Trademarks of Nikon, Inc.
Trademarks of Nikon, Inc.
Photographs by Michael G. Gordon. Copyright AD 2000, 2001 by Michael G. Gordon.
It should be obvious, but clicking on a photo will usually enlarge it. You can either click the "back" button or just click on the enlarged photo to return to this index page. Photographs on this site are 1024 x 768 pixels unless otherwise noted. The camera shoots photos at up to 2048 x 1536, but when I do that I resample it down to 1024x768 for display purposes. All were photographed using a Nikon 990 except where noted. I have not yet added Nikon 800 photographs.
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Macro. (Except flowers, which get their own section) The Nikon 990 focuses extremely close while maintaining excellent depth of field. Macro is available only at the middle setting of the zoom lens and also only when you have selected macro mode (a little "tulip" symbol appears on the LCD screen and viewfinder screen), a fact shown to you when the little white tulip on the LCD screen turns yellow. It can be challenging to notice in daylight settings. The combination of swivel back and macro focus makes some extremely difficult photographs quite easy and spontaneous, such as the spider and iguana photographs. Your face stays safely away from the spider as you follow its movements across the rock. With no worry about film, shoot two dozen photos of the spider -- at least one will be just right! The small size of the lens and CCD sensor creates depth-of-field previously unexperienced. It can also create dust and diffraction problems, so keep your lens clean. |
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Flowers. Matrix-metering, rich colors, wide depth of field and macro focusing means that you can easily photograph flowers.
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People. Automatic focus, a swivel-LCD finder screen and optical finder make it easy to photograph people unobtrusively. When used with a Nikon Speedlight and bounced illumination, you can obtain excellent portraits.
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Scenic. My favorite overall theme; the opposite of macro -- vast landscapes, mountains, lakes, trees. Matrix metering helps keep it properly exposed and most of the time automatic color balance and exposure works fine. The Nikon 990 has an infrared filter over the CCD (or incorporated into it) which reduces the unwanted color shift caused by CCD sensitivity to infrared light -- invisible to human eyes, but causes foliage to be excessively "bright" in lesser digital cameras. Because of haze, you will often want to adjust your photographs slightly to darken the dark end, a process called "histogram equalization". It ensures that your photograph has a full range of brightness, from black to white. You don't always want to do it, just most of the time. Wyoming
Utah
Idaho
Other places
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Clouds, Weather and Lightning!
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Trains. I love 'em! You need crisp lenses to capture the details of locomotives, rails, and landscapes.
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Buildings and Architecture; some dark (Night) cityscapes. Digital photography excels, especially with the Nikon 990 because its swiveling viewscreen allows you to utilize unusual angles and also see exactly what is to be recorded. Warning: The Nikon 990 has slight but noticeable "pincushion" effect at wide zoom lens settings. This makes straight edges, near the edge of the photograph, bow outwards slightly.
The Wells Fargo Center, built as the American Stores Building. Later, American Stores was merged into Albertsons and eventually put up for sale. A consortium of investors headed by Wasatch Property Management, Inc. purchased it, and as Wells Fargo is the premier occupant, it is now called the Wells Fargo Center. The Salt Lake Olympic Committee is also headquartered here.
Architecture at Legoland, north of San Diego, California
Pair of photographs showing the effect of various enhancements on an architectural photograph:
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Glass and Ice. Because the CCD has no grain (each pixel abuts the next), it is superbly suited for photographing smooth surfaces such as glass and water.
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Barns. A special breed of architectural photography and scenic photography.
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Not-yet-classified!
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It is wise to shoot at 2048x1536 all the time because you can resample to other sizes, such as 800x600 for computer 'wallpaper', without aliasing artifacts that happen if you resample using a submultiple (1024x768 to 800x600 requires quite a lot of anti-aliasing and that makes it fuzzy, but 2048x1536 to 800x600 is slightly less than 1/2 size, and is easily accomplished with very little anti-aliasing fuzziness).
Digital cameras have an extremely linear transfer function, which is to say, brightness of scene is accurately recorded on the CCD sensor and subsequently in the photograph. Film is not linear at all, but has an "S" shaped transfer function. The effect of the film transfer curve, is generally to increase contrast and color saturation in the middle of the range, while reducing saturation and contrast at the ends (bright areas, dark areas).
Sometimes you want your digital photographs to "look like film". This is easily accomplished using an S-curve function. Here is an example of a flower without adjustments and with an S-curve adjustment, and also the graphic tool used to accomplish it. The effect is to make dark things darker, and light things lighter, increasing the contrast (sparkle) of everything in the middle of the range. It is an effect to be used sparingly most of the time. At times, you want the shadow detail and the highlight detail, especially in the case of an overcast day, where too much "sparkle" causes you to lose the misty effect of a cloudy day.
Finally, watch out for automatic color balance. In the "A" mode, closup photographs of a yellow or red tulip are not going to make you happy; the camera will try to color correct for the excess yellow or red. In the below photos, the colors came out reasonably well because of the white and yellow patches that make it possible for the camera to set the color. But, you can always put the camera in Manual mode "M" and choose a daylight ("fine") color setting, or you can read a sheet of white paper and pre-set the exposure. That is the only way to get correctly colored photographs of color-saturated objects.
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 S-Curve contrast enhanced |
Here is what the tool looks like in Corel Draw, version 9. Similar
tools are available in all high-end image editing programs; less
sophisticated programs can do similar things using a "contrast"
function. but you may have less control over it.
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