RAW format is a way of storing information about an image so that it gets as close as practically possible to what the camera sensor recorded.
It is not about resolution. The resolution of the image is (unless cropping) determined by the resolution of the sensor. You can have two images in different formats (say JPG and RAW) and they hold the same resolution, but what is different is how much information is stored about each point or dot (pixel) in the image.
RAW format stores much more information about each pixel than other formats do. This maximizes the options for you to work with the image in post processing – you can recover shades in the dark, clipping in the highlights and work with the colors to a degree that no other format allows you to.
But there is no free lunch in photography. The price you pay for all this flexibility and headroom is the file size. RAW format takes up much more space than JPG or HEIC formats, even when the resolution of the image is the same. That is why many edit their images in RAW format and finish their work by exporting the file to a format that takes up less space – this makes sharing on social media much easier.
Vignetting is simply that the corners or edges of your image are darker than the center. It is caused by the lens, but can also be created artificially in post processing software. The term light falloff is also used for the same.
Some use vignetting to draw attention to the center of the image and hence find it useful.
Most lenses exhibit some level of vignetting and it is most common for lenses that can open up and let in a lot of light (say f/1.4 or f/1.2). Some cameras are able to correct the vignetting as part of the cameras processing of the image, so it is never visible to the photographer.
I think a few quotes from other reviewers to start with will set the scene just beautifully:
DXO Mark 2013: “[it] has no significant weaknesses and is the best zoom lens you can mount on a Nikon Full Frame body. If your photography demands a medium telephoto zoom with a fast maximum aperture that will deliver across the board, but particularly at 200mm, and your budget holds no bounds, go get yourself a Nikon 70-200mm f2.8G ED VR II. It’s one hell of a lens.”
Ken Rockwell: “I hate this lens because it is so good than now I want to buy one. I borrowed one to test, and it turned out so subtly excellent that it surprised me.”
DP review 2009, gold award: “Overall, though, it’s impossible to conclude anything other than that the AF-S Nikkor 70-200mm F2.8 G VR II is one of the most accomplished lenses of its type, and a perfect companion to Nikon’s top-end bodies such as the D3S and D3X. It’s an equally accomplished performer on both DX and FX that will satisfy the most demanding of photographers.”
Despite this lens certainly not getting any younger (production started back in 2009) it still today is a great lens, and as far as I know, still in production.
Price
I bought my lens for 900 EUR used (2020), and it came in good condition. Even though prices fluctuate over time, it is a rather expensive lens also used, but certainly much more within reach than the original list price of 2400 USD in 2009.
Build and layout
The lens comes with 4 buttons, two to control the AF, and two to control the VR. In addition good wide rubber grips are there for manual focus and zoom (just left of the buttons).
The full frame 70-200mm lens is packed with features:
ED: glass to control Chromatic Aberrations
AF-S: Built in auto focus motor, that also works on ML with FTZ adaptors plus on entry level Nikon cameras (!)
VR: Vibration Reduction so you can get more keepers with slower shutter speeds
1:2.8G: Constant fast aperture at f/2.8 throughout the focal range
IF: Internal focus, makes focus faster and allows filters to be mounted on the lens
You will have to accept a pretty high weight at 1.5 kilos, it takes Ø77 mm filters and you won’t be able to go closer to your subject than 1.4 meters.
The focal range from 70-200 makes lenses like this one a workhorse for portrait photographers, sports, some wildlife, photo journalists and wedding photographers. It is simply a super important range for many pros, and hence a lens that major lens manufacturers work very hard to get it absolutely right.
The lens features the golden ring that we know from pro grade glass from Nikon, but the jury is still out as to what exactly the gold ring signifies. Some think it is the ED glass, others that it is the weather sealing and yet others that it is pro grade glass. No matter what the right answer is, the lens is built very solid in most metal and some rubber (focus ring and zoom). And a bit seldom in this day and age, it is made in Japan (at least my copy is!).
All in all, you get the impression from handling this lens that it is built for professional use and designed to withstand a lot of beating from daily use in all kinds of weather.
Sharpness / contrast
There are many reservations to make before studying an MTF chart, and one of them is that your lens and your camera team up to produce the images, and hence studying a camera agnostic MTF chart may not reveal how your specific camera performs with this lens. And then Nikon does not provide data other than wide open and at the far extremes of this lens (wide and tele respectively), so we cannot see from the MTF chart how it performs in between.
The MTF chart as provided by Nikon.
However, as you can see, the red contrast line sits very high in the diagram and the blue sharpness is also impressive for center sharpness at least. Then it drops towards the edges, as is the case for so many other great lenses, but it remains over 0.7 close to 15mm from the center, and I find that impressive.
Just for the fun of it, and because people often tell me that primes are sharper than zooms, I made a little test where I looked at the center and corner sharpness and contrast, to see which one came out on top:Although the 180mm AF may not be the sharpest lens Nikon has ever produced, it certainly is a good lens and the 70-200mm won the center sharpness stopped down, whereas the prime won when going wide open. Maybe not a surprise, but to me this clearly shows that the lens in review here has very good contrast and sharpness.
Chromatic aberrations
Some chromatic aberrations can be seen in the treetops where the contrasts are the strongest.
This lens does suffer from chromatic aberrations, but I seldom come across them. In the image above with a high contrast image, the trees top left have a purple line where dark meets white. It is easily removed with the “remove chromatic aberrations” option in Lightroom. You may in stubborn cases need to also work with the manual sliders in Lightroom, but that is even more seldom. So I would not consider CA an issue for this lens.
Flare and ghosts
I shoot a lot into the sun and hence both flare and ghosts often materialize. I find that both flare and ghosts are well controlled with this lens, and often to such extend that even when it is visible in the picture, either I don’t notice it or it is not a disturbing element. Much is still dependent on the lens hood and the photographer’s skills, but this lens gives you all that modern technology has to offer in terms of minimizing flare. I would even argue that if you are a videographer (they love flare!) you may find that flare is too well controlled for your liking!
Focus breathing
This lens suffers from serious focus breathing! The former version of this lens and the successor has much less breathing, as does the f/4 version, so if you are into focus stacking or a videographer, then this could be an issue for you.
Vignetting & distortion
This version of the lens is known to have both vignetting and distortion under very good control and apparently the engineers at Nikon did a really good job here. However, I do see some big shift when I push the profile compensation button in Lightroom, but it is not an issue as such, just interesting to see how big the change is at several apertures. I doubt you will be shooting architecture or other things with this lens where straight lines are important.
Vibration reduction
I don’t have much to say about the vibration reduction other than it works! I have been shooting at 200mm down to 1/80th of a second with no camera shake and it works in a way so I don’t notice it is on. When shooting ICM it is of course turned off!
Sun stars
Sunstar example: the iPhone in the dark!
I am not a big fan of the sun stars this lens produces and it comes down to the 9 rounded blades. The peaks in the sun star as you can see above are split and look messy to me. I much more prefer the sun stars that straight blades gives, but I also understand why Nikon has made the rounded blades, as most users in their target group prefer bokeh over sunstars.
Bokeh
The lens comes with 9 rounded blades that start to get to work as soon as you stop down the lens. I find the bokeh absolutely beautiful and have no complaints whatsoever.
Bokeh example from a fall day with a bit of sun coming through the trees in the background.
Color rendition
Beautiful sunlight providing backlight to the straws.
I often get questions why I don’t comment on color rendition or color science when I review lenses and cameras and the answer is that I have seen the eye opening video by Tony Northrup where he documents that most of us are unable to consistently pick our favorite camera in a blind test and that we are influenced by brand loyalty when assessing color rendition and your WB settings are much more important.
Silhouettes of trees.
So that is why I am hesitant to cover this subject. For this lens I will say that when I put in front of my D4, the pictures and colors it produces are absolutely stunning. If you want to have a closer look, I have a flicker album with these pictures. Link here. There you’ll also find the EXIF information, but please look at the pictures first and foremost.
Auto focus
You can limit the autofocus so that is does not search in the interval from minimum focus distance to 5 meters out.
It is fast and silent. Period. And it is so fast that I do not use the option to limit the AF range from 5 meters and out. Only if you are an extremely nerdy guy like me that likes to shoot lampposts at night will you sometimes experience the AF gives up in low light and you have to switch to manual, but for most normal uses the AF simply just works fast, silent and reliable. As you would expect from a pro grade lens.
Conclusion
My overall conclusion is that this lens probably is as good as it gets when we are talking lenses where the price point is within reach for normal human beings. Is it a perfect lens? No, you can find things that are not perfect for example the focus breathing. But it is a lens where I find that Nikon has made some very good compromises that add up to a very attractive package.
I can fully understand why working Nikon professionals 10 years ago had this lens sitting on their cameras. It is a pleasure to work with. It gets the job done. The vibration reduction just works silently in the background. The auto focus is fast and reliable. It produces great images.
My advice to you is consider if alternatives with more reach or maybe some lighter primes. There are also alternatives in the same range from Sigma and Tamron – or the not so fast f/4 version from Nikon.
This is exactly where I cannot help you, as only you know your personal preferences. This shoe fits my foot well, but that does not mean it will fit your foot well.
I believe they produce a book similar to this one every year, or at least regularly. This is the edition 10, with 1-9 preceding obviously. So it is not the latest and greatest I am reviewing here, but the images are timeless and hence the edition number is of less interest.
It is VisitBritain as sponsor amongst others, so there is an agenda here other than just distributing some absolutely lovely award winning British images.
And I am happy to see that one of my favorite ocean photographers Rachel Talibart is one of the winners that made it into this book (the Sunday Times magazine award), but there are simply so many other talented British photographers that you have to see it to understand it. This is only the top of the iceberg – there must be so many hard working photographers out there that are not on display in this book.
One of the things I really enjoy about this book – other than the beautiful images – is that the photographers tell a little story about each image and in the back of the book they document what camera, settings and lens they used, and in addition briefly describe their post processing work. This is valuable insights, and shows that cameras of different make and price range are all able to produce beautiful images. It is the photographer that makes the big difference. A decent quality and camera is merely the means to an end.
The two Danish photographers Helle and Uri have captured images of wildlife that are nothing short of astonishing. This 200+ page coffee table book is filled with one wonderful image after another. Their passion for wildlife and nature shines from every single image, carefully selected from numerous journeys into the wild: South America, Greenland, New Guinea, Antarctica -the list goes on and on.
It is seldom that I am blown away by even a single image, but in this case I was blown away by almost every single image in this giant of a book. Their work is truly impressive. It is the combination of their love for nature that shines from each page and the technically impeccable images that lifts this book to a level that I have seldom seen. There are a few introduction pages and forewords, but other than that the book is filled with one wonderful image after another.
I can only recommend this book wholeheartedly, even if you are not a nature lover, you will be impressed by the sheer quality of the images presented.
Photo work: Forty photographers on process and practice, edited by Sasha Wolf
This book is as academic as they come! That is my review in short! If you are curious to look over the shoulders of 40 acclaimed photographers (like Andrew Moore or Paul Graham) and understand their process and workflow, then this is the book to read!
All 40 have been given the same questionnaire of 12 questions like “Do you create with presentation in mind, be that a gallery show or a book?”. The book is simply the documentation of 40 answers to these 12 questions.
This is not your beginners book about photography, nor the advanced book about photography, rather it is an look into the minds and workflows of some highly creative people. I could as well have been a book about painters – the questions and their answers are that agnostic to photography.
So only if you have a keen interest in this highly specialized area can I recommend this book – otherwise I would stay clear of the 255 pages of process and insights.
When light travels though the lens, the aperture blades can reduce the diameter of the hole the light travels through. Most lenses can close down the aperture to a very, very small area – the size of a pinhead or even smaller.
When light has to travel through such a small hole it simply changes slightly. This can get very technical, but the effect is that your images appear soft, i.e. as if out of focus – even when you have focused perfectly.
Photographers debate exactly when the effect sets in and how large the effect is. Macro photographers often shoot at crazy high f-stop numbers (closed down apertures) and seem to be doing fine, and in many find that the effect of diffraction is exaggerated.
The best you can do is to notice if your lens/camera combination gives diffraction – I think you should start to worry about this from around F/16 and onwards.
When your DSLR focuses, it typically does so by opening the aperture up as much as possible to allow all the available light to flow to the auto focus system. So if for example you are shooting with a f/1.8 lens at f/8, the camera will open up to f/1.8 to focus and then shift down to f/8 to take the picture.
Some lenses, especially lenses that can go very wide, i.e. a low f-stop number, suffer from focus shift, which means that the lens moves the focal plane as a consequence of changing the aperture.
This is nothing short of a catastrophe for an auto focus system, as the camera gets the focus sharp at f/1.8, but then when the image is taken at f/8 the subject is no longer in tac sharp focus.
There are a few ways to mitigate focus shift, as you can of course shoot at the maximum aperture – then the focus aperture and the shoot aperture is one and the same. You can also shoot in live view on your DSLR, as it the uses a different focus system than when not shooting in live view mode. The best option of course is to get a lens that does not suffer from focus shift!
The Photography Storytelling Workshop by Finn Beales
This is not your average photography book – far from. Finn Beales apparently has landed some VERY big accounts (Apple, Land Rover, Audi, Cartier, etc) and in this book he shares how to pitch for a photography job, plan, deliver and maintain a good long lasting relationship with the client.
The book opens with a chapter about storytelling and how you make a series of pictures tie together to tell a story, with a clear red thread throughout the images – the last image holding the hand of the first one. It continues into how to pitch for a job, win it, plan it, execute the shoot day, edit and finally deliver. I learned a lot about how to manage such process (including the shoot day(s)) as a project and how much planning that is required.
There is a very good section in the book about what colors work together and why – and illustrated with specific examples to underline the points made. Finn coins this as creating a mood board. This was an eye opener for me. I have not come across a photo book where the use of color is addressed in this way and I can tell that this section of the book is one that I will re-visit over and over again.
Finn also has a section about which focal lengths he uses for what kind of shots and I really felt that this part of the book was like looking over the shoulder of a successful commercial photographer. I really found this part extraordinary, and as a result it re-ignited my love for the 50mm prime as a universal tool in my camera bag!
There also are some chapters about editing your photos, but here I felt that I did not learn that much new. However, Finn also addresses how to do data management of your photo files, and here there are lots of tips and tricks that I think you will find useful.
So all in all I found this book both interesting and useful, but if you are new to photography, this would NOT be the book I’d start with. There are better options from Joel Sartore and Michael Freeman. However, if:
storytelling with pictures
project management of your shoots
use of colors to create moods
creating and maintaining client accounts
processing and storing your images
are subjects of interest to you, then this book is definitely worth it. 176 pages with lots of illustrations and examples and exercises. And there is more to be found on his website.
