During the second & third week of April, my wife & I attended the annual Wedding & Portrait Photographers International (WPPI) convention in beautiful Las Vegas. This annual convention & trade show draws photographers, members of WPPI from all over the world to Vegas. If you can imagine going on vacation with thousands of photographers then you can envision what our time there was like.
Vegas is a big place but after dark it's all about "the strip" and the light show put on by this amazing desert oasis. Believe me; it seemed like every photographer there for the convention was out taking photos. They all hit the strip cameras in hand, talking story with each other and photographing every square inch of the place. Now while there are a lot of lights, most good photographers know that you will likely need a tripod to record a night scene. Or will you? I actually arrived in Vegas without a tripod. I was a man on a mission. I have a tripod but I just didn't want to carry it around. We're talking a 5 hour flight from Hawaii, baggage claim at both ends, shoe removal, TSA the whole thing. It just didn't seem worth all the hassle. Besides I was on a quasi vacation. If it seemed like work it wouldn't be much of a vacation now would it?
I needed to strike a happy medium. I wanted to do night photos, but I didn't want to lug around this 10 lb. piece of equipment everywhere I went. Then it came to me, Nikon had introduced a new vibration reduction lens (VR) just a week or so before our trip was scheduled. There was going to be a trade show and some of the vendors would likely have the lens available and possibly even be offering a discount.
The first thing to do would be to go to the Nikon booth and get the scoops on the lens. Here's the skinny. The lens is an "all purpose" lens, just what we needed. It is an 18 - 200mm lens with a 4-5.6, min aperture. Not the fastest of Nikons lenses but the VR function was designed to assist you with that problem. The VR function in the lens basically reduces camera shake at lower shutter speeds. Allowing the user to hand hold the camera at shutter speeds that before would require a tripod.
On the second day of the convention we checked out the dealers. Unique photo had the lens and I couldn't believe how nice it was when we tried it out on a Nikon D200 body. I instantly knew we needed one. Not just for the night shots we had planned but for regular use in our business. We didn't know how well the lens would work but after a few night shots the results were striking. This lens retails at about $700 and it has now replaced 2 lenses we were previously using. As a photographer it allows me to shoot without interrupting the flow of the session to change lenses. What a wonderful asset.
We set our Nikon D200 at 800 ISO, in RAW capture mode and hit the strip. The shot at the left of the Paris Hotel, through the Bellagio's water show was taken at 1/10th of a second at F-5.6. You can see the motion of the water yet the hotel is sharp as a tack.
This process was repeated time and time again. Every time we achieved the same results. Excellent sharpness and for 800 ISO, awesome color and noise rendition from the D200... But that is another article.
The next question was just how far we could take the process. The photograph below was taken handheld at an incredible F-4 @ 1 Second! using Raw capture @ 800 ISO with the lens set at 18 mm.
Ok I was impressed while this is the lens' widest setting this image was incredibly sharp. This was a 1 second exposure. Handheld! Wow.
We enlarged the image to 100% on a 20 inch monitor to view how crisp it might be. The image was still quite good. There was some ghosting but overall I had never taken a photo at one second handheld and been able to produce this degree of sharpness. The image printed very well as an 8x10.
Now the lens has 2 settings for its VR function and while the normal mode works quite well as you see, I think the “action” mode is still in need of some fine tuning. The opening image for this article looks pretty good until you get it up to 100%. We used the action mode for this image.
If you have ever been to Vegas, you have likely visited the restaurant at the “top of the world” in the stratosphere complex. This revolving restaurant makes a complete 360 degree revolution every hour and a half or so. We put the VR action setting to the test here taking a photo every few minutes from our table of the Vegas Skyline. Our exposure was about 1/6th of a second at f-6.3 using 800 ISO once again. The action setting is designed to work when the camera is in motion and is shooting a still subject. Part of the problem with this test is that we didn't pan the camera as we were moving like you would if you were shooting from a moving vehicle. However the results weren't bad. Enlarged up to about 5x7 the image was over all acceptable.
You will also find that the lens will drain your camera batteries faster than normal because of the extra power needed to run the VR function. If you plan on shooting for an extended period of time just bring a spare. Overall this lens performed very well in fact better than we expected. We will be using it regularly in our business and in lieu of taking a tripod on our future vacations.
- Aloha
