Life, Death, and Lack of Experience: Another struggle of the inadvertent historian

A few years ago, I wrote "Life, Death, and Lack of Closure," about a seemingly-inevitable trap of living life after becoming an inadvertent historian: that because inaction — the decision to not document something — is in itself a form of curation, you never really escape from the anxiety of not putting time into documentary work. That is, the awareness that you could be documenting things, but aren't, lingers like a specter throughout everyday life. Even as I described it then, I still feel it now.

I've gotten better at seeing the opportunity and not just the cost — "I am deciding to be present in this moment," rather than just "I'm deciding not to document this moment." But I think some people have a sense of ease at letting moments pass by which I've never managed to recapture.

But I just discovered a new form of this trap.

Second Wind

It's kind of funny to think that the last time I saw my DSLR, it was looking back at me. February 29th. My life had just taken a huge turn — after 22 years of pole vault, I decided to retire, and I went to the photo studio to take some self-portraits that would hopefully capture how unmoored and adrift I felt in that moment.

Little did I know, another huge turn was just around the corner. Little did I know that "unmoored and adrift" was going to be the theme of the year.

[Doc Diaries] The Truth and Beauty of Diversity

I mentioned last time that Singapore's "gleaming architecture, wondrous glass-covered skyscrapers, and spotless streets" felt as if they were devoid of humanity. When I got to downtown Melbourne, I again found myself surrounded by towers of metal and glass. But… this time it was different. This time, I could admire the dazzling architecture without feeling like I was losing my grip on reality. I could look up, but still feel my feet on the ground.

I'm still not entirely sure why, but I think it has a lot to do with space, and I think it has a lot to do with utility. Let me try to explain what I saw, and what I felt.

A bunch of the architecture in Singapore was exquisitely designed, but it felt so special as to seem otherworldly. Out-of-place. It felt like a mystical wonderland that you would visit, but that didn't seem to have as much connection with where and how people actually lived. You would look around, and you would see works of art that placed form before function, even though they did still function.

When I looked towards the sky in the Melbourne central business district (CBD; basically, "downtown"), the trappings of everyday life remained in view. And they fit into the place. The angles of the street lamp fixtures matched the angular design of the buildings. The towering heights of the skyscrapers were echoed in the way that the netting of a play area also reached towards the sky. It felt like design was… an everyday thing. Like the difference between a beautiful sculpture and a nicely sculpted fork. They might both be works of art, but you observe one from afar, and you use the other one every single day.

Leaving Love Behind

I have so many questions. And I know that the answers, if they come at all, will only come with time. Looking back doesn't feel like it'll help me move forward. I don't know how 22 years of "I am" can really prepare a person to say "I am not" for the first time. But I'll do my best.

I grew up playing soccer and tennis since before I can remember. But in 7th grade, a funeral kept me away from tennis tryouts, and opened the door to track and field. I tried the pole vault because it seemed cool. I stuck with it because I was right.

Doc Diaries: On Reflection

There have been a great many photographers who loved being behind the camera, but who were hesitant to have their own pictures taken. For whatever reason, I have never been that way. And while talking to a friend recently, it occurred to me that looking back on my history of self-portraits, and the cameras that took them, might reveal something about how my style and perspective have changed over the years. None of these images is cropped; they are all complete frames.

I consider the real start of my photographic journey to be late 2002, when I was gifted a Sony DSC-P31 for Christmas. The settings were all auto, there was no usable zoom, and there were no real manual controls.

That was a generation before selfies, front-facing cameras, and articulating screens, and it took me a few months before I finally turned the lens on myself, and then a few more before I produced this shot. This was one of the first self-portraits that showed the seeds of how I would go on to capture myself in the 16 years since.

I think that during my earlier years, the self-portraits that I took were mainly incidental — I happened to be a convenient subject to experiment on — but I don't think I had any real documentary intent for them.

Doc Diaries: Aesthetics and Storytelling at the Stanford Invitational (part 2)

I mentioned in part 1 that it's important to take some time before the meet to make guiding decisions about the general shape of the coverage. As a documentary photographer, I always feel a sense of duality between my aesthetic decisions and my storytelling decisions — they're almost inseparably intertwined. And as much as I love to make beautiful images, my actual aspiration is to make images whose aesthetics support the meaning that they're trying to convey. For track and field, beauty is often, but not always, the tool of choice.

Doc Diaries: Work It!

"Can you tell a story without moving?" That's the essence of a photography exercise I first went through about 13 years ago, during one of the only two photography classes I've ever taken. More recently, I was spending time with a friend while she practiced the cello, and I decided to give that exercise another go.

The fundamental goal of the exercise isn't really to capture distinct perspectives of the scene (although that is a good outcome). But rather, the goal is to force yourself to "work the scene" — to do the work to discover novel ways of seeing and capturing the scene that might not immediately come to mind. I absolutely adore this opening photo, but I had no idea that this is something that was lurking in the environment when we started. It took me 35 minutes into the 45-minute practice session to find it.

So let's go back to the beginning, and I'll show you some of the directions I explored en route to finding this and other shots during that session. My hope is that it'll give you some ideas and techniques to explore your own scenes, and to find some new perspectives for subjects that might already be familiar.

Doc Diaries: Fuji X-T1 Mirrorless

Sometimes gear matters. My photographic journey started off with a point-and-shoot camera, about 16 years ago, and has since been powered predominantly by some combination of DSLRs and (more recently) mirrorless cameras.

As I developed as a photojournalist, and subsequently as a documentary photographer, I found myself optimizing for two competing usecases: I wanted a camera I could keep with me, because some of the best opportunities are unexpected and unpredicted. But I also wanted to be able to cover large events (like concerts and athletic events), while wearing gloves, where my movement might be constrained, without needing to change lenses.

Over the years, my kit has bifurcated into a pair of solutions that handle those two kinds of situations separately. For everyday moments and unexpected situations, I have a Fuji X-T1 mirrorless camera with a fairly compact 27mm f/2.8 prime lens that's with me most of the time. The whole package is sufficiently convenient that I carry it even on days when I expect no pictures to happen. In contrast, when I go somewhere for the purpose of shooting, I'll usually bring a pair of D7100 DSLR bodies with f/2.8 zooms attached. I still have plenty of frustrations with both setups, but even so, I still find myself able to work pretty effectively.

Finally, to put this post (and this series) into some context, I picked up the X-T1 in 2014 and have run a bit over 28k frames through it since then. The D7100 bodies are at ~92k for the pair. Previously, I had put ~118k frames onto two D300 bodies, ~23k frames onto a Sony NEX-7 and NEX-6, ~11k frames onto a Fuji X100, and ~50k frames onto the Nikon D70 that started it all for me. Suffice it to say that I have a significant amount of experience with all of these cameras, and all of the conclusions I draw are specifically against this backdrop. I'm well aware that other cameras (whether mirrorless or DSLR) have different strengths and weaknesses.

Photographic Problem Solving: Rolling Shutter in Two Shots

First and foremost, I'm a pole vaulter who trains with decathletes. So when they switch to training for a different event, I switch to my camera, to try to capture a bit of what it's like to be a non-elite, post-collegiate athlete in the US.

My everyday camera is a Fuji X-T1, a mirrorless camera that can shoot either with the mechanical focal-plane shutter, or with an electronic-only silent shutter mode. By default, it will shoot with the mechanical shutter up to the 1/4000s maximum, and then switch to the electronic shutter up to a final max of 1/32000s. That's super useful for me, because I love to shoot at relatively open apertures (to control depth-of-field) in very bright sunlight. Also, sometimes I'll try to expose for a silhouette in bright sunlight, while still keeping DoF in check. In either case, the aperture is locked, I'm at base ISO, and shutter speed is all I've got left.

During one particular shot put practice, I exposed for a silhouette as my training partner Dan took two throws. Of my various images that day, I took images of the two throws with the first at 1/4700s (shown above, with the electronic shutter), and the second at 1/3500s (with the mechanical shutter, shown below).

Timber, Day 2: Jenga

In the first day-two post, we got the tree down to a height short enough that we could fell the remainder all at once. All that was left was to make it happen.

Because trees widen near the base, Matt planned to switch his standard saw to a longer bar and chain to get some extra reach. That plan had to change once he discovered that the longest chain he could find wasn't quite long enough for the bar he needed. Plan B was to fire up an old Husqvarna 3120XP that Mark had previously acquired for his chainsaw mill. It hadn't run in awhile, but some coaxing and old timer magic got it up and running.

pianissimo: How to move a piano (part 1)

Part of the magic of a piano is that they are always surrounded by art. Designing them is an art. Playing them is an art. Recording them is an art. Tuning them is an art. And, it turns out, moving them is an art as well. Recently, I was able to watch as a grand piano was moved from a San Francisco apartment to a house. As always, it was enlightening to watch people who were experienced in the art.

As I noted in "Timber!", tools and infrastructure make jobs like this significantly easier, and provide more margin for error. For this move, the movers mounted the piano to a wooden sled (think of a dolly with no wheels), and used the sled as an interface with the world. They let the sled ride down the stairs, and not having to keep the piano off the floor allowed them to focus their efforts on staying centered in the narrow interior staircase, and keeping the descent under control.

Ad Hoc Challenges and Personal Growth

Sometimes it pays to throw caution to the wind. To try something just to see if you can do it. If it works, that's another skill or capability under your belt. If it doesn't work, that's extra experience under your belt. Either eventuality leads to personal growth.

In my own case, I was in the studio a few days ago to shoot a new passport photo for myself. I wanted to get home, and I idly wondered how quickly I could do a good-enough job. The answer was seven photos. I got to the studio, took seven pictures, and went home. I also made a lot of mistakes. I learned a lot, and if I were going to do it over again, I'd do things differently. Skills, capability, experience.

I analyze all seven shots below.

First shot. Making sure the light and trigger are working. Check. Tripod in the photo is the one that I used (since I forgot mine at home; whoops).

Second shot. Bumped the light output. Remember that this is the tripod that will be under the camera, so the tripod isn't actually in the hotspot.

Third shot. Camera mounted on tripod. Yoga mat as focus stand-in.

Fourth shot. Self-timer was shorter than expected. Obviously overexposed, framed too low, and out-of-focus.

Fifth shot. Bumped the camera from f/2.8 to f/4.0 to deal with overexposure. Used another tripod as a focus stand-in, because its legs kept it from flopping backward like the yoga mat did. Also, I made it taller to better approximate my torso height. Still out-of-focus.

Sixth shot. Pitched down a little bit, and finally nailed the focus.

Seventh shot. Focus is perfect. Framing is perfect. The main thing I got wrong is that the light is too directional. I pondered putting up a second light and decided that I was too lazy. That was a mistake — passport photos call for very flat, even lighting. In the end, I was able to fix that in post, but were I shooting for an actual (journalistic) publication, it would've called for a re-shoot.

The second thing I got wrong is that I needed more diffusion. I used a ~5-foot octa, set up pretty close, and the hotspot is too bright, which overexposed my left (camera-right) cheek, while leaving the rest of my face reasonably-exposed. If I drop the exposure so my cheek is reasonable, the rest of my face is underexposed. The effect is exacerbated by the fact that I wear UV-blocking sunglasses every day, which is why the area around my eyes is so much less tan than the rest of my face.

But all in all, pretty good. And even better next time :o)

F One Eight

Around a year ago, Sigma launched the 18-35 f/1.8 zoom lens. An f/1.8 constant zoom. Wow. I snapped one up as soon as I could afford it, but there were some teething problems the first time I tried it, and after that it just sat in my bag. It never quite got dark enough for me to face those problems and use it in place of my Nikon 24-70/2.8.

But I knew darker times were approaching (this weekend, as it happens), and earlier this month, I figured it was as good a time as any to force myself to learn how to use this lens. I shot a concert with my friends, Holychild, and all I had on me were this lens and my typical long lens, the Nikon 70-200/2.8. All shots in this post are from the 18-35.

Finally, a few technical notes. This lens is 18mm-35mm f/1.8, and is designed for APS-C bodies. For Nikon's 1.5x crop factor, this means that the effective focal length is 27mm-52.5mm in full-frame terms, and the effective depth-of-field matches f/2.7 on full-frame. That said, the light-gathering ability of the lens is independent of the sensor size — you would have to use an f/1.8 constant zoom to gather the same amount of light with a full-frame body — but on the other hand, the APS-C sensors will exhibit more noise at each ISO as compared to similar-resolution full-frame sensors.

All that means that this lens can put an APS-C body on similar footing to its full-frame cousins, but likely won't cause it to perform better than those full-frame bodies by most regards. Anyway, on to the show…

It was pretty tricky at first. The 18-35 and 24-70 focal ranges hardly overlap, and they call for different shooting styles. Also, I hadn't realized just how much I had internalized what settings to use when shooting with an f/2.8 lens. I shot this at 1/50s, 1250ISO. At f/2.8, things would've been fine, if a little hot. At f/1.8, all the highlights were completely blown. Whoops.

On the other hand, the detail in the audience is something I had been struggling to capture with the 24-70, and with this lens, it was pretty much effortless. So there's that.

The key with any wide lens, of course, is to get close to things. Which I found incredibly uncomfortable at first. I like to move around when shooting, but when that's difficult, I look for perches that give me a reasonable view of the crowd and of the stage. As with any perch, though, it's far away from all but a few things. This shot convinced me that I needed to get closer to the stage.

Another crowd shot. This one was 1/30s at f/1.8, 1000ISO, which is pretty far outside the the scope of the 24-70 (at least, without bumping the ISO and losing some of the smoothness of the gradients fading to black). I again love how you get a glimpse of even the people who aren't in the spotlight.

The night ended with a headline performance by Miniature Tigers. During the short opportunity afforded by the changing sets, I made a leap of faith and painted myself into a corner that was way too close to the stage. Of course, way too close turned out to be just the right distance. The 18mm wide end meant that I wasn't as cramped as I would have been with the 24mm, and the position gave me a completely different perspective on the concert.

Even something as simple as having the musicians appear larger in the frame than the audience members is something I've only previously accomplished in outdoor, open-stage concerts. But this lens made it easy simply because it was wide enough to get most of the musician in the frame, and bright enough to capture the faces of the audience-members. I also love the speckles of colored light in the distance — there's enough dynamic range to see some hints of the surroundings.

Sadly, this lens isn't all sunshine and rainbows. The primary drawback is the extremely short focal length range. This photo has the lens racked out to full tele, and it's just not that long. The hole between 18-35 and 70-200 is pretty significant, and there were plenty of times during the concert where my ideal composition would have landed me in that gap. In terms of canonical full-frame focal lengths, I miss the entire 60mm-90mm portrait range.

Also, autofocus is slow. I mean, it's still usable, and I still adjusted to it pretty quickly, but shooting back-to-back with the 24-70 made the difference blindingly obvious. The 24-70 doesn't rack the focus so much as pick a distance and land there — the actual time required for the focus elements to move is almost imperceptible. The 18-35 isn't quite so supernatural — when I focus on something, I watch it come into focus, whereas with the 24-70, the viewfinder starts off blurry and ends up sharp with almost no apparent transition.

All in all, though, I feel like I figured out when it'll come in handy, and what kinds of tradeoffs I'll be making if I slap it on a body. So mission accomplished.

Gear Photography: Lessons Learned

Recently, I embarked on an effort to sell all of the gear that's been gathering dust in my closet. Everyone loves pictures, so my first step was to photograph all of the equipment. I'm pretty pleased with how well everything turned out, especially given how little effort I put into the whole shoot. Here are some things that went well, and some other things that I can improve next time around.

This was my general setup. Lights are a pair of Elinchrom BX 500 Ri monolights. I've got a beauty dish on the one to camera right, blowing out the background wall, and also giving some ambient fill and a nice rim-light effect. And I've got a second one at camera left with a strip box mounted at some cockamamie angle.

I specifically went for the strip box because while I definitely needed some diffusion, I also wanted the light to be hard enough to elucidate the texture of the equipment. I wanted to make it easier for a person to look at the image and imagine what it would be like to hold each piece in his/her hands.

As you can see, I got the reflections by just tossing a dirty piece of plexi onto a table and putting the gear on top of that. I shot pretty long, generally in the 120mm (180mm-equiv) to 200mm (300mm-equiv) range, and I believe my subject distance was around 10 feet. The subject was around 6 feet in front of the distant wall.

Mistakes

Just to keep things easy, let's make a list:

• I started off with the key light about a stop too low, so the detail of the body was difficult to see. You can see how this image looks really back-lit compared to the shot above.
• Lazy is good, too lazy is bad. I didn't really clean anything (lazy!), and it generally didn't make much of a difference (yay!). But failing to even wipe off the surface of the plexi was too lazy. You can clearly see a whiteboard-marker mark near the lower-right corner of the camera.
• You can't (directly) see it, but I wasn't able to lock down the rotation of my lens in its tripod-foot collar, which led to the rotation drifting any time I touched the camera. Keeping everything exactly the same (as much as possible) is the easiest way to cut down time in the studio, and time applying custom adjustments to each and every image during post-processing.
• Along the same vein, I should have marked the center of the frame on the plexi. This would've made it easy to keep the framing and magnification the same as I moved from piece to piece.

Successes

Thankfully, enough things went right that things worked out in the end. A couple examples:

• Stayed focused. I had a good idea of the things I needed to get right, and the things that wouldn't make a big difference. In particular, I didn't want to spend a ton of time on images that I'll likely never use again.
• Brought a backup body. For some reason, my first body wasn't triggering the strobes, and if I didn't have a backup, the evening would've been wasted.
• Shot long. I ended up at f/7.1 and 250s most of the time, which is right around peak sharpness for this lens/body. It also gave me plenty of magnification without having to get the camera really close to the subject. The ~10ft throw also gave me some reasonable DoF.
• Picked a reasonable lighting design. I basically just threw some stuff together, given my prior studio experiments. The beauty dish hitting the back of the room turned out to be a really great idea. You can see how the rim light wraps around the right side of the lens in the picture. The level of diffusion on the key light was pretty good as well. Plenty of directionality, and depth and texture, but nothing too harsh.
• Fixed things as early as possible. This meant that by the time I got home, I just picked the ones that didn't suck and pretty much auto-processed them all. I didn't do any cropping (too lazy), and only fixed rotation in a few cases (too lazy).

So yeah, that's that. Hit me up if you've got any questions.

Long Day in the Studio

Yesterday, my Lovely assistant and I spent all day in the studio, working through the majority of the remaining images for my Photos of Prints project. We finally finished the last one (the snail, 24"x36") at 11:00 in the evening, and that's when things started getting a little silly.

I was really happy with how things turned out. I had only just finished the second version of the print hanging fixture that morning, and it worked fantastically. Which is nice, because those framed 24"x36" prints are heavy. We managed to get through 20 images — the 17 from my Music at Google exhibition, Mondrian Salt Flats, ENDIKA, and Keep Calm, Carry On (aka the snail :o).

Beyond that, I had an opportunity to use the amazing Coastal Optics UV-VIS-IR 60mm f/4 Apo Macro lens. As mentioned in the prior post, I had noticed some color fringing and optical distortion that I wanted to try to fix. Aligning things more carefully helped a lot with the keystoning, and the Coastal Optics did a number on the other problems. This is probably the only opportunity I'll have to shoot with one, so I'm glad everything came together. Thank you to the anonymous benefactor who let me borrow the lens.

An Ongoing Project: Photos of Prints

After having collected a startling amount of print inventory over the last couple years, I've started working on taking photographs of my prints in an effort to sell some of the inventory. Because I can't damage any walls of the studio, and because I wanted the images to "float" against a white background, I ended up designing and building a custom fixture to hold the prints to be photographed.

After finishing a prototype, I took the rig for a trial run, in what was my first time setting up and using studio strobes. I ended up using a ~7-foot octa as the key light, with some (not enough) reflected fill from the bottom. The other two lights are to (left) blow out the background, and (lower-right) blow out the sheet of paper hiding the exposed portion of the stand.

Nearly all of the pieces to be photographed are custom-framed, and thus are reasonably expensive and time-consuming to replace (and some are one-of-a-kind), so a combination of redundancy and over-provisioning was the name of the game. My spec for the system was to handle a 40-pound frame with near-zero chance of the frame ending up on the ground. The heaviest pieces I've done so far, two 24"x36" pieces with glass, should still fit within that envelope, and at this point I'm pretty confident that the system would be able to handle a minor earthquake without issue.

In the prototype, the two main pieces of wood are attached with two small bolts per plank, with a metal framing bracket actually connecting them. The final version will have a pair of brackets, tied together with three bolts, and holding the end of the horizontal plank flush against the back of the vertical plank.

The dowel is intended to locate the fixture both laterally and longitudinally in the head of the work stand. The stand's clamp closes on the dowel to prevent it from moving, and the dowel is again attached to the horizontal plank with bolts. The dowel is slightly wider than the planks themselves, which gives the setup plenty of strength to withstand any yaw forces.

Finally, the black thing near the left of the fixture is a self-tightening strap to lock the pitch of the fixture relative to the head of the workstand. The final version will need adjustable pitch (even if just using some shims and the same strap) to make it easier to square the face of the print to the orientation of the camera sensor.

Oh! I should note that I picked the Spin Doctor Pro G3 bike stand for its combination of portability, stability, robustness, and low cost. The large-diameter tubes are plenty rigid, and all of load-bearing components (including clamps) are constructed from metal.

This is the face of the carrier fixture. The wire hangers are rated for 30lbs each, and given their shape, are extremely unlikely to fail in the first place. For the final, I'll need to remember how to drive a nail ;o) I also did a poor job of laterally centering the fixture on the bike stand, but it seemed to make little difference. Even with the current two-bolt arrangement, the setup has plenty of roll stiffness and stability, thanks in large part to the ability to clamp the dowel.

This also shows the simple paper setup used to hide the central tube of the work stand. That sheet of paper is the "magic" of the floating effect, yet is probably the simplest part of the entire contraption.

This was the first image that I tried. On the plus side, the color tones of the print itself are great; this is the best it's ever looked, and demonstrates how it would look in a properly-lit environment. Beyond that, the lighting setup does a good job of conveying the rounded shape of the frame, especially in the top half.

In what would become a repeating theme for that session, the bottom half of the frame is under-lit, and consequently looks flat and lacks detail. Moreover, the frame looks decidedly non-rectangular. I wouldn't be surprised if this particular frame were out-of-square, but that appearance is definitely exaggerated by some keystoning (that is, the print and the camera aren't properly aligned).

Finally, the background light level wasn't set properly, and so the background isn't fully overexposed in this shot — with a good monitor, you can differentiate the sheet of paper from the backdrop.

This was the second image, and the lighting here definitely needs some work. The defining feature of this frame moulding is the combination of a matte-black exterior with a shiny piano-black interior. I managed to get a little light on the bottom of the frame with a reflector, but it's still got no real depth. I also need to add another light somewhere to illuminate the shiny surface of the piano-black band.

From a slightly more technical perspective, there's some combination of keystoning and pincushion distortion, as well as some chromatic aberration at the edges of the frame. Shooting with a macro/micro prime lens rather than a general-purpose zoom should clean a lot of this up, especially stopped all the way down to f/5.6 or f/8.

I again had some trouble with the lighting on this shot. The top-right corner is too hot, which is most apparent in the overexposure of the cream-colored mat. The colors of the print are generally pretty good, but as the light falls off from the top-right corner to the bottom-left, so does the color saturation. The frame is a tiny bit too hot in the top-right corner, but is under-lit almost everywhere else. Oh, well…

Welp, that's my journey so far. It's been pretty educational for me, and I hope y'all learned a little as well. Until next time

The Bee's Knees: A D7100 Love Story

As much as I loved the D300, from an operational perspective it is completely outclassed by the D7100. The D7100 has a sensor that the 24-70/2.8 lens deserves, and when you put them together, the results are astounding. Above is an unsharpened, 100% crop from a shot I took of some bees on Thursday. Holy moly.

Here's a slightly more artistic crop of that same shot. And man, does that 24-70 pump out some fantastic bokeh.

This is another shot from that same afternoon. I cropped a 3820x2547px box out of the original 6000x4000px image, and then scaled it to 960x640px for the web and did some sharpening. Absolutely delightful. Wow. I mean, if y'all can't tell, I think I'm in love…

Baby Steps with the Nikon D7100

As much as I love my D300 bodies, they're definitely growing long in the tooth, and their major shortcoming has been low-light performance. Any time I would shoot a concert, I'd stick the ISO at 640, drop down to f/2.8, and hope for the best. And even then, there was noticeable noise in the shadows. So really, I've been waiting to replace them for the past 2 years, but until the D7100, there hasn't been a suitable replacement.

Stylistically, I tend to prefer a telephoto perspective, so the replacement would have to be a crop-sensor body (DX in Nikon lingo). The way I shoot also demands an autofocus system that is fast and accurate, and that remains fast and accurate in low light situations. The D300 AF system set the bar pretty high in that regard — the AF system would pretty consistently lock on to airplane winglets during red-eye flights, illuminated only by the once-per-second flashing of the red strobe beneath the fuselage. See examples: On Being Alone and The Calm.

So as soon as the D7100 was announced, I pre-ordered a pair of them. It uses the same MultiCAM 3500DX autofocus module as was used in the D300, and it has a modern sensor which behaves pretty dang well in low light and at high ISO.

My package from B&H finally showed up yesterday, and I managed to take a couple shots with it that approximate how I'd tend to use a camera. All in all, I'm impressed by the low-light performance and the UI enhancements, the AF is what I was hoping for, and the body and ergonomics leave much to be desired. Rumors are that Nikon will release a D400 later this year; here's hoping…

Update! Click each image to see the full-resolution, unsharpened version. None of these (including the reduced-size ones) have any noise-reduction in post (from what I hear, the camera does noise reduction on high-ISO images which can be reduced but not disabled for images above 1250ISO).

1/125s f/2.8 2200ISO 70mm I've tried this kind of shot before, but it's never worked. With the D300, I'd have to bump the ISO and drop the exposure to get a shutter speed where the chef's body was relatively still. By that point, most of the scene would be riddled with noise. With the D7100, it was point, focus, click. Done deal.

1/60s f/2.8 1600ISO 36mm I've never taken a photo this lovely in a partially-lit conference room before, and certainly not with as much ease as I took this shot. The only other camera I've owned which would do 1600ISO this cleanly would have been the Fuji X100, but because of its shoddy AF, I would've been tempted to manual-focus this shot, and because of its shoddy manual focus, I probably wouldn't have taken it at all (no, I'm not bitter). Again, with the D7100, it was point, focus, click, done.

1/100s f/2.8 2800ISO 55mm A nice out-of-focus blur at nearly 3200ISO. Even at 640ISO, the noise on the D300 tended to make the OOF areas noticeably jangly, whereas as lower ISO, they were super smooth. No such issue with the D7100.

1/125s f/2.8 1800ISO 70mm Just a quick AF test. I tried to focus on the keys and not the face, and the camera did what I wanted it to. As far as AF settings, I always shoot in single-area AF-C mode with release priority, so no face detection to contend with.

I had had face-detection enabled for a while on my NEX-7, and while it often did the right thing, I found that I couldn't predict what it'd do when I was shooting without my eye to the viewfinder, and so I disabled it. It's less awesome now, but also more predictable, which benefits the way I shoot.

1/4s f/2.8 6400ISO 32mm To finish, a completely out-of-focus shot at 6400ISO. This is basically a torture test for noise, since any texture is clearly the sensor's fault, and I can definitely live with this level of noise. So far, I've left the camera on Aperture-priority at f/2.8 and with Auto-ISO enabled. I'm sure I'll be fine-tuning settings for awhile as I get used to things, but so far so good.

I know a lot of folks out there are hemming and hawing over whether they should get a D7100 or wait for an inevitable D400. I'd say it depends on what you shoot, how you shoot, and what body you're coming from. My comments will be most relevant to someone considering upgrading from a D300/D300s:

1. If you like to shoot full-resolution RAWs in continuous mode, wait. If you can deal with 1.3x crop mode (total ~1.95x crop), maybe consider it. The buffer on this camera is tiny. Personally, I only ever shoot in single-shot mode and I've bumped into buffer limitations at times. We'll see how this goes when it's time to shoot something for real.
2. If you need low-light performance without the D7000's step down in AF performance, get it.
3. The body feels noticeably plasticky, and I dislike the narrow grip, but for me, those aren't deal-breakers. By comparison, the D300 balances better with my f/2.8 zooms, it's more comfortable and secure to hold, and I never even think about how it's built, because it's rock solid. The D7100 lacks that rock solid feel.
4. The shutter release button is a step down from the D300. It's hard to describe exactly, but it's difficult to activate the shutter release quickly and precisely. In his video review, Scott Kelby noticed the same thing, calling it "mushy." Shooting the D7100 side-by-side with the D300, the difference is night-and-day, and even though the cameras have identical frame rates, I can more easily take quick second and third and fourth shots with the D300 (note that I always shoot in single-shot mode).
5. If you use AF-ON, note that (for me, at least) the AF-ON button for the D300 was in the perfect spot. The AE-L/AF-L button on the D7100 (which I've already programmed to behave as AF-ON) is offset to the left, and is much more difficult for me to trigger, especially if I'm holding the camera with one hand.
6. I really dislike how they moved the Fn button under the camera mount. I recall someone mentioning that it seems designed to use with your left hand — that seems reasonable, but for anyone shooting with long glass, your left hand is going to be on the lens, so it's useless. The D300 Fn button falls perfectly under my right ring finger (just like on the D4). You can program the DoF Preview button, thankfully, but it still isn't in quite the right spot like the Fn button used to be. I really hope they'd fix this for the D400.
7. The soft-touch inserts on the camera don't feel as aggressively textured or as tacky as the ones on the D300. This may just be something that develops with age and use, I don't know, but I think that's part of why the D300 feels more secure to hold.
8. In the positive column, I love having a physical mode dial. I would always get confused while trying to switch between A and M modes on the D300.

In conclusion though I have a number of gripes about the D7100, having played with it for an evening, I feel I definitely made exactly the right choice in deciding to replace my D300 bodies with a pair of D7100s. The focus is on par, and the low-light performance is superb. As for those wondering how Nikon could differentiate a D400 against the D7100, I can say with all certainty that there are plenty of opportunities, and if Nikon fixes those, I'll sell the D7100s and upgrade again.

Ooh, Shiny!

So, this is engine #2. Our initial search for sim cards and relish packets came up negative, so I guess that's a good sign. We got everything buttoned up today, and we should have it back in the car as soon as we figure out what to do about our pretty-much-destroyed motor mounts.

In stark contrast to engine #1, which ate a rod bearing (in addition to the sim card), this motor turns completely freely, and there are parts of the cycle where I can turn the crank with just my hands on the crank pulley.

Cleaning

Spent a couple hours cleaning equipment today, in preparation for selling my Nikkor 80-200/2.8 and my Fuji X100.