cameras

Let’s return to the cropped camera vs full frame camera issue and the crop factor. As you might be able to realize now, a crop factor of 1.5, does not make a 10mm lens on an APS-C camera equivalent to a 15mm lens on a full frame camera.

Depth of field on cropped vs full frame cameras

Another thing, that comes from the optics, is that wide angle lenses have a huge depth of field, meaning that you can have almost everything in focus, while tele lenses are good to make blurry back grounds on portraits. If you are shooting landscape photos using extreme wide angle lenses, you will be able to get even more in focus on a 10mm lens compared with a 15mm lens. This can be an advantage. So a cropped camera will in general have a larger depth of field, than a full frame camere, if you use the crop factor to recalculate the focal length. But this also has got one more implication, which involves the bokeh.

Bokeh on cropped vs full frame cameras

Because the depth of field is larger on a cropped camera, if you use the crop factor calculation on the focal length (like 30mm on a cropped camera equals 45mm on a full frame camera), the bokeh also changes. The bokeh is the “out of focus” blurry back ground that looks to great on portraits. Let’s have a look at a 100% crop of both images at the same resolution.

DX bokeh100% crop of a 30mm, f/2.8 on a cropped camera. Notice the bokeh on the flowers.

FX bokeh

100% crop of 45mm, f/2.8 on a full frame camera. Notice much softer and stronger bokeh.

As you can see you get a much softer and nicer bokeh on the full frame camera, which is an advantage if you are shooting photos, where you need the bokeh.

Gone – 1 year anniversary

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Gone

Canon 5D Mark III, Canon 24-105mm, ISO 400, 24mm, f/16, 1/100 sec

One year and 1 day ago I got my first high-end DSLR – a Canon 5D Mark III. And one year ago today, exactly, I took this photo – the first one I have found good enough to be published. This version of the image is actually the second version I published. The first one I wasn’t quite satisfied with and I returned when my post-processing skills improved.

The photo is a single exposure that I have processed as a pseudo HDR. I did that by creating two virtual copies in Lightroom, and then setting the exposure compensation to -2 and +2 respectively. That gave me a -2, 0 and +2 version of the image. However, the dynamic range of the Canon 5D Mark III is really not very impressive (you might want to read about it in my review of Canon 5D Mark III and Nikon D800 and D600). Because of that, there was heavy noise in the darker regions of the +2 image, because the shadows had been raised so much. So what I did was to do some heavy duty noise reduction on the +2 version of the image.

I then did my tone mapping with Photomatix Pro (see my tutorial on using Photomatix) and got a good result that improved the photo immensely. I did a few other things, that I don’t remember in detail, but what I got was this image:

Denmark - Roskilde - Gone

As you can see, the lower part of the image is more or less the same, but the upper part has changed a lot.

What sometimes happens, when you make HDR photos, I have realized, is that they get way too gray’ish. That is a side effect of making HDR photos and it is your job, as a photographer to handle that that in some way. In this particular case, the sky was complete wrong and it was way too grey and I wanted to fix that. Some time later I found the original photo and started working the sliders in Lightroom, and focused only on the sky. Below you first see the original image, and then you see the sky I got, by working the sliders. What I did was take my Photomatix version of the photo, and exchanged the sky, with this new one from Lightroom, and that really made the image.

Original photo without any adjustments:

Gone - Original photo

And a Lightroom version, in which I focused on the sky only:

Gone - with good sky

I then replaced this sky, with the sky in my tone mapped image, and that really did a change to the photo.

Roskilde Cathedral by Night – Change your vantage point

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Roskilde Cathedral by Night Roskilde Cathedral is almost a thousand years old. The Church is on the list of UNESCO's world inheritage and is absolutely worth a visit, if you ever come by Roskilde or Denmark. The Church is fairly big (not in the Sct. Peters Cathedral in the Vatican, but it's no small cathedral. Infact I needed a 14mm full frame lens to be able to capture all of it, from the square in front of the church.

 Nikon D800, Nikkor 14-24mm, ISO 200, 23mm, f/4.5, 1.6 sec (zero exposure)

Roskilde Cathedral is almost a thousand years old. The Church is on the list of UNESCO’s world inheritage and is absolutely worth a visit, if you ever come by Roskilde or Denmark. The Church is fairly big (not in the Sct. Peters Cathedral in the Vatican size, but it’s no small cathedral).

Shooting the photo

I had a lot of trouble getting a close shot of the church, if I wanted all of the church included. The square infront of the church is fairly big, but not compared the the size of the church. In the end I needed a 14mm full frame lens to be able to capture all of it. The first time I tried with a 17mm, and was able to include all of it, but I had to tip the camera so much, that I couldn’t get a propper good looking church out of it. The problem with wide angle lenses is, that when ever you tilt your camera, the lines start to scew, and the more you tip, the more you scew the image. And if it gets too scewed you can’t fix anymore, without ruining the photo.

But with this photo I used a different approach. I couldn’t include all of the church easily, so I chose to focus on a part of the church, like the door. As I said the square is fairly big, and I wanted to use the lines in the cobble stones, as lead in lines, but  didn’t want terrible much rather boring ground in the lower part of the photo, so I placed the camera very close to the ground, as you can see. By doing this, I can emphasize the lines going through the cobble stones, just as well as I get more room for the church it self in the image.

Taking a low vantage point, some times work really great and emphasize lines, but don’t go low too often. It might spoil the element of surprise, in your photos…

A note on the post processing

The photo a mix of three images.

  1. A 5 shot HDR photo that I tone mapped in Photomatix Pro
  2. A double tone mapped image made in Photomatix Pro.
  3. An image created in Light room

The double tone mapped image, is only mixed in on the bricks and the cobble stones, which makes it even more moody, almost computer game graphics.

Sunrise Going to Oslo – fixing a photo from a snapshot camera

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Sunrise Going to Oslo This sunrise was so awesome and I really hated myself for not bringing my DSLR for this trip. I shot this shot with a snapshot camera Canon S95, which is a pretty good snapshot camera, but it doesn't come close to a DSLR. But I still managed to get a pretty amazing photo out of it.

This sunrise was so awesome and I really hated myself for not bringing my DSLR on this trip, when I saw this sunrise. I shot this shot with a snapshot camera Canon S95, which is a pretty good snapshot camera, but it doesn’t even come close to a DSLR. This is the original photo:

Sunrise going Oslo - before

As you can see the photo is not nearly as strong in the colors and the shadows are almost completely black. I shot this in JPEG, even though the Canon S95 actually does shoot RAW format. Never shoot JPEG, you just might end up regretting it, at some point, when you want to use the photo.

When I shot the photo I liked the speaker, but when I started post-processing it, I didn’t like it. I removed using a combination of clone stamp and healing brush. It takes a little time, to recreate the water and waves well enough, for the viewer not to notice.

To get the look and feel of the final image I used Lightroom with these settings:

Sunrise going Oslo - settings

 

Notice that I increased the Shadows to 100, and then on the tone curve I also increased the Darks and the Shadows again. If you have some really dark parts, you can use both sections to make the shadows brighter. However, you will get a lot of noise in there.

I shot this in JPEG and a JPEG almost does not have any information in the shadows, so I dialed the Contrast pretty high, to 95. This brought the shadows back to very dark, but increased the brighter parts – that’s what Contrast does. But it did give me a lot more structure and mood on the hills. You can now see the mist.

I then made the photo a lot more colorful by using both Vibrance and Saturation.

The last major thing I did to this photo, was to use Noise reduction. I used Noiseware from Imagenomic. I find that to be a great Noise reduction tool, because it is good at retaining details. The noise was quite bad in this photo, when I had made the look and feel in Lightroom, so I did a lot of work on the noise. The sky got more noise reduction than the hills. I used layer masks in Photoshop to blend a heavily noise reduced image with a less noise reduced image. If I just applied heavy noise reduction to all of the image, I would loose too many details.

The Ghost Driver in the Taco Taxi

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USA - New York - The ghost driver in the Taco TaxiThis got to be the coolest yellow cab in New York City. Found on 7th avenue on Manhattan.

Nikon D800, 32mm, ISO 250, f/9.0, 1/400

In New York City on Manhattan I found this totally cool 1950 Studebaker yellow cab parked by the curb. I took 5 handheld shots, with my new Nikkor 24-70mm lens. We were in a big rush, because we had to go back to the hotel to check out, so that we could get to the airport. I did not have the time to consider the scene well enough, because we were half running. And I happened to include a couple of people, that did really work in the photo. And the van on the left hand side was double parked and didn’t move either.

I have been going back to the photo several times trying to process it, but not getting anything interesting. But then suddenly it came to me more by chance than anything else. I’m working on a post, in which I discuss good and bad processing and how to fix some problems with halos. I needed an extreme HDR and pushed the Surreal preset in Photomatix. Photomatix works this way: When you open Photomatix, it uses the same settings you had last time. And by chance I once again dumped my Taco taxi into Photomatix and BAM! That was how my yellow cab should look like. I did dial the extreme a liiiitle bit back, to take the edge of it, but the effect is still very very strong. This is the original 0-exposure:

The Ghost Driver in the Taco Taxi - original

As you can see, quite a dramatic change. The speed effect I added, because the rest of the photo really doesn’t work too well. The people on the right and the van on the left shouldn’t have been included – so I had try something. I tried blurring the background using gaussian blur, but that didn’t come out very well, and then I tried the Radial Blur with a zoom effect, and that did the trick.

Tacotaxi - radial blur 1

Tacotaxi - radial blur 2

Tacotaxi - radial blur 3

This blurred image I mixed with the original photo, in such a way, that the car remained unblurred, while the rest is blurred.

Notice how the people disappears and how the van suddenly works as a part of the composition. That’s neat.

You can find my HDR tutorial here, including a coupon code that gives 15% discount on buying Photomatix.

Miniature review of the Fujipix X100

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Viking ships on a rowBeen a while since I posted a photo of Viking ships. A thousand years ago, Roskilde was the home of the vikings, and the king of Denmark. The second king of Denmark Harald Bluetooth (the modern technology is named after that guy!) rests in our Cathedral. We also have the worlds largest replica of a viking ship called the Sea Stalion. These are some of the smaller viking ships, and you can get to sail with them, as a tourist attraction.

ISO 800, 23mm, f/4.0, 1/140 sec

It has been a while since I posted a photo of Viking ships. A thousand years ago, Roskilde was the home of the vikings and the king of Denmark. The second king of Denmark Harald Bluetooth (the modern technology is actually named after that guy!) rests in our Cathedral. That kind of puts Roskilde on the map, so to speak. We also have the worlds largest replica of a viking ship called the Sea Stalion. These are some of the smaller viking ships, and you can get to sail with them, as a tourist attraction.

I shot this photo with my Fuji FinepixX100, a camera that I both love and hate and use far too little, and should have got rid of. The camera can take absolutely fantastic photos, but also has it’s flaws.

The camera looks awesome – like an old Leica or similar. I bought the brown leather cage for it as well, which only emphasizes the looks of an antique camera. And when ever I carry it around, it is always commented “Oh – that’s an old camera” – but it is not.

Basic facts:

  • 12 Mega pixels using an APS-C sensor. APS-C is awesome, compared to user smallish cameras. 12 Mega pixels is just a little to little.
  • Dynamic range 12.4 EVS (See dxomark for the lab test)
  • Maximum auto bracketing (aeb) is -1, 0, +1. As a photographer of HDR, this is just not good enough
  • Built-in Neutral Density filter ND 3. This is cool! I have used it far too little.
  • The lens is fixed at 23mm – equivalent of 35mm. A good all round size, but due to the small mega pixel cropping options are not that great. If I have the “wrong lens” attached, I will crop an image. 12 Megapixel just leaves less to crop from.
  • Weight Approx 0.5 kg. It’s not a light weight small camera.
  • Pretty awesome low light performance.

I have had the camera with me on a few vacations, but I tend to get annoyed with it. As you can see on the image of this post and this image the camera can produce absolutely awesome photos. But it has problems getting the focus spot on. I tend to get maybe 10% or 20% of my photos not tack sharp. But when it hits the focus point, the photos are awesome sharp. And the saturation I just love.

The camera is slow – it takes a long time to start up. And because of the mirrorless technology, it also focuses slowly.

The lens is fixed and not possible to switch – however, the lens is totally awesome. f/2.0 and produces fantastic images. The limit comes with the fairly low mega pixel count. If it had been a higher mega pixel count, I would have shot more shots and just cropped them.

It has a panorama feature, which works quite well. If you do it hand held, you of course have to have a fairly steady hand, otherwise you get skewed merges between images.

About low light performance. The camera is known for it’s low light performance, and that is in all fairness. However, it still get’s it ass kicked, by high level DSLRs. There is an upper limit for the everything, including Low light performance of the X100.

I love the camera because of the looks, the high image quality and the fairly compact format.

I hate the camera because, it is not good for HDR, because it only does -1, 0, +1 in automatic exposure bracketing mode. I also hate it because it fails on getting the focus spot on, in far too many photos, just as well as it is a slow camera, both in starting up and focusing.

For the casual shooter, that want’s something that that is siginificant better than the average snapshot camera, this camera really kicks in. But for the serious photographer, the camera comes in almost good enough. No doubt the image quality is totally awesome, but it’s flaws are considerate, and for that reason I use it far too little.