I got a late start today seeking out photographic material outdoors. The sun was getting quite low. However, there were a few half decent shots possible. I decided to play with my Nikkor 18-35mm 1:1.8 lens. I had avoided it some because of barrel distortion. Then I discovered a menu setting for automatically correcting small lens distortions. It was set to “Off” by default. I turned it on…. Guess what? It worked!
The biggest challenge of the photos I tried with the 18-35mm.
This was the hardest challenge of all. The camera corrected 90% of the barrel distortion (I forgot to export the file as it came off the camera). Lightroom let me correct the little remaining distortion with ease. There is still a little remaining, but hopefully it isn’t obvious to most people.
Hopefully that speck near the center is a bird. I’ll check it later with another sky shot.
The first time I used the lens after it arrived 6 months ago, it made a singing noise focusing. Today, it was totally silent and focused quite well. To be honest, it has been that full 6 months since I last used it. Since I’m still recovering from cancer treatment, I just didn’t feel like messing with reducing lens distortion. now that I discovered that menu setting, I’m looking forward to giving it a workout. After all, I didn’t purchase it to let it sit in the gadget bag!
The picture above is straight out of the camera. The garden flag pole is tilted in real life. You can see the fence post it is attached to lean from distortion. I tried to correct this distortion and this is one time I just couldn’t get it to behave. Straightening the post caused the flag pole to warp. Really, it isn’t that noticeable in my opinion even though the mobile home in the background also leans a little from lens distortion as well as the house across the street from the mobile home. Once again, those distortions did not lend themselves to correction.
The flag pole is slightly bent in real life at the swivel near the mounting point.
I slightly boosted the saturation and vibrance of the pictures. I darkened the sky a little and boosted the saturation slightly, not much. I also brought the darker areas up a little. Next experimenting may be with exposure metering settings. I had it on Matrix today. Normally, I use center weighing, sometimes spot. The camera has highlight-weighted metering, too, which I might experiment with later on.
The next fall colors will be the burning bush. For some reason, ours lags a week or so behind other peoples’ burning bushes. Once it does its thing, my primary subject will once again be birds. I had been too active today out front so they kept themselves elsewhere.
On a different note, I offloaded the pictures directly from the camera instead of using the card reader I posted about earlier. What a difference!!!!!! The camera took about half a minute to offload 18 pictures, where the card reader would have done the job faster than I could blink. Still, it wasn’t anything to complain about, and if there aren’t more than a couple dozen pictures, I offload from the camera, anyway.
The Christmas lights I’ve mentioned earlier still are on the list of things to get done as well as mulching leaves again. I should document that project, I guess, in case someone is interested. Stay tuned!
