"Don't delete pictures in camera." I had never thought of this as being something done to avoid buggy software in cameras. This is rooted in the tiny poor quality displays on early digital cameras. I learned to not delete photos in camera because what appear to be bad photos not worth keeping may look better once viewed on a larger screen. Even photos that don't result in what was intended may be interesting once viewed on a better screen. This rule of thumb was about avoiding discarding images that might be valuable. If in doubt about whether a photo is trash or a keeper, don't delete in camera. Wait until the image can be viewed on a larger screen. As in-camera displays and user interfaces have improved, this rule has become less important to me, but I still consider whether I might see something making the photo worth keeping if I were to view it on a larger screen.
This is very true, but some photos are clearly poor, subject blinking etc, so I find it quicker to get rid of those before going through the rest in more detail.
I've always done it, and NEVER have had an issue doing so. Since 2005. HOWEVER, I have had a laptop, two external HDs, and a handful of USB sticks die on me during the same time period. Oh, and two camera digital shutters.
I think the key to busting the myths is knowing your capabilities and equipment. Being crippled by arbitrary "rules" will keep people from growing in photography. Photographers, especially amateurs, should just go out and push the limits of their equipment and learn what works and what doesn't work in conjunction with some cursory research. You guys do a great job of diluting so much of that information and making it easily searchable and consumable for those who need answers or even need to know where to start. The fact that you offer so much value and such a large portion of your content library for free is such a great contribution to the community and despite the nitpickers in the comments, the amount of attention and research you both apply to making your content is clearly evident. I enjoy your variety of content and look forward to hearing you weigh in on photography topics especially when it comes to the ever shifting paradigms in the technology we use.
As a portrait and wedding photographer, I've always used f8 for depth of field, not as a lens sweet spot. F8 usually gives me enough depth of field to keep groups in focus front to back, while letting the background go out of focus enough to not compete with the subject.
I use an IV filter as protection for my lens glass. I know the difference between using one and not is minimal but a scratch on the lens glass can be expensive.
1:38 - Nickel Metal Hydride batteries aren't really obsolete tech (check your Eneloop batteries) and don't have much of a memory effect......the one you MAY be thinking about is Nickel Cadmium. I'll totally agree if you're saying NiCad batteries are obsolete junk.
lol Ni Cad batteries, i remember my uncle having a de charging rig for old nicads, a vey low wattage bulb with to wires soldered on, so you could contect to pwer terminal on battery and leave to discharge over night
The only reason I ever told my learners never to delete images in camera was purely because you can never see enough detail to make that decision based on the LCD which in early days was WAY too small
I stopped deleting pictures in camera after 2 memory cards failures. After talking to a friend who works in the hard drive industry, I confirmed it's a really bad idea to delete your pictures in camera. It appears cameras are not so good at dealing with such operations as computers. Of course, It mostly works of course, but the risk still exists.
@@LaurentBourrelly I think you were just coincidentally unlucky. That sort of delete breaking a card where adding (which does a lot more than a delete does) does not seem plausible. Tony explained this - a delete is literally removing a "table of contents" entry. This is why you can recover deleted files. So unless your cards were fully usable when they "failed" and you just didn't know to grab a free file recovery software to get back any "lost files" - the failure was unrelated to deletion. In fact, the only thing I can see about deleting a lot of files selectively is just that a computer has a better UI for this.
When you shoot e.g. birds in flight, you delete mostly not because of minute details but because you do not have the object in frame properly. So I definitely delete in camera.
@@jamespulver3890 Both your's and Tony's presumption is wrong. Tony is correct in noting that the delete is simply marking out a line in the drives table of contents, but he is wrong in stating that it cannot cause whole drive data loss as it can. You must keep in mind that computers have drivers that have been tweaked and improved over a period of years to make them better. If a camera's firmware has a bug in it, and that bug is related to writing deletions to the card's table of contents, then; you have a good chance of loosing everything on the card when you delete files with the camera. And unlike the updates received with a computer operating system, the odds are that the firmware on a camera never gets updated. I have a Canon IIS 20sx I purchased back in 2010. It has never received a firmware update. I also have an off brand Camcorder that has had issues with connecting to the PC. There were many posts regarding this issue. It has never received a firmware update from the manufacturer and of course, the camera fails to connect to the PC. I think it may be a 32bit verses 64bit issue. I view tech from a programmers perspective and I know for a fact that if a program has a bug in it, that bug will remain until the programmer edits the code and removes that bug. So, while loosing the whole card of images is less likely with newer cameras, do not put that much trust in those older cameras that have a reputation of crashing the card when you delete a file in camera. The best way to remove files from the card and guard against loss is to first copy them to a computer or other non camera storage device, and then delete the files from the card. Memory cards have a certain number of read and writes and you are likely to reach the read limit before you reach the write limit. Thus, if you copy the data from your card to your computer, and you suddenly find that you no longer read the card with your computer, you have retrieved your data at the end of the card's life cycle and have not lost data. (You saved your data and Happy are you!) You will also know at that point, the card is useless.
On the subject of "Sharpness vs microcontrast": The sharpness can be divided into "acutance" (=macrocontrast, but nobody uses that term) and "resolution" (=microcontrast). If you look at the MTF charts for lenses, the 10lp/mm would represent the acutance, and the 50lp/mm the resolution/microcontrast. Another way to look at it would be edges vs textures, the edge sharpness = acutance, the texture detail = microcontrast. Yet another way to look at it ... if a lens has a good acutance but bad microcontrast, it means you won't get more detail by using a higher resolution sensor, and it also means that if you want a lens to resolve a lot of MP, you want it to have a good microcontrast. If you want to visualize examples => take any image, and boost the sharpness in Lightroom, well, you're boosting the acutance, but not the microcontrast, because you're not getting more details.
Thanks for this comment. Out of interest, is there a way to boost microcontrast/resolution in post processing (rather than the macocontrast sharpening)?
I realised recently the reason I thought f8 was better than wide open was that a lot of my wide-open pictures weren't in focus. The ones that are look great - the only difference is that at f8 a lot more is in focus
Even if the higher-resolution has "more noise", I would be happy to trade that for the higher resolution of the photo which gives you more freedom to "work" the photo.
It's complicated. Size of the sensor, size of the micro lenses, insulation between photosites and the like do have an impact. But, a higher resolution camera also allows you to do things like reduce the size to get an average of the pixels. For example, if you decrease the size to 1/4 (1/2 in both directions) now you've got 4 pixels being averaged into one pixel, which can significantly reduce the noise in the final image.
One of your most informative podcasts ever. Having a science background, I really appreciate Tony’s way of looking at things. Feynman was right : “Science is what we do to keep from lying to ourselves”!
LOL. I remember editing jpegs years ago in PS and having them practically disappear from multiple compressions. They got smaller every time I hit save.
As for SD card failure; I'm an enthusiast photographer and used the same couple SD cards for 12 years without ever having any issues. Then I took your guys' good advice (and that's a sincere good, not a sarcastic one) to get extra cards to stash around for that "just in case" moment. I figured after so long I must be due for a failure of some kind. I picked up a 5-pack of 16GB SanDisk SDHC cards for $31 and now I am CONSTANTLY getting error messages of one kind or another. I'll turn it on and it won't see the card at all, or it won't be able to read an image I just took, or it won't allow me to zoom on an image it's currently showing me, or it will tell me it can't write to the card, or it will seem like it's writing but then nothing is there. If I shot a lot and it happened a lot, that would be one thing, but I shoot maybe a couple hundred images once a week and it happens at least once during each outing. Very disappointing. I suspect that the reason these "name brand" cards were so cheap was that they are either counterfeit or rejects that didn't pass QC but got sold anyway. Just goes to show that there is a difference between "cheap" and "crap". Buyer beware. I'll probably be retiring those cards for strictly emergency use and get another "inexpensive" card for my main shooting.
@@stephenarling1667 There is a F0.85 lens compatible with the Sony crop sensor. Kipon Ibelux or Handevision Ibelux - but it's hard to get them and they're pricey. Not that great bokeh though at that premium price.
Back in the 80s and 90s I would have been a purist about manual focus, but as I get older and my eye sight isn't what it used to be I'm all about auto-focus.
Manual focus used to be much easier with half circles in the lens in that would line up when in focus. We've lost that. Knowing when it's in focus is tough now especially with these high megapixel cameras that show everything.
Those little half-circle (ground-glass?) focus tools were great in 1970. when my eyes were only 18 years old. Very nearly fifty years since, and after cataract surgery, effective auto-focus is the sine qua non, the development that allows me to keep using the camera.
I take wildlife photos (birds mostly) and it is amazing how many empty tree branches I wind up with. I always try to delete these in camera because I hate wasting time downloading them and then deleting them on my PC. I have deleted literally thousands of photos in camera from the same memory card and it has not affected the performance of my cards yet.
Actually, I get "3D Pop". I only really observed it when I started looking at my work on a 4k monitor or small HD tablet screens (where the pixel density is high). And I only get it from certain lenses (primes and Nano coated it seems so far).
@@philindeblanc I know this already. I only buy cameras without the AA filter. With good glass I get the Pop like 99% of the time. I'm guessing it's only a few of us who know these things.
Regarding the DXO mark ISO score. There are two ways you can look at it. "Per pixel vs scaled" distinguished by "screen vs print" respectively. If you used "print" it assumes you matched the picture resolution say 2MP vs 2MP and thus the D850 and A7S are very close. If you used "screen" it looks at it per pixel which obviously the a7S is bigger per pixel and would require huge improvements before a D850's high resolution sensor matched that. DXO's data is correct, but they don't tell people how to navigate or interpret the data
10, this one really depends. if you're trying to take a picture of something specific and your auto focus keeps trying to grab the wrong things to focus on, the auto focus is worthless. (even if you only use 1 focal point) at the same time if your vision isn't 20/20 and you don't have the right diopter settings, you're never gong to be able to focus for anything because you physically won't be able to see.
If you have ever tried to seriously change white balance after shooting JPGs, like for example correcting a tungsten-balanced room that was shot with a Daylight WB mode in-camera, it will be clear how much less color data is contained in JPG files vs. RAW. Yes, of course you can and sometimes should edit JPGs, but for certain edits you do lose image quality compared to editing RAW.
not only that but correcting exposure and light... The matter is that JPEG is a decent end format but it is a limited format on intermediate files who still need to be polished
Also, if you're blowing anything up to close to the 100% level, JPG will have these weird patterns where there should be smooth tones due to the way that the compression format arranges everything into a grid and averages them out. Admittedly, with modern camera resolutions being so high, that's not as likely as it was decades ago. That being said, I do think that most of the time the JPG that comes out of the camera is perfectly sensible, I just think that it's foolish to not shoot RAW. You can usually set the camera to also store a JPG immediately if you like, but don't always know when you're going to need to do some substantial tweaks that a JPG just does not have the necessary information to allow for.
@@jotabe1984 It's regrettable that we still use JPG, there are far better options for images these days, It's kind of a shame that JPG2000 never caught on.
@@bog2k3 Made me think of a great T-Shirt Idea, and let it be public record here as copyright, and decleration of ownership....."I Cook Raw" , and "Always Cook your raw", and !! :-)
Thanks for this, I have two comments: - I'm an Architectural photographer and I noticed on one of my wide angle lenses that f5.6 was actually sharper than f8, however I often use f8 because when you take DOF into account, f8 turns out to be actually the sweet spot of both DOF and sharpness combined. - I still believe that cheap SD cards has a factor in increasing the risk of failure, thats mainly from my experience ofcourse.
Agreed on memory cards. In the past I had bought some crappy cards and usb sticks by likes of lexar and transcend and they just died so quickly or didn't work to begin with. I still have an old (must be more than 10 years now) SanDisk SDHC card that came with nikon d40 (still using it now!). I don't think I ever had a Sandisk memory failed on me. I have some kingston, samsung and toshiba cards/usn sticks which seem to be alright as well)
Roberts Lapsevskis I had A transcend card that failed too, all my Sandisk extreme pro never failed once so far! And I recently got the Sony Tough cards and they seem even more durable than sandisk
The "myth" about MPix vs noise. You don't think there is more to it than that? With newer sensors you get newer technology and probably lower power usage.
It's complicated, but it's a belief that turned out to underestimate the ability of the engineers to come up with new ways of reducing noise. With additional heat, power, closer photosites and increased sensitivity, noise should increase; but along with that there were new advancements in technology to fight the noise. The increase in noise doesn't seem to have kept pace with the rate at which new pixels were added to the arrays.
This is Dre Shoot in RAW and JPEG. Edit a RAW file and edit a JPEG. Huge difference in quality and file size. And each time you save a JPEG, your file is getting more compressed. I only shoot RAW now. I’m gonna start with the best quality image that I can.
My reason not to delete pictures in camera is sometimes there are weird hidden abstract gems in there you can't really see and appreciate on the wee screen at the back of the camera. But I'm shooting for art and elements not assignment. Auto-focus isn't more accurate when it won't lock on.
Deleting pictures besides the last one taken can potentially lead to fragmentation, which could make recovery of files added later more difficult if those are accidentally deleted. But that would be a pretty rare circumstance.
In general, higher MP cameras are actually noisier than lower MP cameras, BUT that's when you view at 100%. When you downsize the larger image to match the smaller (like that DXO mark graph shows), then the noise is very similar. And like you said, the big thing is, you can apply more NR to the high MP image because it has a lot more detail.
I still buy UV filters for all my lenses, for the sole purpose of protecting the lens. I’d rather scratch a $60 piece of glass than a $1.5K or more lens
I think the theory behind higher noise of higher megapixel cameras is pretty sound - the smaller pixel size means each pixel receives less light, and this in turn should produce more noise. But what I think people are forgetting is that this is just per pixel, and it means that the noise in a 100% crop would be higher in the higher megapixel count camera, everything else being equal. But if you resize the higher megapixel image to the same pixel count as the lower megapixel image, you'll also be shrinking and reducing the noise, and again, all else equal, they should be about the same. Because the sensors are the same size and they're receiving the exact same amount of light and random noise from the outside. So that part really shouldn't matter so much. The main reason for improvements in ISO quality is rather things like BSI sensors, better readout technology, shorter and faster circuitry, and so on.
Danni Efraim, Your explanation is correct. The key item in why the Sony camera image was noisier than the Nikon D810 has to do with your statement everything else held constant. Samsung used to have 16 Megapixel sensors on their Galaxy cellphones. They dropped their sensors to 12 Megapixel to get lower noise in low light scenes.
I never thought the deleting in camera would be an issue, until I read an article from Jeff Cable who worked at Lexar, who advised against it. He strongly seems to think it's an issue, but given I've never worked with camera O/S on that level I have no idea.
I remember deleting files in camera and then having issues that weren't solved until I formatted the memory card, but it's so long ago I don't remember the camera or type of card. No digital data storage is entirely glitch free and a card which suddenly can't be read by the camera can usually be read by a PC using data retrieval software if necessary - always take spare cards 🙂
The problem in deleting in camera is that there is not waste basket so if you delete something you should not have you need to put the card in the side and use another and then try to recover with a computer. If you do not have a second card you are in trouble.
Agree with most of these except for the color science issue. There’s a reason why people are selling presets for Sony to try to match the look of Canons files. I shoot Canon and shot Sony for a week and everyone on my timeline mentioned that the images looked flat and “different” even when I used my canon glass on the Sony. There is a difference in the look of the files.
About the noise. The A7s have the best possible noise ratio for a video camera. The most advanced sensors are also those with the highest resolution, consequently, they are also those with a better resolution/noise ratio (because are the last projected). However, the sampling that a photodiode 1/5 of another can do is necessarily more approximate, having less signal (light) to analyze, but you can take some of them, to have a more accurate sampling (the S3 have clusters of 4 photodiodes instead of one only, probably to use the actual technology instead make it in a totally different machinery). To see which machine has the best noise ratio, you need to interpolate all the images to the resolution of the machine with the lowest resolution in the comparison. I have an A7s and A7r2 here, the basic S produces cleaner images and makes some incredible videos, but if I take a 42Mpx image of the R2 then I reduce it to 12Mpx, the noise of the R2 becomes lesser than the 7S. However, this cannot be done with videos, which is why the 7S has such a low resolution, to have excellent noise, even without having to interpolate (which you can't in videos, as already said). This means that the concept of low resolution = less noise is only valid for videos.
Greetings, I'm from Puerto Rico and I don't miss your programs. Interesting topic of photographic myths, even I thought some of them were true. I want to take this opportunity to thank you for the help you gave us, when Hurricane Maria damaged us. Truly thank you, God bless you always.
Another reason to delete pictures in-camera: if you shot RAW+JPEG, you only have to perform one delete operation. Once they're on the computer, they're considered two separate files, and (at least natively in Windows File Explorer) deleting them will involve two delete operations. In some cases deleting both files involves four steps, since there can be an "are you sure?" dialog to deal with. Deleting in-camera is best, at least for obvious missed-focus or junk lighting shots.
I shoot raw+JPEG. Raw for obtaining the best from my shots after edition. JPEG to send them immediately as test shots. Raw is no use (and JPEG are ok) if you don't deeply edit your photos. Raw is mandatory if you always want the best from your photos after editing (shadows/highlights/noise). An other pro of shooting raw: I have been able to edit again some old raw files taken with a D200 with an up to date editing software and so, with better image quality.
Dear Tony, DXO Mark didn't do mistake in testing the A7s. The whole issue is about cleaning the noise before cocking the RAW file which Sony has been doing for long time to cheat results which impact in lower image sharpness which DXO mark don't include in their equation when measuring low light quality. Example of cheating is when DXO measured low light for RED Helium they gave it ISO score of 4210 (Super 35 Sensor-not even a full frame) and they admitted in their review that RED are clearing noise before writing the RAW Files. Another evidence that Sony clear noise before writing the RAW file is the weird artifacts that show from now where in some of the images at high ISO. In addition, degradation in sharpness in Sony camera is faster than other cameras due to the processing pre RAW file production. Please take your time in examining these facts and produce a nerdy episode about it
Excellent video and lots of great info.. I use clear filters on all my lenses, simply to protect them from scratches not for better picture quality. Having said that I use a lens hood on all of them too for extra protection as well as to stop glare, especially with the long zooms. As for jpeg or raw, I only use jpeg. I usually do very little editing and prefer to perfect my photography skills rather than my editing skills. In my opinion you only need to shoot in raw if you have to do some serious editing for important occasions such as weddings where perfection is expected, or simply you enjoy it. I do a lot of landscape and wildlife photography but still only ever use jpeg. Modern day cameras take extremely good photos in jpeg and software like Photoshop or lighthouse will still allow more than enough editing for most people. For me I only keep the photos that are worth keeping and do some light editing as I see fit. If I have some photos that are so crappy and require a lot of editing I just bin them anyway. Unless you are doing something like wedding photography where perfection in the photo is mostly a must jpeg is fine. They take up less space on your card and is much easier on your computer too. As for the f8 sweet spot, it is both true and false depending on your lenses. My two kit lenses that I used to use f8 were certainly the sharpest when used at the long end of the zoom, but not at the wide end. I have a 10-20mm Nikon which is fine anywhere between f8-14. Can not notice any difference in sharpness. The Sigma 17-70mm I have is sharpest at f5 when using it with spot metering and taking closeups. But for landscapes using it at the wide end then f8-16 gives better results. And the Sigma 150-600 is sharpest at f7.1 when using with spot metering and using it to take birds, etc. When using with matrix and trying to get a larger field of view for landscape then F11-13 gives best results. So one sweet spot on any lense is not necessarily true across the whole focal range where you are using a variable lens. Your camera settings as well as what you are trying to focus on as well as distance will all affect which f stop will give the best results at least with variable aperture lenses anyway.
I always thought sharpness is when objects don’t smear themselves outside their own boundaries. Micro contrast is when you have sharpness among objects of near identical shades and colors.
DXO score for noise is actually for single pixel. It did not counts that you have 5 or 10 pixels to average vs. one big slighty better pixel. It measures how much every pixels differentiate from a "correct" values it should capture. That's why.
RAW is objectively better than JPEG. 12, 14 or even 16 bit is massively better than 8 bit (16 times, 64 times and 256 times respectively). That allows much more modification to the brightness and colour of the image (including WB).The best analogy to shooting JPEG is like shooting film, having it printed amd them scanning in the print!
You are right. JPG depends on the purpose of the image of course but RAW is the only way to have a file that retains its data-depth. JPG is both a de-mosaic-rendering and deep compression engine so every time any change is made it is compressed again and each time into the future until little remains. It is a poor archive format for this reason, resized transfers drop a lot of data each pass.
Stan SPb Exactly. Which is why I work in Photoshop. I can work all I want with a PSD file and the quality doesn’t deteriorate. I only save the image as a JPEG when it’s required and only when I’m done editing.
@@borderlands6606 I respectfully disagree with that. That is the final criterion, but not the ONLY criterion. Shooting RAW with more bit depth and no lossy compression will allow you more avenues to arrive at the final criterion than the jpeg image will. The advantage of RAW is... wriggle-room, so that when you don't perfectly nail the correct exposure, or the dynamic range of the image is a bit extreme, you can still pull an image out of it that will meet that final criterion.
The card failure issue really is valid, SD cards were never designed or intended for critical application and DO fail more than modern storage tech. That format was designed to be cheap to manufacture for low-cost consumer products. Fragile shells, dumb bus with no error tolerance(same bus used on 5.25in floppy disks from 1984) exposed contacts, but hey, small ones are cheap. he best way to assure losses is using the very large capacity cards since they have no mapping function to bypass defective cells. The XQD was designed by Sandisk, Nikon, and Sony to address these problems to create the only pro-oriented storage system. Sony MTBF figures indicated they are orders of magnitude more reliable. XQD and the 3 planform standard CFExpress and multithreaded, and was made to use the PCIe+ modern bus used in reliable network SSD drives that have a degree of fault tolerance and self-mapping of defective cells, error detection and correction. The testing for the standard shows 1 XQD card being more reliable than 2 or more mirrored SD cards by a significant amount. That is why Panasonic, Nikon and Sony pro video ENG uses them and a single card.. The only reason to use SD by manufacturers is a very low cost of the socket. High capacity fast SD are just as expensive as the more reliable XQD and first releases of the CFExpress.
On the subject on manual focus, there is on important factor with modern cameras - the focusing screen. Back in the dark ages (well 40 years ago) when I started photography and auto focus was all but non-existent; SLR cameras would have focusing aids incorporated. This would be in the form of a Fresnel Screen or split view focusing. These made manual focus much more accurate than the plain ground glass in modern DSLR cameras. I'm not sure where that fits in with these new fangled EVF things 😜
EVFs provide focus peaking and magnification. FP behaves differently depending on lenses and scenes (a portrait lens and a face vs a wide angle lens and some sharp edges, the latter triggers FP better), magnification works well all the time but one have to give up framing.
If only modern DSLRs employed a flat ground glass! The problem with modern DSLRs is different. The ground glass -- a very good diffuser -- functions to decouple the camera's optical system from your eye's optical system. But consider the modern DSLR. First, you have to deal with a large part of your business being in APS-C cameras, so there's less light and more optics needed in the viewfinder to deliver an image, which is going to be really dark compared to our 35mm SLRs from the 1970s. And next in line, your camera has to streal around 25% if that light to feed your DSLR's autofocus sensor. So in order to fix this, most modern DSLRs don't have a ground glass focusing screen. They have a partical condenser, a lens that optically spreads the light. It's way less lossy than a ground glass, but here's the problem: it does not fully decouple the camera's optical system from the eye's optical system. So it's extra-difficult for you to judge correct focus on a manual lens. Not just your imagination. Mirrorless do achieve this complete decoupling... pretty obviously, given that your view through the EVF is directly off the image sensor you'll use to take the photo.
Thanks you guys for all the help. I got back into photography largely in part because of watching your videos. Especially with your review of Sony A600, which is what I ended up buying. I picked up the 18-135 lens for this camera and now love the size and capability that this combo gives me. Also, I like how you support each other as a couple--very rare these days--very honoring.
Sergio Pulgarín one of my best pictures was one I was about to delete in camera because the highlights were way high, then I remembered hearing someone say to wait until you pull it up in an editor. Glad I listened, I've actually been asked for prints of it
I tell my second shooters not to delete on camera so I can see what happened maybe on a missed shot also in case they accidentally delete something that was important by accident just because there is no going back at that point ....
i really wanna see a video on micro contrast and 3d pop. whenever i hear photo bros going off about lead glass in vintage lenses giving better "presence" i wonder if its just a bunch of snobbish hooey!?
just facts. 1- micro-contrast (bad word) means lens distorts the signal less, so it's likely more true-to-life. The more elements, the most likely your signal will be distorted. 2- 3d pop is a lens design choice when the depth of field is not even across the lens image projection. Say f1.4 in the centre but f2.8 in the corners. This gives a 3d look to it. This is purposefully chosen by designers in some lenses, for example, Fujifilm XF 35mm f1.4, as per Fuji's design notes.
Agreed on the UV filters, the only thing to really be aware of is that many lenses (some Canon L models for sure, not sure about others) require a front filter to be weather sealed. At least older ones, they might have changed it on modern lenses.
The reason to buy one is as a method of lessening the risk of damaging the lens coatings. But, if you're careful, you don't really need it, it serves no purpose at this point.
3D pop...back when I was shooting Kodachrome and Ektachrome slide film I would experience a 3D appearance when I viewed the image on a small slide viewer. I think it was the apparent brightness of the reds and blues in contrast to the duller background colors. It was pretty cool looking though.
If you think critically about sensor noise, lower resolution sensors compared high resolution sensors at the same sensor size have bigger pixels. With this in mind, even though lower resolution sensors have less noise, each noise pixel is substantially larger than noise in high resolution sensors. This noise either accentuate the noise or brings the noise to the forefront or looks a lot more noticeable when looking at the whole picture. A group of noise in high resolution sensors are substantially smaller that they blend more naturally with the other pixels, so when you look at the whole picture the noise actually shows up as pattern within the picture. This is assuming both sensors are using the same lenses able to resolve both sensor resolutions and same sensor size. Higher resolution sensor are similar theory, but lenses able to resolve the resolutions get substantially factored in more into iso performance.
Not that it matters, but y'all are the prettiest vlogger couple on UA-cam. What actually matters is that you two put out a crazy amount of good and informative content. Compelling stuff you two beautiful creatures!
Thx for the vid! A couple follow-up questions... • Forgive my naivete, but then what good are UV filters on digital cameras these days (other than keeping sound off your lens)? • Using arbitrary numbers to help ask my question, if I have a 5-megapixel sensor outputting images at max resolution of 5 megapixels versus a 10-megapixel sensor (of similar general quality and other characteristics) but set to output only a 5 megapixel picture, will the quality of those images be anyting more than trivially different from each other, and if so, which is better? • When you answered the myth about compression, were you talking about some form of mythical light compression and not about digital processing compression? • On the JPG discussion, you didn't really explain why the myth is false; why it's fine to edit JPG images today where it wasn't in the "olden days" •When a camera with image stabilization (either body or lens stabilization) is on a tripod and the image stabilization feature is not turned off, what happens? What's the problem with it?
Tony, Chelsea (ending with EA - the true way to spell it), you forgot to mention the greatest photography myths of all time: "Expensive gear doesn't make you a good photographer".
Micro-contrast as it was explained to me is; the amount of dynamic range of color or shades of color from the darkest to the lightest (shade to highlight) the lens aids the camera sensor in capturing. It is also referred to as the 3D pop as it makes images come alive. Lenses that are said to have Great micro contrast are the Zeiss Otus line of lenses. Now because the lens's ability to demonstrate this characteristic is also depended upon the camera's sensor, the better the camera sensor the more micro-contrast is evident - such as the Nikon D850, Sony A7r III, etc. But you can include the Canon 1D, 1DX, 1DX ii, Nikon D3s, D4, D4s, D5
Yes, but that's just a combination of general contrast and sharpness. It's not a separate thing. Zeiss lenses are known for their sharpness, almost as much as for their weight, but you'd necessarily get microcontrast as the change in color or brightness between adjacent points is how you know you've got sharpness.
I think manual focus needs a caveat: its inferior most of the time. In many niches, like astro and macro photography, I find manual focus is a must. in fact, in the latter im using a focusing rail, and moving the camera millimeters to focus.
Ya, autofocus in astrophotography is a recipe for fuzzballs for stars. I took a series of photographs of nighttime lightning with autofocus and I was lucky to get a single good shot out of the lot.
It greatly depends on the focusing screen technology and how careful you are. In most cases a modern autofocus will do a better job than manual. That being said, there are definitely times when that's not the case. Especially if there's a bunch of stuff that confounds the AF system. But yes, in general, selecting the AF point and using that is usually the right way to go.
Old canon 5D (classic) was one camera that I wouldnt recommend to delete photos in camera as when you press delete options: Delete photo, Delete all photos and Cancel come up.
People seem to forget or they don't even know, that lenses also contribute to an image's color "science." Some lenses have more contrast and saturation than other's do. For example the Nikon 85mm 1.4G has much more saturation and contrast than the Nikon 85mm 1.8G does. So some lenses effect the overall color look of an image, by increasing the saturation and or contrast.
As far as deleting photos/videos in camera, my biggest fear is deleting either the wrong image or with a slower camera deleting multiple images due to camera lag. I've often looked at an image on the lcd back and thought it was out of focus but found it to be in focus once I viewed on a computer. I'd rather play it safe and leave the deletion alone until it's been offloaded to another device.
Being a bit of a battery guru.. Ni-MH doesn't have a memory it's Ni-CD ones that do. So you can fully discharge them without a problem Li-ion and Ni-MH can be charged at any level. Camera batteries have a protection circuit so you can't over discharge them, or over charge them. But it is true you get more cycles by not fully discharging it.
Ni MH at least traditionally had memory but it was not as severe. It was enough if you fully discharged them maybe once a month. Some, however, advertise that they have no memory.
@@okaro6595 When people say "memory" what they mean is lower voltage/capacity. This can happen on Ni-CD cells if they are repeatedly not discharged (say half empty and charged). It's not essential to do this every time, but if you do many cycles with Ni-CD it will over time show a lower capacity/voltage thus not last as long. Hence it's usually a good idea to discharge them before charging. Ni-MH has pretty much eliminated this, at least in modern good quality cells. I've yet to see any cells that show any notable reduction in capacity/voltage with "top up" charging. It's not impossible, but from a practical point it's a non issue
Tony hinted to this, but most use-specific Li-Ion batteries now have integrated electronics that mitigate the charge cycle issues. I don't think an iPhone will suffer from being drained to 1% because the battery controller really just calls it 1%, while in fact there is still sufficient charge to stop from damaging the battery. NiMH's though still come with notices to run out completely once every several months.
This video is full of errors... When you compare the Nikon D750 and the D850, you ignore the fact that the D850 sensor is a BSI sensor which means it can achieve more megapixels, without losing low-light performance. Why? because the native-gain thus signal to noise ration is better than the D750 sensor. It's not magic...
Optics will tell you that adding say a 1.4x teleconverter will in fact contribute to compression on say a 600mm F4 lens, where as a Nikon crop camera at 1.5x crop will produce a similar field of view. However the crop sensor is simply a crop, and only ever a crop of the full-frame and it's not optical, so it does not change the actual angle even though it looks pretty much the same. It's very difficult to tell the difference between the two obviously but that does not mean that it's the same. Glass is glass and a crop is a crop, the teleconverter is optically increasing the angle of view, while a crop is increasing the field of view. I hope I said that right lol.
I get that old wives tales is a saying but in photography it was most likely "old husbands tales" being that men dominated the field for most of the history of photography.
Yep high res is better in every way, I put together some data based on sensors used in Astrophotography in particular, and almost every sensor of a similar generation produce similar dark current and read noise per sensor area, regardless of pixel size. eg the sony IMX071 (crop sensor used on early a6000 cameras) and sony imx094 (used on a7r) have got 4.81 e/sec/um^2 and 4.2 e/sec/um^2 (according to ZWO datasheets). The reason the full frame version has lower perceived noise is due to letting more total light hit the sensor for the same FOV.
Another myth about UV filters is that they protect the front element from breaking if something hits it. The front element is much thicker and harder than a UV filter. The filter will break before the front element does. Now, there are coatings on the front element that you don't want to wear off so if you clean your front lens constantly, you could benefit from a UV filter just so you don't wear off the coatings.
carl mcneill it may be stronger but a front filter will reduce the force of anything coming through so yes it will protect your front element and also adds weather sealing.
I agree no sense to avoid deleting images in-camera, but from the NAND flash (this is a type of non-volatile memory element used in memory cards today) behavior perspective, deleting images is much complex process. It will cause changing the NAND behavior from just writing sequentially to extra so-called program-erase cycles (cutting the NAND life time) then random write to fill trimmed memory blocks, etc. I still think you can delete because we never reach the flash endurance limits in real life and so extra program-erase cycles will not impact much. Just wanted to say it's not the same as just writing a new file. In reality it can be even much more complex. - and yet, I really love your episodes and podcasts - great job, guys!
This is strange, why would you compare just 2 cameras and say higher megapixel camera produce lower noise? you don't even say it is jpeg comparison or raw... usually cameras do noise reduction for jpeg files, may be Nikon has a better algorithm to reduce noise?
I think the "f8 is the sweet spot" idea comes from "f8 and be there" from the days of fully manual film cameras, where f8 gives a reasonably deep depth of field on a 50mm or 35mm lens. If you always return your lens to f8, focused at 3m, and a shutter speed of 1/60th, there is a good chance you could get something usable outdoors on iso 100-400 film even when there is no time to meter or focus accurately. Some SLRs with built in metering, such as the Olympus OM2, default to 1/60th even when turned off, making a fast grab shot possible. Going back further, many Box Brownies/folders have a 1/60th ish shutter speed and at best a maximum aperture of f8.
f8 and be there is a common mantra with street photographers. With a 28mm lens stopped down to f8 at hyperfocal distance, everything in the frame will be sufficiently sharp front to back.
In my opinion I turn off stabilization if I use a tripod because I saw lenses trying to chase stabilization just if I touch the camera for small vibrations, and also for HDR or pixel shift, just in case
The explanation for noise I got was that a 12 mp sensor have fewer but larger sensor elements than a 32 mp sensor of same size, so it can register more light, so on a 12 mp camera you can often use a lower ISO and in that way reduce noise. This is only if you compare sensors of same size what I understood of it
For what it's worth, microcontrast is more easily capturing same/similar color tonal variation and edge contrast of fine details-REGARDLESS OF SHARPNESS-instead of just the brightest to darkest across the whole frame or straight up resolution. The smaller lines on an MTF chart are what demonstrate both at the same time, and that's usually why it's so confusing. Microcontrast and sharpness tend to go hand in hand and you need one to see the other, but you don't need equal amounts of both all the time and the difference isn't always drastic. A lens may be able to very, _very_ clearly resolve most things, but without enough contrast for details that are shoved in really close to each other and are of the same or similar colors, you won't be able to see the edges because the lens can't transmit the color difference. It could still have a big difference between the brightest and darkest part of the image overall and be ludicrously sharp everywhere else (and that same sharpness technically applies to that area you're analyzing), but you still wouldn't be able to tell the colors apart. Likewise, a lens might not be able to show quite as much fine detail as another one in terms of its resolution, but it could still transmit tonal variation really well. I'd imagine missing focus with a lens considered to have high microcontrast would demonstrate that, and in an article I found on The Luminous Landscape, someone mentions the Leica 35mm f/2 Summicron-R specifically. High microcontrast, but other lenses are sharper. Honestly, if you can, I'd ask Dustin Abbott if he can give a clearer explanation. He regularly mentions microcontrast in his lens reviews, and there's a shootout between the Zeiss Otus 85mm, Tamron 85mm VC, Sigma 85mm f/1.4, and the Canon 85mm f/1.4. Zeiss, obviously, is usually lauded for their "pop." If not, see if you can maybe get your hands on the Zeiss Otus 85mm and a Tamron 85mm VC yourself and stop them down until they seem to have equivalent sharpness. The few times I've been able to look back and forth between the two, the Zeiss lens usually looked substantially different. And if DxO is to be believed, the Tamron is actually the sharper of the two, just not by much. Cue someone telling me I'm wrong just because instead of telling me why, and those that do explain giving exactly the reasons I already gave to explain the difference. My body is ready.
I have taken over 450,000 images with 8 different cameras without a single card error. Don't know why. Love your updates. watch them all the time. Thank you for helping all of us learn new techniques, learn about new hardware, and all the stuff you teach us. Sincerely, John Chambers jrcDigitalMemoryImaging.
You two are awesome and I love this episode! You explained all those urban legends that are as rampant as ever 2 1/2 years after you made this video, and how they started and why. I especially appreciate, in all your episodes, your calm, rational, get to the point explanations! For 37 years I've used nothing but Nikon and their lenses and this video justified what the engineer in me was thinking! Thanks guys!!
I use lots of NiMH batteries (flash gun, radio, travel tooth brush, ...) NiMH batteries suffer from the memory effect just like NiCd ones. Newer batteries are better than old ones, but it's still there.
@@ge48421 Not really Ni-MH doesn't need to be fully discharged, Ni-CD does they are entirely different in the way they react. Saying that Ni-CD if it's repeatedly not discharged the voltage will be lower as will the capacity. Whist you don't have to do it every charge cycle on Ni-CD cells, Ni-MH I've yet to encounter a real issue on any good quality cell.
22:20 This is true. For Sony branded Primes (Sony, ZA, G, GM, etc..) the sharpness "sweet spot" is between F4.0 and F5.6. F2.8 and F8.0 usually arn't bad though.
Re: "You Can't edit JPEGs": You can edit JPEGs but large color corrections or exposure recovery will always work better on your 14-bit-per-channel raw files than on your 8-bit-per-channel JPEG files. Yes you can turn your JPEGs into 16bpp files in Photoshop, but you can't recover data that's been compressed out of the file by the 14-8 conversion. It's not that you CAN'T, it's just that if you intend to, you should always shoot RAW.
“Large corrections” is the key differentiator there. Some of us make only minor or even no corrections. I also hate sitting at a desktop playing with Lightroom/Photoshop more than anything.
@@joeltunnah , right on. As the JPEG algorithms get smarter, the JPEG images should require less and less correction. Just understand that as this happens, what comes out of the camera is less a reflection of your creative vision than it is of some software engineer's creative vision. You can still be creative in that case, but no longer so much about color and light.
Stuart Schaffner, what a ridiculous comment. So according to you Ernst Haas’ photos only show Kodak’s “creative vision” because he used Kodachrome? The camera and film/sensor/jpeg engine are only tools, the photo is made by the photographer. Thinking you’re more “creative” as a photographer because you diddle with photoshop is total nonsense.
Joel Tunnah sorry you found my comments ridiculous. I am having trouble understanding your statement to mean anything other than that you consider all post-processing to be uncreative and inartistic. Was Ansel Adams being uncreative or inartistic when he used dodging and burning? What about color toning? Just because you personally hate to do post-processing doesn’t mean it is invalid for all artists.
Stuart Schaffner, you’re the one who said what comes out of the camera is a software engineer’s creative vision, not mine! Yes, that’s a ridiculous statement. I never said anything about other people doing post processing, only that I don’t like to do it. PP doesn’t make someone more or less creative, and neither does straight out of the camera. You get it now?
High resolution will always win over low resolution with high sensitivity cameras for normal photography. From your angle of thought you are very much correct. Where high sensitivity wins is astrophotography and possibly low light situations for videos. As I like the variety of settings, including video and astro, mixing with portrait, street, wildlife and landscape photography, I go for a compromise of the Sony hybrid line of cameras with lower resolution and higher sensitivity. I am not a professional photographer and for me it is a sweet spot. Love your work by the way!
Great video! Thanks so much for making it. One big myth you didn't address was telephoto compression. But you did speak about medium format compression, which is similar. Folks need to understand that there is no such thing as telephoto compression. A scene does not look more compressed because a long telephoto lens is used. Rather, the more compressed look is due to the photographer's perspective being from further away. It is a matter of point of view, not a matter of focal length or optics.
I set my camera to store RAW & JPG. I prefer the RAW file when I'm shooting landscape because of dynamic range. Then I will look through my photos and process the ones I like the best. Now when I'm shooting family photos, I don't feel like going into my Mac and processing everyone of those. I have a folder of RAW files and a separate of JPGs.
Try shooting a 10 second exposure with IS on and see how far you get Tony... IS float is the gyro floating ie moving the IS element over the period of the exposure. Short exposure fine leave your IS on but please if your busting myths at least be right and any long exposure will suffer from severe to complete image reduction by using IS on multi second exposures. Nice work on myth busting but this one ie long exposure and IS float aint no myth..
How about NOT during long exposures? I would think that is probably closer to the myth he was talking about. Also, I need to try long exposures more. Thanks for the reminder!
@@darphotos55 - The problem is seen and magnified when the anti-shake does not correspond to the focal length of the lens used. That is why Canon claimed that IS is better placed in the lens than in the camera body. In that case the manufacturer can tune the IS closely to the focal length of that particular lens. But many photographers have thin and light tripod that shakes anyway. For long exposure, their thin tripods do not actually give them the sharpness their lenses can offer.
As someone else mentioned, it was NiCds that had the memory effect, not NiMH. The old rule with lenses was that they were sharpest 2 stops down from full, so an f4 lens would be sharpest at f8, but an f1.4 lens would be sharpest at f2.8. Many of the newer, most expensive lenses seem to be working to bring the "sweet spot" closer to full aperture. I have a feeling that microcontrast and sharpness may be separate things, with microcontrast similar to the dynamic range on LCD screens from one pixel to the next. in other words, how much 'bleed' there is in light levels within a short distance. It could also be a function of minor color fringing where some colors are in sharp focus, but others aren't.
Alan Tutt Leica stated long time ago, that their lenses were indeed the sharpest two stops down. In the 50s they mentioned that their lenses performed the best aroun 4 and 5.6. But that was before any 1.4 (Summilux) lens appeared.
Starting a crowd funding drive to buy a light for Chelsea
spot on! ....get it? spot. on.
LOL
If only we could get a crowdfund going to get you some original jokes...
@@mattiejane9628 yOUR Mother
@@dinmavric5504that cracks me up
"Don't delete pictures in camera."
I had never thought of this as being something done to avoid buggy software in cameras. This is rooted in the tiny poor quality displays on early digital cameras. I learned to not delete photos in camera because what appear to be bad photos not worth keeping may look better once viewed on a larger screen. Even photos that don't result in what was intended may be interesting once viewed on a better screen. This rule of thumb was about avoiding discarding images that might be valuable. If in doubt about whether a photo is trash or a keeper, don't delete in camera. Wait until the image can be viewed on a larger screen.
As in-camera displays and user interfaces have improved, this rule has become less important to me, but I still consider whether I might see something making the photo worth keeping if I were to view it on a larger screen.
this is so true and becomes more true as my eyes deteriorate over the years.
This is very true, but some photos are clearly poor, subject blinking etc, so I find it quicker to get rid of those before going through the rest in more detail.
This is what I had heard too!
Even an A7 III still has a 640x480 pixel screen ;)
I've always done it, and NEVER have had an issue doing so. Since 2005. HOWEVER, I have had a laptop, two external HDs, and a handful of USB sticks die on me during the same time period. Oh, and two camera digital shutters.
I think the key to busting the myths is knowing your capabilities and equipment. Being crippled by arbitrary "rules" will keep people from growing in photography. Photographers, especially amateurs, should just go out and push the limits of their equipment and learn what works and what doesn't work in conjunction with some cursory research. You guys do a great job of diluting so much of that information and making it easily searchable and consumable for those who need answers or even need to know where to start. The fact that you offer so much value and such a large portion of your content library for free is such a great contribution to the community and despite the nitpickers in the comments, the amount of attention and research you both apply to making your content is clearly evident. I enjoy your variety of content and look forward to hearing you weigh in on photography topics especially when it comes to the ever shifting paradigms in the technology we use.
Yep, there's a bunch of rules that made sense at the time, but less so over time.
As a portrait and wedding photographer, I've always used f8 for depth of field, not as a lens sweet spot. F8 usually gives me enough depth of field to keep groups in focus front to back, while letting the background go out of focus enough to not compete with the subject.
Ah someone using it correctly not just for the sake of it. Well done Sir.
I use an IV filter as protection for my lens glass. I know the difference between using one and not is minimal but a scratch on the lens glass can be expensive.
UV*
Nooooooo
Since Tony showed how durable lens glass is, I stopped using UV filters.
1:38 - Nickel Metal Hydride batteries aren't really obsolete tech (check your Eneloop batteries) and don't have much of a memory effect......the one you MAY be thinking about is Nickel Cadmium.
I'll totally agree if you're saying NiCad batteries are obsolete junk.
I agree, I use Ni-MH in my flashes, triggers and and other devices I attach to my camera.
Thanks for mentioning that. I use Eneloops because of the memory issue.
@Creek Walker → 100%
lol Ni Cad batteries, i remember my uncle having a de charging rig for old nicads, a vey low wattage bulb with to wires soldered on, so you could contect to pwer terminal on battery and leave to discharge over night
The only reason I ever told my learners never to delete images in camera was purely because you can never see enough detail to make that decision based on the LCD which in early days was WAY too small
I stopped deleting pictures in camera after 2 memory cards failures.
After talking to a friend who works in the hard drive industry, I confirmed it's a really bad idea to delete your pictures in camera. It appears cameras are not so good at dealing with such operations as computers.
Of course, It mostly works of course, but the risk still exists.
@@LaurentBourrelly I think you were just coincidentally unlucky. That sort of delete breaking a card where adding (which does a lot more than a delete does) does not seem plausible. Tony explained this - a delete is literally removing a "table of contents" entry. This is why you can recover deleted files. So unless your cards were fully usable when they "failed" and you just didn't know to grab a free file recovery software to get back any "lost files" - the failure was unrelated to deletion.
In fact, the only thing I can see about deleting a lot of files selectively is just that a computer has a better UI for this.
When you shoot e.g. birds in flight, you delete mostly not because of minute details but because you do not have the object in frame properly. So I definitely delete in camera.
@@jamespulver3890
Both your's and Tony's presumption is wrong.
Tony is correct in noting that the delete is simply marking out a line in the drives table of contents, but he is wrong in stating that it cannot cause whole drive data loss as it can.
You must keep in mind that computers have drivers that have been tweaked and improved over a period of years to make them better.
If a camera's firmware has a bug in it, and that bug is related to writing deletions to the card's table of contents, then; you have a good chance of loosing everything on the card when you delete files with the camera. And unlike the updates received with a computer operating system, the odds are that the firmware on a camera never gets updated.
I have a Canon IIS 20sx I purchased back in 2010. It has never received a firmware update.
I also have an off brand Camcorder that has had issues with connecting to the PC. There were many posts regarding this issue. It has never received a firmware update from the manufacturer and of course, the camera fails to connect to the PC. I think it may be a 32bit verses 64bit issue.
I view tech from a programmers perspective and I know for a fact that if a program has a bug in it, that bug will remain until the programmer edits the code and removes that bug.
So, while loosing the whole card of images is less likely with newer cameras, do not put that much trust in those older cameras that have a reputation of crashing the card when you delete a file in camera.
The best way to remove files from the card and guard against loss is to first copy them to a computer or other non camera storage device, and then delete the files from the card.
Memory cards have a certain number of read and writes and you are likely to reach the read limit before you reach the write limit. Thus, if you copy the data from your card to your computer, and you suddenly find that you no longer read the card with your computer, you have retrieved your data at the end of the card's life cycle and have not lost data. (You saved your data and Happy are you!)
You will also know at that point, the card is useless.
I never rely on the LCD in making that decision. But that is a personal choice, not a hardware influenced choice.
On the subject of "Sharpness vs microcontrast":
The sharpness can be divided into "acutance" (=macrocontrast, but nobody uses that term) and "resolution" (=microcontrast).
If you look at the MTF charts for lenses, the 10lp/mm would represent the acutance, and the 50lp/mm the resolution/microcontrast.
Another way to look at it would be edges vs textures, the edge sharpness = acutance, the texture detail = microcontrast.
Yet another way to look at it ... if a lens has a good acutance but bad microcontrast, it means you won't get more detail by using a higher resolution sensor, and it also means that if you want a lens to resolve a lot of MP, you want it to have a good microcontrast.
If you want to visualize examples => take any image, and boost the sharpness in Lightroom, well, you're boosting the acutance, but not the microcontrast, because you're not getting more details.
Thank's !
Ding ding ding, we have a winner. Thanks.
Thanks for this comment. Out of interest, is there a way to boost microcontrast/resolution in post processing (rather than the macocontrast sharpening)?
Tony, when Chelsea said she was a horrible cook, you should have jumped in and disagreed with her. Don't ask me how I know these things.
Disagreeing with your wife? Not good. Don't ask me how I know these things. You can't win ;)
How do you know these things?
Haha! You’re sweet, but I don’t really try to cook so it’s fine.
:)
@@chelseanorthrup8787 So there is another reason Tony is so thin. Thought I had it all figured out :-)
I realised recently the reason I thought f8 was better than wide open was that a lot of my wide-open pictures weren't in focus. The ones that are look great - the only difference is that at f8 a lot more is in focus
Even if the higher-resolution has "more noise", I would be happy to trade that for the higher resolution of the photo which gives you more freedom to "work" the photo.
It's complicated. Size of the sensor, size of the micro lenses, insulation between photosites and the like do have an impact. But, a higher resolution camera also allows you to do things like reduce the size to get an average of the pixels. For example, if you decrease the size to 1/4 (1/2 in both directions) now you've got 4 pixels being averaged into one pixel, which can significantly reduce the noise in the final image.
One of your most informative podcasts ever. Having a science background, I really appreciate Tony’s way of looking at things. Feynman was right : “Science is what we do to keep from lying to ourselves”!
LOL. I remember editing jpegs years ago in PS and having them practically disappear from multiple compressions. They got smaller every time I hit save.
As for SD card failure; I'm an enthusiast photographer and used the same couple SD cards for 12 years without ever having any issues. Then I took your guys' good advice (and that's a sincere good, not a sarcastic one) to get extra cards to stash around for that "just in case" moment. I figured after so long I must be due for a failure of some kind. I picked up a 5-pack of 16GB SanDisk SDHC cards for $31 and now I am CONSTANTLY getting error messages of one kind or another. I'll turn it on and it won't see the card at all, or it won't be able to read an image I just took, or it won't allow me to zoom on an image it's currently showing me, or it will tell me it can't write to the card, or it will seem like it's writing but then nothing is there. If I shot a lot and it happened a lot, that would be one thing, but I shoot maybe a couple hundred images once a week and it happens at least once during each outing. Very disappointing.
I suspect that the reason these "name brand" cards were so cheap was that they are either counterfeit or rejects that didn't pass QC but got sold anyway. Just goes to show that there is a difference between "cheap" and "crap". Buyer beware. I'll probably be retiring those cards for strictly emergency use and get another "inexpensive" card for my main shooting.
F8 sweet spot? - Don't know and don't care, I bought an F1.4 to use wide open!
CaptainAwasome there’s a time and place to shoot all out
Stanley Kubrick shot a movie at f:0.7
@@stephenarling1667 There is a F0.85 lens compatible with the Sony crop sensor. Kipon Ibelux or Handevision Ibelux - but it's hard to get them and they're pricey. Not that great bokeh though at that premium price.
CaptainAwasome.... I love your comment. So funny. I don't own a camera so everything is always in focus.
CaptainAwasome amateur. My 85mm F1.2 has crazy tight dof and is pretty much unusable for portraits @ F1.2.
Back in the 80s and 90s I would have been a purist about manual focus, but as I get older and my eye sight isn't what it used to be I'm all about auto-focus.
Manual focus used to be much easier with half circles in the lens in that would line up when in focus. We've lost that. Knowing when it's in focus is tough now especially with these high megapixel cameras that show everything.
Those little half-circle (ground-glass?) focus tools were great in 1970. when my eyes were only 18 years old. Very nearly fifty years since, and after cataract surgery, effective auto-focus is the sine qua non, the development that allows me to keep using the camera.
My manual focus lenses are really crap when set to autofocus 😢
@@fixitrod4969 There's focus peaking now. Not in all cameras, but I think it will be someday not too far in the future. It's pretty awesome.
I have a vision impairment I love autofocus
Great video Format!! You guys should cover "Myths" more often.
I take wildlife photos (birds mostly) and it is amazing how many empty tree branches I wind up with. I always try to delete these in camera because I hate wasting time downloading them and then deleting them on my PC. I have deleted literally thousands of photos in camera from the same memory card and it has not affected the performance of my cards yet.
Tony: Ever heard of people say the 3D POP?
Chelsea: I don't talk to people who say that
😂😂😂
Actually, I get "3D Pop". I only really observed it when I started looking at my work on a 4k monitor or small HD tablet screens (where the pixel density is high). And I only get it from certain lenses (primes and Nano coated it seems so far).
@@brahmabeharrysingh5287 shhhhh
@@brahmabeharrysingh5287 try a sensor without AA filter, it will happen more often. Then you can go to the lens for the reason.
@@philindeblanc I know this already. I only buy cameras without the AA filter. With good glass I get the Pop like 99% of the time. I'm guessing it's only a few of us who know these things.
Same though
Regarding the DXO mark ISO score. There are two ways you can look at it. "Per pixel vs scaled" distinguished by "screen vs print" respectively. If you used "print" it assumes you matched the picture resolution say 2MP vs 2MP and thus the D850 and A7S are very close. If you used "screen" it looks at it per pixel which obviously the a7S is bigger per pixel and would require huge improvements before a D850's high resolution sensor matched that. DXO's data is correct, but they don't tell people how to navigate or interpret the data
10, this one really depends. if you're trying to take a picture of something specific and your auto focus keeps trying to grab the wrong things to focus on, the auto focus is worthless. (even if you only use 1 focal point) at the same time if your vision isn't 20/20 and you don't have the right diopter settings, you're never gong to be able to focus for anything because you physically won't be able to see.
If you have ever tried to seriously change white balance after shooting JPGs, like for example correcting a tungsten-balanced room that was shot with a Daylight WB mode in-camera, it will be clear how much less color data is contained in JPG files vs. RAW. Yes, of course you can and sometimes should edit JPGs, but for certain edits you do lose image quality compared to editing RAW.
not only that but correcting exposure and light...
The matter is that JPEG is a decent end format but it is a limited format on intermediate files who still need to be polished
Also, if you're blowing anything up to close to the 100% level, JPG will have these weird patterns where there should be smooth tones due to the way that the compression format arranges everything into a grid and averages them out. Admittedly, with modern camera resolutions being so high, that's not as likely as it was decades ago.
That being said, I do think that most of the time the JPG that comes out of the camera is perfectly sensible, I just think that it's foolish to not shoot RAW. You can usually set the camera to also store a JPG immediately if you like, but don't always know when you're going to need to do some substantial tweaks that a JPG just does not have the necessary information to allow for.
@@jotabe1984 It's regrettable that we still use JPG, there are far better options for images these days, It's kind of a shame that JPG2000 never caught on.
if you shoot jpegs, you can't wear a t-shirt that says "I shoot raw".
but I shoot raw JPEGs, then I cook them.
@@bog2k3 Made me think of a great T-Shirt Idea, and let it be public record here as copyright, and decleration of ownership....."I Cook Raw" , and "Always Cook your raw", and !! :-)
@@philindeblanc haha, good one!
@N. D. Crispy highlights are not all that bad
@@bog2k3 I like that ..Crispy Highlights... from Raw
Thanks for this, I have two comments:
- I'm an Architectural photographer and I noticed on one of my wide angle lenses that f5.6 was actually sharper than f8, however I often use f8 because when you take DOF into account, f8 turns out to be actually the sweet spot of both DOF and sharpness combined.
- I still believe that cheap SD cards has a factor in increasing the risk of failure, thats mainly from my experience ofcourse.
Agreed on memory cards. In the past I had bought some crappy cards and usb sticks by likes of lexar and transcend and they just died so quickly or didn't work to begin with. I still have an old (must be more than 10 years now) SanDisk SDHC card that came with nikon d40 (still using it now!). I don't think I ever had a Sandisk memory failed on me. I have some kingston, samsung and toshiba cards/usn sticks which seem to be alright as well)
Roberts Lapsevskis I had A transcend card that failed too, all my Sandisk extreme pro never failed once so far! And I recently got the Sony Tough cards and they seem even more durable than sandisk
The "myth" about MPix vs noise.
You don't think there is more to it than that?
With newer sensors you get newer technology and probably lower power usage.
It's complicated, but it's a belief that turned out to underestimate the ability of the engineers to come up with new ways of reducing noise. With additional heat, power, closer photosites and increased sensitivity, noise should increase; but along with that there were new advancements in technology to fight the noise. The increase in noise doesn't seem to have kept pace with the rate at which new pixels were added to the arrays.
Thanks again. Like most long term photographers, it is hard to let go of beliefs that were true in the past but technology caught up and fixed...
I edited lots of jpgs. The only difference is that you cant push them hard.
That's what she said.
Lol
This is Dre Shoot in RAW and JPEG. Edit a RAW file and edit a JPEG. Huge difference in quality and file size. And each time you save a JPEG, your file is getting more compressed. I only shoot RAW now. I’m gonna start with the best quality image that I can.
My reason not to delete pictures in camera is sometimes there are weird hidden abstract gems in there you can't really see and appreciate on the wee screen at the back of the camera. But I'm shooting for art and elements not assignment. Auto-focus isn't more accurate when it won't lock on.
I agree. It's amazing how many times I find a great picture from a picture I thought was bad by cropping.
27:01
Chelsea: "... I mess up a lot of things in life."
Tony: "Yes."
*savage*
The follow up to this that was cut for time.
Tony: "..... I'm sleeping on the couch tonight aren't I?"
Chelsea: "Yes."
Tony slept in the pool house that night. LOL
Angel Angelov I caught that too. 😂
That was most likely for her calling him a fake photographer lol
Deleting pictures besides the last one taken can potentially lead to fragmentation, which could make recovery of files added later more difficult if those are accidentally deleted. But that would be a pretty rare circumstance.
Many photographers mistake compression for shallow depth of field. They often use the term to describe a blurred background, which is incorrect.
In general, higher MP cameras are actually noisier than lower MP cameras, BUT that's when you view at 100%. When you downsize the larger image to match the smaller (like that DXO mark graph shows), then the noise is very similar. And like you said, the big thing is, you can apply more NR to the high MP image because it has a lot more detail.
I still buy UV filters for all my lenses, for the sole purpose of protecting the lens. I’d rather scratch a $60 piece of glass than a $1.5K or more lens
but you remove the filter before each shooting, right?
Dr B bet you can’t tell the differences, with a good quality filter on and one off.
Nathan Crabtree what about cleaning over and over better to do that to a filter hehe
Nathan Crabtree what about cleaning over and over better to do that to a filter hehe
@Nathan Crabtree Yup, most of the time you don´t need filters.
I think the theory behind higher noise of higher megapixel cameras is pretty sound - the smaller pixel size means each pixel receives less light, and this in turn should produce more noise. But what I think people are forgetting is that this is just per pixel, and it means that the noise in a 100% crop would be higher in the higher megapixel count camera, everything else being equal. But if you resize the higher megapixel image to the same pixel count as the lower megapixel image, you'll also be shrinking and reducing the noise, and again, all else equal, they should be about the same. Because the sensors are the same size and they're receiving the exact same amount of light and random noise from the outside. So that part really shouldn't matter so much. The main reason for improvements in ISO quality is rather things like BSI sensors, better readout technology, shorter and faster circuitry, and so on.
Danni Efraim,
Your explanation is correct. The key item in why the Sony camera image was noisier than the Nikon D810 has to do with your statement everything else held constant. Samsung used to have 16 Megapixel sensors on their Galaxy cellphones. They dropped their sensors to 12 Megapixel to get lower noise in low light scenes.
I never thought the deleting in camera would be an issue, until I read an article from Jeff Cable who worked at Lexar, who advised against it. He strongly seems to think it's an issue, but given I've never worked with camera O/S on that level I have no idea.
I remember deleting files in camera and then having issues that weren't solved until I formatted the memory card, but it's so long ago I don't remember the camera or type of card. No digital data storage is entirely glitch free and a card which suddenly can't be read by the camera can usually be read by a PC using data retrieval software if necessary - always take spare cards 🙂
The problem in deleting in camera is that there is not waste basket so if you delete something you should not have you need to put the card in the side and use another and then try to recover with a computer. If you do not have a second card you are in trouble.
Agree with most of these except for the color science issue. There’s a reason why people are selling presets for Sony to try to match the look of Canons files. I shoot Canon and shot Sony for a week and everyone on my timeline mentioned that the images looked flat and “different” even when I used my canon glass on the Sony. There is a difference in the look of the files.
Don't let Jared Polin hear you say that about JPGs.
Afro Knows Aphrotos?
Perhaps Jared likes to play with post production more and he has the time to do that.
About the noise. The A7s have the best possible noise ratio for a video camera.
The most advanced sensors are also those with the highest resolution, consequently, they are also those with a better resolution/noise ratio (because are the last projected).
However, the sampling that a photodiode 1/5 of another can do is necessarily more approximate, having less signal (light) to analyze, but you can take some of them, to have a more accurate sampling (the S3 have clusters of 4 photodiodes instead of one only, probably to use the actual technology instead make it in a totally different machinery).
To see which machine has the best noise ratio, you need to interpolate all the images to the resolution of the machine with the lowest resolution in the comparison.
I have an A7s and A7r2 here, the basic S produces cleaner images and makes some incredible videos, but if I take a 42Mpx image of the R2 then I reduce it to 12Mpx, the noise of the R2 becomes lesser than the 7S.
However, this cannot be done with videos, which is why the 7S has such a low resolution, to have excellent noise, even without having to interpolate (which you can't in videos, as already said).
This means that the concept of low resolution = less noise is only valid for videos.
Greetings, I'm from Puerto Rico and I don't miss your programs. Interesting topic of photographic myths, even I thought some of them were true. I want to take this opportunity to thank you for the help you gave us, when Hurricane Maria damaged us. Truly thank you, God bless you always.
Another reason to delete pictures in-camera: if you shot RAW+JPEG, you only have to perform one delete operation. Once they're on the computer, they're considered two separate files, and (at least natively in Windows File Explorer) deleting them will involve two delete operations. In some cases deleting both files involves four steps, since there can be an "are you sure?" dialog to deal with. Deleting in-camera is best, at least for obvious missed-focus or junk lighting shots.
I shoot raw+JPEG. Raw for obtaining the best from my shots after edition. JPEG to send them immediately as test shots. Raw is no use (and JPEG are ok) if you don't deeply edit your photos. Raw is mandatory if you always want the best from your photos after editing (shadows/highlights/noise). An other pro of shooting raw: I have been able to edit again some old raw files taken with a D200 with an up to date editing software and so, with better image quality.
Dear Tony, DXO Mark didn't do mistake in testing the A7s. The whole issue is about cleaning the noise before cocking the RAW file which Sony has been doing for long time to cheat results which impact in lower image sharpness which DXO mark don't include in their equation when measuring low light quality. Example of cheating is when DXO measured low light for RED Helium they gave it ISO score of 4210 (Super 35 Sensor-not even a full frame) and they admitted in their review that RED are clearing noise before writing the RAW Files. Another evidence that Sony clear noise before writing the RAW file is the weird artifacts that show from now where in some of the images at high ISO. In addition, degradation in sharpness in Sony camera is faster than other cameras due to the processing pre RAW file production. Please take your time in examining these facts and produce a nerdy episode about it
Apple should redo Siri's voice using Chelsea's. So should Google and all the voice response software.
Imagine if they did Tony's! Everytime you say Micro Four Thirds he would finish with "is dead!" 😂
Nah I'm good.
Lol - then everyone would get square space plugs thrown in at random
Yeah, but imagine they made a clerical error and used Tony's voice instead...…..I just don't think it's worth taking the risk!!!
Instructions Unclear: Jared Polin is now the voice of Siri
Excellent video and lots of great info.. I use clear filters on all my lenses, simply to protect them from scratches not for better picture quality. Having said that I use a lens hood on all of them too for extra protection as well as to stop glare, especially with the long zooms. As for jpeg or raw, I only use jpeg. I usually do very little editing and prefer to perfect my photography skills rather than my editing skills. In my opinion you only need to shoot in raw if you have to do some serious editing for important occasions such as weddings where perfection is expected, or simply you enjoy it.
I do a lot of landscape and wildlife photography but still only ever use jpeg. Modern day cameras take extremely good photos in jpeg and software like Photoshop or lighthouse will still allow more than enough editing for most people. For me I only keep the photos that are worth keeping and do some light editing as I see fit. If I have some photos that are so crappy and require a lot of editing I just bin them anyway.
Unless you are doing something like wedding photography where perfection in the photo is mostly a must jpeg is fine. They take up less space on your card and is much easier on your computer too. As for the f8 sweet spot, it is both true and false depending on your lenses. My two kit lenses that I used to use f8 were certainly the sharpest when used at the long end of the zoom, but not at the wide end. I have a 10-20mm Nikon which is fine anywhere between f8-14. Can not notice any difference in sharpness. The Sigma 17-70mm I have is sharpest at f5 when using it with spot metering and taking closeups. But for landscapes using it at the wide end then f8-16 gives better results. And the Sigma 150-600 is sharpest at f7.1 when using with spot metering and using it to take birds, etc. When using with matrix and trying to get a larger field of view for landscape then F11-13 gives best results. So one sweet spot on any lense is not necessarily true across the whole focal range where you are using a variable lens.
Your camera settings as well as what you are trying to focus on as well as distance will all affect which f stop will give the best results at least with variable aperture lenses anyway.
I always thought sharpness is when objects don’t smear themselves outside their own boundaries. Micro contrast is when you have sharpness among objects of near identical shades and colors.
You mean take a picture of 50 shades of grey and then to be able to identify each shade?
The production quality of your podcasts are AWESOME! Top shelf!
Except for the failure to light Chelsea adequately.
DXO score for noise is actually for single pixel. It did not counts that you have 5 or 10 pixels to average vs. one big slighty better pixel. It measures how much every pixels differentiate from a "correct" values it should capture. That's why.
I know this is older; I'm going back and watching back catalog. Just want to say the audio in this is gorgeous.
RAW is objectively better than JPEG. 12, 14 or even 16 bit is massively better than 8 bit (16 times, 64 times and 256 times respectively). That allows much more modification to the brightness and colour of the image (including WB).The best analogy to shooting JPEG is like shooting film, having it printed amd them scanning in the print!
You are right. JPG depends on the purpose of the image of course but RAW is the only way to have a file that retains its data-depth. JPG is both a de-mosaic-rendering and deep compression engine so every time any change is made it is compressed again and each time into the future until little remains. It is a poor archive format for this reason, resized transfers drop a lot of data each pass.
The only criterion is what your eyes can see. Preferably on a print.
You totally missed the point.
Stan SPb Exactly. Which is why I work in Photoshop. I can work all I want with a PSD file and the quality doesn’t deteriorate. I only save the image as a JPEG when it’s required and only when I’m done editing.
@@borderlands6606 I respectfully disagree with that. That is the final criterion, but not the ONLY criterion. Shooting RAW with more bit depth and no lossy compression will allow you more avenues to arrive at the final criterion than the jpeg image will. The advantage of RAW is... wriggle-room, so that when you don't perfectly nail the correct exposure, or the dynamic range of the image is a bit extreme, you can still pull an image out of it that will meet that final criterion.
I don't delete in-camera because I once deleted a prize shot because I chose based on a detail I missed in the back LCD! Bad Marty!!!
Hope Jared Polin didn’t get triggered by the title of this video. Watch out Tony!😂
@dennytenny LOL!!!
As a fan of both the Northrups and the Fro, I would suggest that Jared is pleased by the controversy but unconvinced by the argument.
Don't forget the cult of raw
The card failure issue really is valid, SD cards were never designed or intended for critical application and DO fail more than modern storage tech. That format was designed to be cheap to manufacture for low-cost consumer products. Fragile shells, dumb bus with no error tolerance(same bus used on 5.25in floppy disks from 1984) exposed contacts, but hey, small ones are cheap. he best way to assure losses is using the very large capacity cards since they have no mapping function to bypass defective cells.
The XQD was designed by Sandisk, Nikon, and Sony to address these problems to create the only pro-oriented storage system. Sony MTBF figures indicated they are orders of magnitude more reliable. XQD and the 3 planform standard CFExpress and multithreaded, and was made to use the PCIe+ modern bus used in reliable network SSD drives that have a degree of fault tolerance and self-mapping of defective cells, error detection and correction. The testing for the standard shows 1 XQD card being more reliable than 2 or more mirrored SD cards by a significant amount. That is why Panasonic, Nikon and Sony pro video ENG uses them and a single card.. The only reason to use SD by manufacturers is a very low cost of the socket. High capacity fast SD are just as expensive as the more reliable XQD and first releases of the CFExpress.
On the subject on manual focus, there is on important factor with modern cameras - the focusing screen. Back in the dark ages (well 40 years ago) when I started photography and auto focus was all but non-existent; SLR cameras would have focusing aids incorporated. This would be in the form of a Fresnel Screen or split view focusing. These made manual focus much more accurate than the plain ground glass in modern DSLR cameras. I'm not sure where that fits in with these new fangled EVF things 😜
EVFs provide focus peaking and magnification. FP behaves differently depending on lenses and scenes (a portrait lens and a face vs a wide angle lens and some sharp edges, the latter triggers FP better), magnification works well all the time but one have to give up framing.
If only modern DSLRs employed a flat ground glass! The problem with modern DSLRs is different. The ground glass -- a very good diffuser -- functions to decouple the camera's optical system from your eye's optical system. But consider the modern DSLR. First, you have to deal with a large part of your business being in APS-C cameras, so there's less light and more optics needed in the viewfinder to deliver an image, which is going to be really dark compared to our 35mm SLRs from the 1970s. And next in line, your camera has to streal around 25% if that light to feed your DSLR's autofocus sensor.
So in order to fix this, most modern DSLRs don't have a ground glass focusing screen. They have a partical condenser, a lens that optically spreads the light. It's way less lossy than a ground glass, but here's the problem: it does not fully decouple the camera's optical system from the eye's optical system. So it's extra-difficult for you to judge correct focus on a manual lens. Not just your imagination.
Mirrorless do achieve this complete decoupling... pretty obviously, given that your view through the EVF is directly off the image sensor you'll use to take the photo.
Thanks you guys for all the help. I got back into photography largely in part because of watching your videos. Especially with your review of Sony A600, which is what I ended up buying. I picked up the 18-135 lens for this camera and now love the size and capability that this combo gives me. Also, I like how you support each other as a couple--very rare these days--very honoring.
Still, don't delete photographs in camera; wait until you see them on a proper screen to make a decision.
Sergio Pulgarín one of my best pictures was one I was about to delete in camera because the highlights were way high, then I remembered hearing someone say to wait until you pull it up in an editor. Glad I listened, I've actually been asked for prints of it
@@roadrunner76b Yeah, that's what I'm talking about. I do sometimes delete in camera, for example way out of focus images.
I tell my second shooters not to delete on camera so I can see what happened maybe on a missed shot also in case they accidentally delete something that was important by accident just because there is no going back at that point ....
i really wanna see a video on micro contrast and 3d pop. whenever i hear photo bros going off about lead glass in vintage lenses giving better "presence" i wonder if its just a bunch of snobbish hooey!?
just facts.
1- micro-contrast (bad word) means lens distorts the signal less, so it's likely more true-to-life. The more elements, the most likely your signal will be distorted.
2- 3d pop is a lens design choice when the depth of field is not even across the lens image projection. Say f1.4 in the centre but f2.8 in the corners. This gives a 3d look to it. This is purposefully chosen by designers in some lenses, for example, Fujifilm XF 35mm f1.4, as per Fuji's design notes.
Agreed on the UV filters, the only thing to really be aware of is that many lenses (some Canon L models for sure, not sure about others) require a front filter to be weather sealed. At least older ones, they might have changed it on modern lenses.
The reason to buy one is as a method of lessening the risk of damaging the lens coatings. But, if you're careful, you don't really need it, it serves no purpose at this point.
3D pop...back when I was shooting Kodachrome and Ektachrome slide film I would experience a 3D appearance when I viewed the image on a small slide viewer. I think it was the apparent brightness of the reds and blues in contrast to the duller background colors. It was pretty cool looking though.
The podcasts are really, really interesting. Love them.
If you think critically about sensor noise, lower resolution sensors compared high resolution sensors at the same sensor size have bigger pixels. With this in mind, even though lower resolution sensors have less noise, each noise pixel is substantially larger than noise in high resolution sensors. This noise either accentuate the noise or brings the noise to the forefront or looks a lot more noticeable when looking at the whole picture. A group of noise in high resolution sensors are substantially smaller that they blend more naturally with the other pixels, so when you look at the whole picture the noise actually shows up as pattern within the picture. This is assuming both sensors are using the same lenses able to resolve both sensor resolutions and same sensor size. Higher resolution sensor are similar theory, but lenses able to resolve the resolutions get substantially factored in more into iso performance.
My Pentax is smart. When you set to two second or longer exposure, it automatically turns off image stabilization. It assumes you are on a tripod.
But can I manually tell it not to turn off stabilization even if on tripod?
@@KhoPhi correct
Not that it matters, but y'all are the prettiest vlogger couple on UA-cam. What actually matters is that you two put out a crazy amount of good and informative content. Compelling stuff you two beautiful creatures!
i like this ! thank you ! I don't care about sweet spot :) Aperture is a creative and technical parameter to control exposure and depth of field.
Thx for the vid! A couple follow-up questions...
• Forgive my naivete, but then what good are UV filters on digital cameras these days (other than keeping sound off your lens)?
• Using arbitrary numbers to help ask my question, if I have a 5-megapixel sensor outputting images at max resolution of 5 megapixels versus a 10-megapixel sensor (of similar general quality and other characteristics) but set to output only a 5 megapixel picture, will the quality of those images be anyting more than trivially different from each other, and if so, which is better?
• When you answered the myth about compression, were you talking about some form of mythical light compression and not about digital processing compression?
• On the JPG discussion, you didn't really explain why the myth is false; why it's fine to edit JPG images today where it wasn't in the "olden days"
•When a camera with image stabilization (either body or lens stabilization) is on a tripod and the image stabilization feature is not turned off, what happens? What's the problem with it?
Just a quick message to reiterate my appreciation for succinct, accurate, and well articulated dissemination of knowledge. :D
You guys have brought the fun of photography back to me as I refresh and learn. Thanks ! I don't miss a podcast on youtube.
Raises Pitchfork and chants "We Want More Myths ! We Want More Myths !!"
The problem with deleting in-camera is judging photos on a poor monitor instead of a good/big one.
Tony, Chelsea (ending with EA - the true way to spell it), you forgot to mention the greatest photography myths of all time: "Expensive gear doesn't make you a good photographer".
Micro-contrast as it was explained to me is; the amount of dynamic range of color or shades of color from the darkest to the lightest (shade to highlight) the lens aids the camera sensor in capturing. It is also referred to as the 3D pop as it makes images come alive. Lenses that are said to have Great micro contrast are the Zeiss Otus line of lenses. Now because the lens's ability to demonstrate this characteristic is also depended upon the camera's sensor, the better the camera sensor the more micro-contrast is evident - such as the Nikon D850, Sony A7r III, etc. But you can include the Canon 1D, 1DX, 1DX ii, Nikon D3s, D4, D4s, D5
Yes, but that's just a combination of general contrast and sharpness. It's not a separate thing. Zeiss lenses are known for their sharpness, almost as much as for their weight, but you'd necessarily get microcontrast as the change in color or brightness between adjacent points is how you know you've got sharpness.
I think manual focus needs a caveat: its inferior most of the time. In many niches, like astro and macro photography, I find manual focus is a must. in fact, in the latter im using a focusing rail, and moving the camera millimeters to focus.
Ya, autofocus in astrophotography is a recipe for fuzzballs for stars. I took a series of photographs of nighttime lightning with autofocus and I was lucky to get a single good shot out of the lot.
It greatly depends on the focusing screen technology and how careful you are. In most cases a modern autofocus will do a better job than manual. That being said, there are definitely times when that's not the case. Especially if there's a bunch of stuff that confounds the AF system.
But yes, in general, selecting the AF point and using that is usually the right way to go.
Old canon 5D (classic) was one camera that I wouldnt recommend to delete photos in camera as when you press delete options: Delete photo, Delete all photos and Cancel come up.
People seem to forget or they don't even know, that lenses also contribute to an image's color "science." Some lenses have more contrast and saturation than other's do. For example the Nikon 85mm 1.4G has much more saturation and contrast than the Nikon 85mm 1.8G does. So some lenses effect the overall color look of an image, by increasing the saturation and or contrast.
Which is also why some people love some vintage lenses so much and why _sometimes_ having fewer elements can make a picture look "better."
Azenturi vintage lenses are snapped up by film makes as it is far more difficult to achieve this look in oost in video, and also for the lens flare.
As far as deleting photos/videos in camera, my biggest fear is deleting either the wrong image or with a slower camera deleting multiple images due to camera lag. I've often looked at an image on the lcd back and thought it was out of focus but found it to be in focus once I viewed on a computer. I'd rather play it safe and leave the deletion alone until it's been offloaded to another device.
Being a bit of a battery guru.. Ni-MH doesn't have a memory it's Ni-CD ones that do. So you can fully discharge them without a problem
Li-ion and Ni-MH can be charged at any level. Camera batteries have a protection circuit so you can't over discharge them, or over charge them. But it is true you get more cycles by not fully discharging it.
Ni MH at least traditionally had memory but it was not as severe. It was enough if you fully discharged them maybe once a month. Some, however, advertise that they have no memory.
@@okaro6595 When people say "memory" what they mean is lower voltage/capacity. This can happen on Ni-CD cells if they are repeatedly not discharged (say half empty and charged). It's not essential to do this every time, but if you do many cycles with Ni-CD it will over time show a lower capacity/voltage thus not last as long. Hence it's usually a good idea to discharge them before charging. Ni-MH has pretty much eliminated this, at least in modern good quality cells. I've yet to see any cells that show any notable reduction in capacity/voltage with "top up" charging. It's not impossible, but from a practical point it's a non issue
Tony hinted to this, but most use-specific Li-Ion batteries now have integrated electronics that mitigate the charge cycle issues. I don't think an iPhone will suffer from being drained to 1% because the battery controller really just calls it 1%, while in fact there is still sufficient charge to stop from damaging the battery. NiMH's though still come with notices to run out completely once every several months.
This video is full of errors...
When you compare the Nikon D750 and the D850, you ignore the fact that the D850 sensor is a BSI sensor which means it can achieve more megapixels, without losing low-light performance. Why? because the native-gain thus signal to noise ration is better than the D750 sensor. It's not magic...
Optics will tell you that adding say a 1.4x teleconverter will in fact contribute to compression on say a 600mm F4 lens, where as a Nikon crop camera at 1.5x crop will produce a similar field of view. However the crop sensor is simply a crop, and only ever a crop of the full-frame and it's not optical, so it does not change the actual angle even though it looks pretty much the same. It's very difficult to tell the difference between the two obviously but that does not mean that it's the same. Glass is glass and a crop is a crop, the teleconverter is optically increasing the angle of view, while a crop is increasing the field of view. I hope I said that right lol.
Thanks guys, I really enjoyed this video it’s amazing all of these urban legends and old wives tales!
So sharpness is subjective!
I get that old wives tales is a saying but in photography it was most likely "old husbands tales" being that men dominated the field for most of the history of photography.
Yep high res is better in every way, I put together some data based on sensors used in Astrophotography in particular, and almost every sensor of a similar generation produce similar dark current and read noise per sensor area, regardless of pixel size.
eg the sony IMX071 (crop sensor used on early a6000 cameras) and sony imx094 (used on a7r) have got 4.81 e/sec/um^2 and 4.2 e/sec/um^2 (according to ZWO datasheets). The reason the full frame version has lower perceived noise is due to letting more total light hit the sensor for the same FOV.
Another myth about UV filters is that they protect the front element from breaking if something hits it. The front element is much thicker and harder than a UV filter. The filter will break before the front element does. Now, there are coatings on the front element that you don't want to wear off so if you clean your front lens constantly, you could benefit from a UV filter just so you don't wear off the coatings.
carl mcneill it may be stronger but a front filter will reduce the force of anything coming through so yes it will protect your front element and also adds weather sealing.
Depends how you hit it, but the filter definitely can take a scratch or light hit. I actually prefer to keep the lenses with filter without a cap.
I agree no sense to avoid deleting images in-camera, but from the NAND flash (this is a type of non-volatile memory element used in memory cards today) behavior perspective, deleting images is much complex process. It will cause changing the NAND behavior from just writing sequentially to extra so-called program-erase cycles (cutting the NAND life time) then random write to fill trimmed memory blocks, etc. I still think you can delete because we never reach the flash endurance limits in real life and so extra program-erase cycles will not impact much. Just wanted to say it's not the same as just writing a new file. In reality it can be even much more complex.
- and yet, I really love your episodes and podcasts - great job, guys!
This is strange, why would you compare just 2 cameras and say higher megapixel camera produce lower noise? you don't even say it is jpeg comparison or raw... usually cameras do noise reduction for jpeg files, may be Nikon has a better algorithm to reduce noise?
I think the "f8 is the sweet spot" idea comes from "f8 and be there" from the days of fully manual film cameras, where f8 gives a reasonably deep depth of field on a 50mm or 35mm lens. If you always return your lens to f8, focused at 3m, and a shutter speed of 1/60th, there is a good chance you could get something usable outdoors on iso 100-400 film even when there is no time to meter or focus accurately. Some SLRs with built in metering, such as the Olympus OM2, default to 1/60th even when turned off, making a fast grab shot possible. Going back further, many Box Brownies/folders have a 1/60th ish shutter speed and at best a maximum aperture of f8.
f8 and be there is a common mantra with street photographers. With a 28mm lens stopped down to f8 at hyperfocal distance, everything in the frame will be sufficiently sharp front to back.
In my opinion I turn off stabilization if I use a tripod because I saw lenses trying to chase stabilization just if I touch the camera for small vibrations, and also for HDR or pixel shift, just in case
The explanation for noise I got was that a 12 mp sensor have fewer but larger sensor elements than a 32 mp sensor of same size, so it can register more light, so on a 12 mp camera you can often use a lower ISO and in that way reduce noise. This is only if you compare sensors of same size what I understood of it
Did you mean to say Ni-Cad instead of Nickel metal hydide? NiMH is still popular (I have a bunch in service now)
For what it's worth, microcontrast is more easily capturing same/similar color tonal variation and edge contrast of fine details-REGARDLESS OF SHARPNESS-instead of just the brightest to darkest across the whole frame or straight up resolution. The smaller lines on an MTF chart are what demonstrate both at the same time, and that's usually why it's so confusing. Microcontrast and sharpness tend to go hand in hand and you need one to see the other, but you don't need equal amounts of both all the time and the difference isn't always drastic. A lens may be able to very, _very_ clearly resolve most things, but without enough contrast for details that are shoved in really close to each other and are of the same or similar colors, you won't be able to see the edges because the lens can't transmit the color difference. It could still have a big difference between the brightest and darkest part of the image overall and be ludicrously sharp everywhere else (and that same sharpness technically applies to that area you're analyzing), but you still wouldn't be able to tell the colors apart. Likewise, a lens might not be able to show quite as much fine detail as another one in terms of its resolution, but it could still transmit tonal variation really well. I'd imagine missing focus with a lens considered to have high microcontrast would demonstrate that, and in an article I found on The Luminous Landscape, someone mentions the Leica 35mm f/2 Summicron-R specifically. High microcontrast, but other lenses are sharper.
Honestly, if you can, I'd ask Dustin Abbott if he can give a clearer explanation. He regularly mentions microcontrast in his lens reviews, and there's a shootout between the Zeiss Otus 85mm, Tamron 85mm VC, Sigma 85mm f/1.4, and the Canon 85mm f/1.4. Zeiss, obviously, is usually lauded for their "pop." If not, see if you can maybe get your hands on the Zeiss Otus 85mm and a Tamron 85mm VC yourself and stop them down until they seem to have equivalent sharpness. The few times I've been able to look back and forth between the two, the Zeiss lens usually looked substantially different. And if DxO is to be believed, the Tamron is actually the sharper of the two, just not by much.
Cue someone telling me I'm wrong just because instead of telling me why, and those that do explain giving exactly the reasons I already gave to explain the difference. My body is ready.
Azenturi Like Tony said - give us some examples.
Thanks, even for 30 minutes, this video is easy to digest...
if you like photography.
I have taken over 450,000 images with 8 different cameras without a single card error. Don't know why. Love your updates. watch them all the time. Thank you for helping all of us learn new techniques, learn about new hardware, and all the stuff you teach us. Sincerely,
John Chambers jrcDigitalMemoryImaging.
Panasonic Eneloop Pro are some of the best rechargeable batteries and they are NiMH.
Richard Graham They still have a memory effect though...
You two are awesome and I love this episode! You explained all those urban legends that are as rampant as ever 2 1/2 years after you made this video, and how they started and why. I especially appreciate, in all your episodes, your calm, rational, get to the point explanations! For 37 years I've used nothing but Nikon and their lenses and this video justified what the engineer in me was thinking! Thanks guys!!
Nickle Metal Hydrides are still in prominent use. I think you meant to say Nickle-Cadmium.
I use lots of NiMH batteries (flash gun, radio, travel tooth brush, ...) NiMH batteries suffer from the memory effect just like NiCd ones. Newer batteries are better than old ones, but it's still there.
@@ge48421 Not really Ni-MH doesn't need to be fully discharged, Ni-CD does they are entirely different in the way they react. Saying that Ni-CD if it's repeatedly not discharged the voltage will be lower as will the capacity. Whist you don't have to do it every charge cycle on Ni-CD cells, Ni-MH I've yet to encounter a real issue on any good quality cell.
Li-Po has the same problems that Li-Ion
I guess its a lithium problem.
22:20 This is true. For Sony branded Primes (Sony, ZA, G, GM, etc..) the sharpness "sweet spot" is between F4.0 and F5.6. F2.8 and F8.0 usually arn't bad though.
Re: "You Can't edit JPEGs": You can edit JPEGs but large color corrections or exposure recovery will always work better on your 14-bit-per-channel raw files than on your 8-bit-per-channel JPEG files. Yes you can turn your JPEGs into 16bpp files in Photoshop, but you can't recover data that's been compressed out of the file by the 14-8 conversion. It's not that you CAN'T, it's just that if you intend to, you should always shoot RAW.
“Large corrections” is the key differentiator there. Some of us make only minor or even no corrections. I also hate sitting at a desktop playing with Lightroom/Photoshop more than anything.
@@joeltunnah , right on. As the JPEG algorithms get smarter, the JPEG images should require less and less correction. Just understand that as this happens, what comes out of the camera is less a reflection of your creative vision than it is of some software engineer's creative vision. You can still be creative in that case, but no longer so much about color and light.
Stuart Schaffner, what a ridiculous comment. So according to you Ernst Haas’ photos only show Kodak’s “creative vision” because he used Kodachrome?
The camera and film/sensor/jpeg engine are only tools, the photo is made by the photographer. Thinking you’re more “creative” as a photographer because you diddle with photoshop is total nonsense.
Joel Tunnah sorry you found my comments ridiculous. I am having trouble understanding your statement to mean anything other than that you consider all post-processing to be uncreative and inartistic. Was Ansel Adams being uncreative or inartistic when he used dodging and burning? What about color toning? Just because you personally hate to do post-processing doesn’t mean it is invalid for all artists.
Stuart Schaffner, you’re the one who said what comes out of the camera is a software engineer’s creative vision, not mine! Yes, that’s a ridiculous statement.
I never said anything about other people doing post processing, only that I don’t like to do it. PP doesn’t make someone more or less creative, and neither does straight out of the camera. You get it now?
High resolution will always win over low resolution with high sensitivity cameras for normal photography. From your angle of thought you are very much correct. Where high sensitivity wins is astrophotography and possibly low light situations for videos. As I like the variety of settings, including video and astro, mixing with portrait, street, wildlife and landscape photography, I go for a compromise of the Sony hybrid line of cameras with lower resolution and higher sensitivity. I am not a professional photographer and for me it is a sweet spot. Love your work by the way!
Great video! Thanks so much for making it.
One big myth you didn't address was telephoto compression. But you did speak about medium format compression, which is similar.
Folks need to understand that there is no such thing as telephoto compression. A scene does not look more compressed because a long telephoto lens is used. Rather, the more compressed look is due to the photographer's perspective being from further away. It is a matter of point of view, not a matter of focal length or optics.
I set my camera to store RAW & JPG. I prefer the RAW file when I'm shooting landscape because of dynamic range. Then I will look through my photos and process the ones I like the best. Now when I'm shooting family photos, I don't feel like going into my Mac and processing everyone of those. I have a folder of RAW files and a separate of JPGs.
Try shooting a 10 second exposure with IS on and see how far you get Tony...
IS float is the gyro floating ie moving the IS element over the period of the exposure.
Short exposure fine leave your IS on but please if your busting myths at least be right and any long exposure will suffer from severe to complete image reduction by using IS on multi second exposures.
Nice work on myth busting but this one ie long exposure and IS float aint no myth..
How about NOT during long exposures? I would think that is probably closer to the myth he was talking about. Also, I need to try long exposures more. Thanks for the reminder!
Second that. Most of the video is wrong actually :(
I regularly shoot up to 4 minute exposures with a Canon 300mm f/2.8 II with the IS turned on. No problems seen.
darphotos55 maybe it's "intelligently" turned off by the camera.
@@darphotos55 - The problem is seen and magnified when the anti-shake does not correspond to the focal length of the lens used. That is why Canon claimed that IS is better placed in the lens than in the camera body. In that case the manufacturer can tune the IS closely to the focal length of that particular lens. But many photographers have thin and light tripod that shakes anyway. For long exposure, their thin tripods do not actually give them the sharpness their lenses can offer.
As someone else mentioned, it was NiCds that had the memory effect, not NiMH.
The old rule with lenses was that they were sharpest 2 stops down from full, so an f4 lens would be sharpest at f8, but an f1.4 lens would be sharpest at f2.8. Many of the newer, most expensive lenses seem to be working to bring the "sweet spot" closer to full aperture.
I have a feeling that microcontrast and sharpness may be separate things, with microcontrast similar to the dynamic range on LCD screens from one pixel to the next. in other words, how much 'bleed' there is in light levels within a short distance. It could also be a function of minor color fringing where some colors are in sharp focus, but others aren't.
Alan Tutt Leica stated long time ago, that their lenses were indeed the sharpest two stops down. In the 50s they mentioned that their lenses performed the best aroun 4 and 5.6. But that was before any 1.4 (Summilux) lens appeared.