Saturday, September 23, 2006

Lantern Festival

I used to do this with my family with I was young. I thought its WAY ouf of fashion but I was wrong. This traditional festival is alive and well. I went to see it at my local community center.

All Photos done with Nikon d200, Built in flash (sometimes), 18-200mm VR AF-S



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Nikon stuff - part 2 18-200mm AF-S VR

18-200mm AF-S VR - gaffer taped up as ususal for its own protection

AF-S means that the lens focuses silently (or close to silently) becasue is uses a tiny motor in the lens rather than the screwdriver twisting type of focus mechanism. Its supposed to be faster... and I feel that it is but its only noticable at longer focal lenghts (maybe 70mm and above)

This lens is my most used. It covers a huge zoom range! more than 10X (200(longest)/18(shortest) zoom. Ususaly such zooms are not very good picture wise. The Nikon one is the very best in the world (as of end 2006). Its sharp (very good at 18mm and only good at 200mm), it has good contrast and it is not as slow at the 200mm end (f5.6 as oppoesed to other 10x zooms which are f6.3). f5.6 is not good enough for indoor sport. But is good enough for decent outdoors action. Indoors you cannot use this lens to capture action shots.

But what is good is that you can use this lens to capture still shots using the VR function. I have hand held 1/4second shots at 200mm indoors with decent % of sharp ones... maybe 50%. Thats quite amazing. Great for places I don't usually visit museums etc where the objects dont move.

This lens covers from wide angle to zooming in so thats great. Unless I need a shot where there is alot of action indoors, this is the lens that will be on my camera:) Its quite amazing that the same lens took both the pictures below from the same place all handheld at 1/10s shutter speed. This lens costs 2x the price of other 18-200mm zooms. But i feel that the VR and the AF-s and the picture quality are worth it. Its also in VERY short supply at the moment. When it is in stock it will cost you 1250-1300 Singapore dollars.

Wide - 18mm there is a bit of light falloff at the corners, thats normal and not noticable in 95% of shots especially outdoors. Its EASILY fixed in photoshop


Zoomed in (taken from same position as above) - 200mm. Those 2 little bottles are at the center of the previous shot. yes, ZMA is a good supplement to take. Many people are severly zinc defficient - hehe totally off topic! But you wouldnt even have this topic without the 200mm zoom range of this lens.