Dave Hartley

During my recent travels, I’ve been keeping a log of camera battery usage. I did this to get a better feeling on how the camera and battery combinations were working so that in the future I would have a good idea on how many batteries I would need out in the field.

The first major workout for my D3 was our trip to the Falkland Islands, South Georgia, and the Antarctic peninsula. This was a twenty five day cruise in the Southern Ocean. I used the Nikon EN-EL4a rechargeable Li-ion battery exclusively taking a total of three on the voyage. The usage statistics for this trip are shown below (14-bit RAW capture with loss less compression). The lenses used and the approximate percentage of use were the 17-35/2.8 (~15%), 28-80/2.8 (~10%), 70-200/2.8 (~15%) and 200-400/4 (~60%). The 70-200 and 200-400 lenses have VR and this was enabled.  Weather conditions on the Falklands are similar to England (rain, wind, sleet, sun, all in about 60 minutes!). South Georgia is colder, with temperatures from just below freezing to about 5C (windchill can lower this considerably if you get Katabatic winds). The Antarctic peninsula was about the same as South Georgia. During the trip, I never had to change a battery whilst out shooting.

D3 Battery Usage for the Falkland Islands, South Georgia & Antarctica 2008

Compare these numbers with a trip to Antarctica and the Falkland Islands that we did in late November/ early December the previous year. This was early in the season and hence we had colder weather whilst in Antarctica. I was also shooting with the D2x as the D3 became available whilst we were away. The lenses used were almost identical to those mentioned before with the 12-24/4 being used instead of the 17-35/2.8. Both EN-EL4a and the lower capacity EN-EL4 were used; capture was 12-bit uncompressed RAW.

D2x Battery Usage for Antarctica and the Falkland Islands 2007

Notice that the average number of pictures increased with the D3 compared with the D2x. You can also see the higher capacity EN-EL4a performing much better than the EN-EL4.

Finally, some statistics for the D3 in hot climates. The D3 with the EN-EL4a was used for a trip to Belize for the last two weeks of May 2008. The first week was spent in the jungle whilst the second week was spent offshore on the two of the Cayes. Temperature was very hot, around 38C (100F) with humidity through the roof in the jungle; on one of the Cayes, we were photographing Red footed Boobies on a platform, in absolutely scorching sun, so temperature was around the same but humidity was lower. The same lenses were used (17-35, 28-70, 70-200, 200-400) with the 200-400 being used for about 90% of the images. All images 14-bit RAW capture with loss less compression.

D3 Battery Usage for Belize

The middle battery numbers included using the live-view feature in tripod mode; this tends to use up more batteries due to the use of the rear LCD. Normally I would expect the battery performance to be better in warmer conditions, but the numbers are slightly distorted due to the more intensive use of the 200-400 (with VR) and also the live view mode.

Recently, my wife was using Capture NX (1.3.3) to process a Nikon NEF file. After modifying various parameters, she did a “File -> Open with…” to export the file into Photoshop. This will render the file as a TIFF and automatically pass it to Photoshop. Normally this works fine, but this time, when Photoshop opened, instead of showing the image, the Adobe Camera RAW window popped up. This should not have happened. Somehow, the Adobe preferences had got screwed up (from my experience, corruption of Adobe preferences can randomly occur). To resolve this issue, open Adobe Bridge CS3, go to the Bridge CS3 menu and select “Camera RAW Preferences…”. At the bottom you will see JPEG and TIFF Handling. If these boxes are ticked, then Photoshop will use Adobe Camera RAW when you select a JPEG or TIFF file. In our case, these preferences were somehow enabled, and hence when we exported from Capture NX to Photoshop, it automatically went through Adobe Camera RAW. To prevent, this, simply ensure these boxes are un-checked.

When buying electronics or digital cameras etc, you usally get asked whether you want to purchase an extended warrenty. Normally I don’t bother with these but when I bought my Apple Macbook Pro over a year ago, I decided to get the AppleCare protection plan as the laptop used the new LED backlit displays and I erred on the cautious with the new technology.

In April this year, I had the screen replaced as I had a few stuck pixels. Yesterday, I went to boot up my Mac and had the unfortunate experience of seeing it fail to switch on, not even the startup “bong”. I could hear the disk being accessed, but had a black screen and no sync on my external monitor.  This was about fourteen months after the date of purchase, and hence for the normal warrenty of twelve months, I would’ve been out of luck. As I had the AppleCare, I was able to call up the phone support (normal phone support is only 90 days!) and went through a bunch of procedures to try to get the machine back to life. None of these were sucessfull, although we were at least able to get the startup “bong” but no life on the displays. So, we booked an appointment at the Genius Bar. Unfortunetaly they couldn’t fix it either as it looks like it needs a new motherboard. Hopefully, I’ll get a fixed computer within a week. I’m sure glad that I decided to buy the extended warrenty this time.

I’ve previously written about the problem I was having when selecting a number of images and hitting command-return for an instant slideshow. With Lightroom 2.0 the images were being displayed in random order which was really frustrating and different to what I was expecting (Lightroom 1.4.1 did not do this). Well, whilst drinking a beer, I looked at the slidehow settings and guess what? The default behavior is to use a random order for playback! That’s not very clever; why not have the order set to sequential by default? To fix this, go into the Slideshow module and in the Playback panel, remove the tick from the Random Order option. After doing this, my instant slideshows are back to being in sequential order.

There seems to be a major bug in the Lightroom dual monitor support. with the primary screen in loupe view and the secondary screen in either loupe view or grid view, the application will produce the infamous spinning ball. Occasionally, this will fix itself after a minute or so, but more often than not, a force quit is required. In all cases, the Lightroom cpu load is ~98%. This is running on a Macbook Pro, 2.4GHz, 4G ram and 10.5.4. The bottom line is dual monitor support is not stable.

Update: since I was having problems with dual monitor mode, I went back to using just the one. I’ve had one hang using normal loupe view whilst doing simple reject editing on folders. I’ve also seen the system hang for a minute or two whilst it Lightroom thinks about things.

Previously, when processing my raw files, I would look at the image and depending upon whether there was a predominance of red or blue I would pick either Nikon Capture NX (for reds) or Adobe Lightroom (for blues). The color of the reds I was obtaining using Adobe Raw converters was always below par, whereas the Nikon Capture NX software would give me the vibrant reds I was expecting.

With the release of Lightoom 2.0, Adobe has also introduced beta versions of it’s new camera profiles. These can be downloaded from the Adobe Labs website. Now, when I use the develop module, I can go to the camera calibration panel and select the camera profile . This mimics the various color modes that Nikon Capture NX supports. The images below show a Ring-necked Pheasant that was taken at sunrise; hence, I had some beautiful golden light. On the left hand side is the standard conversion in Lightroom using ACR 3.1; the reds and browns are really poor. The middle uses the new camera calibration with the camera profile set to D2X Mode 3 beta 1; the reds and browns are much more vibrant. Finally, the right hand image shows the output from Nikon Capture NX; this has great reds and browns. You can click on the image to get a larger view

With the new camera profiles, I’m not sure whether I need to go to Nikon Capture NX anymore, as now I can get great reds directly from Lightroom. This will greatly ease my work flow.

Images of icebergs in the Scotia Sea and the Antarctic Peninsula are now online. You can access them through my Galleries page or directly via this link.

Looks like I hit another bug in Lightroom 2.0, this time with keywording.

I had a set of 12 images in a collection. I selected all twelve and applied a keyword to them (eg. “AAAAA”). Then I hit command-L to switch off the catalog filters. I then went to the Keyword list panel and confirmed that the number of images with the keyword was indeed 12. I then clicked on the right arrow for the keyword “AAAAA”.

This should result in the filter bar popping up and I would expect to see my twelve images. Instead I only saw six and the Library Filter keyword for “AAAAA” has the number six by it. If I go to each individual file in its folder and check the keyword tags I correctly see the keyword “AAAAA” for each of them. The Catalog has “All Photographs” selected, so it is not as if I am only searching a subset of my catalog. If I go to the folder(s) where the files are located and individually remove and then re-add the keyword, I see the image I just “keyword-fixed” pop up in the filter search. So, it seems to me there is a bug when applying keywords to images in a collection. That is pretty scary!

Note that the images are not stacked so we can discount that. To clarify what I mean by this, suppose you have an image in the catalog which has a raw file and a photoshop file. The two images are stacked and contain the keyword “BBB”. In this case, the keyword panel will say “2″ next to the keyword “BBB” and when you click the right arrow, you will see the images stacked with the filter saying “1″ (as the image is stacked). This seems to be the current behavior of Lightroom.

I’d be interested to know if anyone else has seen this problem.

Images of the wildlife at Palo Alto Baylands are now online. The images can be accessed via the Galleries page or via this link.

In Library mode, grid view, use command-click to select a number of images that you want to put into an instant slide show. For example, if you have four pictures, select pictures 1, 2 and 4. Then do command-return for the instant slide show. All four images are displayed, not the ones you selected. This is quite a basic bug and you wonder how the software ever got through quality control.

My advice is to wait for the next point release before upgrading. I broke my own rule with respect to buying software when it has just been released as I was getting frustrated with the clunky key-wording & search functionality offered in 1.4.1.

Update (one more bug):

I just found another bug. When in Library mode, grid view, I was applying a metadata preset by selecting all images (123 images). I applied the preset but with all images selected, the preset says “None”. If I select a single image, it indicates the correct preset name. I found that if I select up to 25 images, the correct preset name is shown, but as soon as I select a 26th image, the preset indicates “None”. If I just select the 26th image, it correctly indicates the preset name.