Limit
Taken on January 30, 2013 by Daniel Zedda
Another one from my last Sunday at the beach (I have more to come : P).
The weather, as I mentioned, was pretty bad, and there wasn’t much going on but a wide beach, waves and clouds. I decided to go minimalistic for a couple shots, just working with textures and perspective.
Small Nikon 16-35 vr review:
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The lens I have been using for the past weeks is the Nikon 16-35mm f4 vr, it has very mixed reviews on the web, I wanted to share some facts about it, according to my experience over about a month:
The build quality is extremely good, the lens feels solid and well put together with no movements, it’s large but it balances great on my D600. The zoom ring is smooth and dampened, the focus ring is, like with all AF DSLR lenses, a little dry feeling (plastic on plastic feel) and not very precise with a hint of play.
Optically the lens is excellent across the frame once stopped down to f/11 or below (I shoot most of my landscapes between f/11 and f/22), wide open the corners are definitely a little softer.
The lens gives the best optical performance at about 20-24mm, at these focal lenghts it’s very very sharp even wide open.
The barrel distortion at 16mm is real and pretty bad but it’s easy to fix with 1 click in post, at longer focal lenghts the distortion is negligible.
My only gripe is the general performance at 35mm, I feel the lens is a little week at it’s maximum end, compared to the wide end quality at least.
The VR is actually really good and very useful (despite the hate that it gets on wide angle lenses), I can shoot consistently sharp images at 1/4s while at 16mm, I just love it and it’s a great addition.
Overall, I really really like my Nikon 16-35 f4 vr lens, it has its problems but overall it’s a fantastic performer and with it’s weather sealed body and 77mm filter thread, it provides a high quality and hassle-free landscape photography experience.
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Editing:
– Lens profiling and exposure optimization in Lightroom.
– Dust cleaning… (I really hate doing this)
– Local contrast boost and general darkening (to take care of some of the haziness)
– Sharpening using unsharp mask and layer masks.