I must admit that I was a bit disappointed when I opened the parcel the book came in, only to find a relatively small and not all that thick book. I had expected a big and heavy book – the bold name “bible” had created some expectations that the appearance of the book could not match.
However, as they say, don’t judge a book by it’s cover, or as in this case: by the size and weight of it. It really is comprehensive. I can understand why Michael Freeman has named this “The Photography Bible” because he really covers a lot of aspects of photography and manages to do so in a condensed way. The main blocks from the table of content are: Exposure, Light and lightning, Composition and Post Processing – distributed across 330 pages with lots of examples and so called challenges.
Challenges are exercises for you as a reader to take on to complete a chapter or an knowledge area. And the author in the foreword recommends that you follow the structure of the book from front to back and don’t just dip in here and there. I can see that great care has been made to present the subjects in a particular order and wrap it with an exercises (challenges) to enhance your learning, so I support the advice to read the book from front to back in its full and take up the challenges presented.
I can really recommend this book if you are after one of the most complete books about the basics of photography. And more than that – it is one of the few books that I have seen talk about soft and hard light, chiaroscuro lightning and not just aperture, depth of field and the like (which of course is also included). It also covers composition to a great extend – a subject that in itself could fill an entire book. So, in short, a great book if you are after a rather complete book about the basics of photography. But not a book that I would read from front to back, I more use it more as a reference when I want to study a subject in detail.
Review of the book Understanding Exposure by Bryan F. Peterson.
Book review
Understanding exposure by Bryan F. Peterson
The title of this book is well chosen as it is all about exposure. So for a beginner to photography I would not recommend this as a general introduction to photography, but if you have been shooting for some time and want to take a deep dive into the nuts and bolts of exposure, this is the book.
One of the things that I learned from this book is not to be afraid of closed down apertures. Bryans range for “normality” was way into my range of extreme apertures, so I have really had to work with my own convictions here. Another takeaway is how much you can do with the white balance on your camera – here I think the book (just look at the cover) gave me some insights that gave me appetite to try a different mode than auto white balance on my camera.
Bryan has several mottos, of which “you keep shooting” is one. I think he here refers to the fact that experience and persistence is key to becoming a better photographer. Another motto is “shoot the adjective, not the noun” and here asks us to look not only at the subject but also what works with the subject, for example background or the way light is shaped on its way through a fence.
I can recommend this book – not as your first buy – but certainly as one of your more advanced books. I did not find this to be an easy read, but certainly a rewarding one, if you really dig in. If you don’t feel like buying this book, try following Bryan on Instagram – he really gives some good insights to “behind the scenes” for the images he posts.
The title is very precise when it comes to this book: photo basics. It is an introduction to the basics of photography, but a very good one, probably one of the best I have read. It strikes a very good balance between covering all aspects of the basics without diving into too much detail. However, this does not imply that it is only a book about basics – there is information for both the beginner and more advanced photographer, but it is also a condensed reading, so you may want to revisit some sections several times.
The book is divided into two parts: the basics and practicing the basics, with these two parts evenly split across the 254 pages. The book is packed with beautiful photos, and there are tips and challenges for both the beginner and the more advanced photographers.
Joel’s motto is “if it is not working for you, it is working against you” – an advice related to what you decide to put in your frame. I find that what Joel has put in this book is all working for me as a photographer, and hence I can recommend this book wholeheartedly. If I was new to photography and could only buy one book, this would be the one.
Short not-too-technical definition of the circle of confusion.
Lets say that a dot in reality is represented by a dot in your picture. Your eyes and brain in combination will form an opinion about how well the picture shows the dot, and if it is in focus or not. The shape and the size of the dot is the deciding factor.
Here is the thing: Your evaluation is not binary! In other words, you don’t make a “flip a switch” assessment, rather you accept some minor deviations in the way the dot is shown in your image. Sometimes the dot is spot on (he-he) and other times it is a bit oval or a bit larger that the real thing.
The interval in which you accept the dot to be sharp is known as the circle of confusion. Don’t ask me how this term came about, but the point is that accept small variations and still think of it as sharp.
It is the circle of confusion that gives us depth of field! The fact that minor variations in how the dot in reality is represented in the picture, gives us some wiggle room before and after the focus plane and this is exactly the DoF. Without a circle of confusion there would be no DoF!
Light diffuser defined and a few examples to illustrate the use.
A light diffuser is anything that spreads out the light to cover a larger area or space than it would otherwise. The point is to make the light source bigger relative to the subject – the bigger the light source is relative to the subject, the softer the light is.
If you shoot with flash sitting on your camera, a way to diffuse the light is simply to point the flash upwards or sideways, away from your subject, and let it bounce on the ceiling or wall, so these are now your light source and not the flash itself. You can also get a little white cap to put on your flash that in itself enlarges the area of the flash light, in case you don’t want to loose so much power in the light as you do when you bounce it against a wall.
If you are outdoor shooting at noon on a cloudless day, the sun makes very hard light, i.e. the transition from light to dark happens very suddenly and you only have extremely light and extremely dark and very few shades in between. If you diffuse the light from the sun by hanging a big white sheet between the sun and your subject, you will find that this diffuses the light greatly as the light source is now the entire sheet rather than a very, very small dot very far away (also known as the sun!).
Welcome to yet another lens review of yet another 50mm! I bought this lens used over at MPB.com for 139 EUR in September 2021. My reason for buying this lens despite the fact that I have the AF-D version, is that I am ever so slowly preparing to move to the Nikon mirrorless camera series, and the AF-S lens here will give me AF focus on the Z-mount as the motor is built into the lens body.
Build and appearance
The first that stuck me when unboxing the lens was how light it is – around 180 grams and hence 40 grams or so lighter than the AF-D version. On the other hand the G-lens is both taller and wider than the AF-D version. The lens is built in China and has a filter diameter of 58mm. Needless to say, there is no vibration reduction.
50mm AF-S lens to the left, 50mm AF-D lens to the right.
A nice deep lens hood is supplied with the lens and on top of this the front of the glass sits rather deep in the lens, which keeps it well protected from scratches and the like. The deep position in combination with the lens hood should effectively counter flare.
The lens hood is supplied with the lens.
There is no aperture ring – aperture has to be controlled from the camera body. Other than the focus ring, there only is a M/A to M switch, that allows you to switch between auto focus and manual focus, with manual override of the former as soon as you touch the focus ring. The lens mount is all metal as we like it, and there even is a small rubber gasket to dust seal the lens/camera interface (the lens is not weather sealed). There is a simple distance scale for both meters and feet, but the depth of field mark is only made for f/16.
Sharpness and contrast
Looking at the MTF chart that Nikon has provided, the center sharpness should be quite good, and decline towards the edges in a rather constant manner (blue line). Contrast on the other hand (red line) is a better story:
MTF chart from Nikon
This is of course only fully open as Nikon only reports the MTF charts for their lenses this way – as indicated by the f=1.8 bottom right of the graph.
I have done a bit of not-too-scientific testing with my Nikon D750 in base ISO, at 2 meters distance with manual focus, on a tripod tripod in aperture priority mode, and it confirms the above graph also for not-so-wide apertures. Contrast is very good but if you want sharpness in the corners, you have to stop down the lens to around f/5.6 or even a bit more before it compares to the center sharpness.
The “real world” image below is probably very difficult to see in details, but the corner sharpness for the same motive shot at 1.8 and 5.0 (right) yields very different results in quality: the left image is less sharp and along the middle stem you can also see a purple line on the right hand side, created by chromatic aberration. Mind you that this is zoomed in 300%, and most will never need to go into that level of detail or even see that there is a difference between the two images at normal zoom. But I did it here to illustrate the point that the lens is significantly softer and has more aberration in the corners wide open than stopped down.
A screen shot from Lightroom – the entire image top left, and to the right a zoomed in version with 1.8 left and 5.6 right.
Chromatic Aberrations
This lens will yield chromatic aberrations, especially wide open and especially in the corners. It is however, pretty well controlled and I have so far been able to remove it in Lightroom.
Purple and green aberrations along the pillars….
However, I did have to use the manual sliders to get the CA eliminated fully:
Autofocus
One of my reasons for staying clear of the 1.4 version of the 50mm AF-S lens is that it – other than being softer than this one – is reported to have a surprisingly slow auto focus, so slow that the AF-D version beats it! I am happy to say that the 1.8 version here has a fast AF as you would expect, maybe not sufficiently silent for videographers, but for most other uses I think you will love the fast and silent performance.
Also notice that this lens will give you auto focus on entry level cameras like the Nikon D5600 and it will also work fine on a mirrorless camera with an Nikon FTZ adapter.
Focus shift
My simple test of this lens where I focus manually at f/1.8, take a picture and then stop down to f/8 and take yet a picture, shows no focus shift between the two images. This is good news as the lens will focus well on a DSLR with a contrast detect focus system.
Focus breathing
The short of the long of it when it comes to focus breathing is: yes. And to such an extend that I think videographers should look elsewhere. Most others I think would not care and probably would not even notice.
Flare
Normally I test flare by taking my iPhone and shooting some light from the torch sideways into the lens, i.e. from a bit outside the angle of view. Due to the construction of the lens where the front of the glass is immersed, this has not been possible. So I instead used my iPhone to see if I could provoke some flare, and at f/1.8 I succeeded:
A bit of flare just to the left of the iPhone (green dot)
However, I find this to be pretty well controlled. You can see the coating of the glass makes the flare appear green and very dampened. Mind you however, that my reference point is how Nikkor vintage lenses produce flare, so my reference point may be a bit skewed.
Sun stars
This lens comes with rounded aperture blades and 7 of them. Normally I am not a big fan of rounded blades as it gives odd looking sun stars. But Nikon has somehow managed to find a good compromise here so the sun stars do look quite ok if you ask me. It is of course a matter of taste.
The 7 blades gives 14 peaks in the sun star here, made by the iPhone torch
Bokeh
The bokeh when the lens is fully open at f/1.8 is a bit to the oval side, which always surprises me as the lens is a round as round can be. However, this is what I get when shooting my coffee with a few lightbulbs in the background:
Bokeh at f/1.8
When I stop down the lens to f/2.2, I get completely round and beautiful bokeh:
Bokeh at f/2.2
I have absolutely no complaints here and think that Nikon – as so often before -have done a great job here.
Conclusion and recommendation
This is a very good lens taking the price point of 239 EUR used into consideration. But its performance in terms of corner sharpness may be something for you to consider, especially if you want to use this as a fast lens.
If you want a technically much more perfect lens to use on Z-mount cameras, I have seen the Nikkor Z 50mm f/1.8 S used over at MPB.com for 479 EUR, i.e. double the price. But then you get one of the best affordable 50mm lenses made so far – the reviews I have read of this lens are really praising it’s performance.
If built in AF motor is not that important to you, the 1.4 AF-D version could be a more budget friendly alternative at 194 EUR. It is also a faster lens, and the AF performance (other than being more noisy) will be at par with the reviewed lens for most Nikon DSLRs. But mind you that this option does not give auto focus on Nikon entry level DSLRs like the 3×00 and 5×00, nor on a Nikon Z mount camera with the FTZ adapter.
What about?
There are a few things that I do not cover in a review, that you may have missed, so I mention it here:
Color rendition is not covered, simply because it is subjective and difficult to test systematically. I will say that if you in general like the way Nikon glass renders colors, this lens will not disappoint you.
Distortion is not covered – this can for most modern lenses be corrected in post processing so this is less of an issue if you ask me. Of course annoying if you are a real estate photographer, but it really is easy to fix in post.
The golden hour is the time just before or just after sunrise or sunset. The light is very different from the rest of the day, as the sunlight has to travel through the atmosphere “sideways” and hence travels a much longer distance than if the sun is right above your head in zenith during noon of day. The light during the golden hour has a much more red cast that the rest of the day, the light hits subjects sideways and it is much softer light with gentle transitions from light to dark.
The sun at noon sends its light waves directly downwards and hence the shortest distance through the atmosphere. Early morning or late evening, the light travels much longer through the atmosphere.
In the image below, other than clearly having a red cast, the light travels sideways and lights up the side of the train to the right. During mid day the light would obviously have hit the top of the train which is a far less interesting view.
Also during the golden hour, the power of the sun is significantly reduced, and especially in the morning you can find that mist and traces of light are much more frequent than during the day:
Rays of light travels though the treetops on a misty morning.
So, in conclusion, if you can set the alarm clock to get up in the morning or you have the endurance to go shooting during sunset, you will capture images that are very different from what you can shoot during the day. The golden hour term is no exaggeration.
I guess a sun star is rather self explanatory just by the name as such. But it does not necessarily come from a sun – it can be any bright light source like a lamppost at night or your smartphone, as this low key image illustrates:Sun star, here the light comes from an iPhone!
To produce a sun star you obviously need a bright light source like the sun, a spot, a lamppost or the like. And then you need stop down the lens, i.e. go to a high f-stop number – this will help produce the sun star. If then in addition partly block the bright light source so it is a very small spot that produces the bright light, then that further helps the sun star to appear.
I usually shoot in aperture priority mode and that allows me to set the aperture and let the camera calculate the shutter speed to get a correct exposure. In order to avoid too slow shutter speeds, I may increase the ISO from base ISO to say 800 or 1200 to secure that camera shake and motion blur is prevented. For most cameras you can easily set the ISO to values between 800 and 1200 without affecting the image quality.
Sunstars can be produced also without the sun!
The number of peaks in the sun star is a function of the number of aperture blades in your lens, so that the number of peaks is double the number of aperture blades. Your blades can also be shaped a bit differently: straight blades in my opinion gives the most beautiful sun stars, whereas rounded blades make then less well defined. But this is all personal preference.
The sun star here underlines the beautiful windless morning
A sun star can be used as a tool to emphasise a scene. In the example above the sun star underlines the beautiful quiet morning with the sun rays seeping through the trees to light up parts of the grass. You will also notice a bit of lens flare top right of the sun star – you can minimize this in general using a lens hood, or if you shoot into the sun, try to point directly into the sun so the lens flare is put on top of the sun itself.
A high key image is one that in its tonal range is dominated by lighter mid tones and white highlights.
In this product shoot there is a very bright white desktop to set the scene, and on top of it most subjects are very bright as well. The Notebook and the coffee, together with the pen, are in stark contrast to the otherwise high key image.
This happens naturally if you a shooting where there is lots of light and/or bright surfaces to reflect the light. Or it can be achieved by over-exposing the image or post processing it in post to achieve the same effect.
High-key image example
If you study the histogram of a high-key image, you will see that it “tilts” very much to the right, with almost no blacks or shadows. The few black tones that you do see however, stand out so much more because of the “light” impression of the image overall.
In the example above you can see that the seagull and the black sails of the boat stand out, whereas the rest of the image is highlights or whites. This helps the subjects “pop”, i.e. they stand out because the contrast to the rest of the image is so significant.
High-key images have a light and positive feel to them, quite contrary to low-key images that in all aspects are the exact opposite.
A low key image – lots of blacks and shadows, but not many whites or highlights.
I short introduction to MTF charts and how to read them. Deliberately made not-too-technical.
A MTF (Modulation Transfer Function) chart gives information about how a given lens performs when it comes to sharpness and contrast.
Indication, nothing more
It is by no means a perfect tool, but it does give some information that can be useful when you are in the process of selecting your next lens. There are many reasons why the MTF chart is not perfect, but here are some:
For zoom lenses these are only tested at the wide and long end – how the lens performs in between is often not defined.
Some lens manufacturer like Nikon only give data for the lens wide open. How the lens performs stopped down is not shown (Canon does better here). Compare of lenses with different speeds is hence not on a “level playing field”.
The test is done on a lab lens with a close-to-perfect copy of the lens. However, during production, there will be sample variations between lenses and hence your copy may perform slightly different from what the MTF chart shows.
Manufacturers do not test the MTF charts the same way, so you can only (meaningful) compare MTF charts from the same manufacturer.
Lens performance is also a function of which camera the lens co-operates with. The MTF chart are produced in a camera agnostic way, so the performance of the lens tested and your specific camera may vary relative to the MTF chart
So, please, take the MTF charts as an indicator and not the entire truth!
The MTF chart
There are some technical aspects of the MTF chart that I will not cover here as it gets too technical for me and I also fear that we loose sight of the bigger picture. What I want to cover here is how to read the chart:
Chart from the Nikon home page. The 50mm 1-8G lens.
The x-axis on the chart is the distance from the center of the lens. All the way to the left is the center point and going right it moves further and further away from the center. The point here is to test how the lens performs in the corners, which traditionally is the weak point for lenses.
Lets say the y-axis is an indication of how the lens performs (this is not the real story, but sufficient to read the graph). A value of zero is super poor performance, a value of one (1) is perfect performance. A perfect lens would hence have a flat curve going straight from left to right with all values on the y-axis reading 1. Or, as Nikon coins it: the higher and straighter is better.
The two colors show the sharpness (blue) and the contrast (red) respectively.
Contrast, red: In the graph above the contrast is very good in the center of the lens, it stays good to around 17-18 mm from the center of the lens and then it drops.
Sharpness, blue: The sharpness is really good in the center and then falls with an almost constant slope moving away from the center. The corner sharpness does not appear to be impressive.
Mind you that this is only a graph for the lens at full throttle (f=1.8) – you can see in the bottom right of the graph that Nikon has made a note to make us aware of this. The lens probably performs much better stopped down, but we get no wiser in this regard studying the graph, unfortunately.
You will also notice that there are two lines for both sharpness and contrast, a solid and a dotted. When they test the lens, they do so with small lines drawn very close to each other. The direction of these lines varies between the solid and the dotted graph. The point when it comes to reading the graph lines is that the closer they stay together the better the lens performs. You cans see that the blue lines indicating sharpness stays well together almost to the edge of the lens, whereas the contrast lines drift apart when moving towards the edge of the lens (some types of aberrations start to surface for example).
Even though Nikon says that higher and straighter is better, a good question is: What does good looks like? How high in the graph do you need to be in order to have a good lens? I think you get a feel for this when you have compared charts from a few lenses, but as a rule of thumb I think of anything above 0.8 as stellar, 0.6 to 0.8 as really good and anything below that as “I need to think about this before buying”.
Mind you that no lens is perfect, so you will never get a straight line in the graph. But some do come close. Take a look at the f/1.8 50mm prime from Nikon for the Z-mount. What a lens! I think it makes sense to compare it to the graph above as it is same manufacturer, same focal length, both primes and equally fast (f= 1.8). I have no doubt that this lens technically a much better performer. I do say “technically” because some absolutely love the look of a Nikkor vintage lens, but then again I would assume they do not study MTF charts!
I hope this gave you a good introduction to what an MTF chart is and how to read it. Questions and comments are of course more than welcome.
