Nikon builds vibration reduction into some of its lenses, as does Canon. Not all Nikon’s lenses have vibration reduction and for very short focal length lenses it is not necessary. Vibration reduction, or image stabilization as some other manufacturers call it, stabilizes the camera. It does not stop the subject moving so it is no advantage in sports photography where very fast speeds are required. But it is useful in low light.

In the Nikon Imaging site, a Mr Kazutoshi talks about the development in vibration reduction technology in Nikon lenses. He says that VRII, the second generation incarnation of this technology means that:

The detection of the low frequency band in camera shaking has been greatly expanded, so the VR effect has become available even if the shutter speed is quite slow. I believe that a VR effectiveness equivalent to about four stops in shutter speed covers most shooting conditions. When we were test shooting during development, we couldn’t assess the effectiveness of four stops in shutter speed until well after the sunset, so we had to shoot through the night for some time.

For those not familiar with what four stops in shutter speed means, cameras are designed so that there is a constant relationship between the aperature and shutter speed. Each stop opening up the aperture, doubles the light that gets into the camera during the shot. And shutter speeds double in the same way, so that it is meaningful to measure an increase in one stop of light by saying it is equivalent to a doubling of the time the shutter remains open.

So translating this into what we can acheive with Vibration Reduction on a Nikon lens, let’s suppose I am shooting a lens with a focal length of 135mm and that I using a camera with a crop factor of 1.5, (which means all of Nikons DSLRs with the exception of the new D3, which is full frame).

So the 135mm lens has a field of view equivalent to a 200mm lens (more or less) in a full frame 35mm film camera, which is the standard that focal lengths for lenses are described against.

Now it is generally accepted that to be pretty sure of getting a sharp shot hand-held, the slowest shutter speed should be no slower than the reciprocal of the focal length, in other words for a 135mm lens on a digital SLR with a 1.5 crop factor, the slowest shutter speed I should use is 1/200th second. (more…)

I have been getting some odd results with shots of greenery. So today I reset all the menu settings. This is done by pressing two buttons on the top plate – ‘QUAL’ and ‘+/-‘ for a second or so until the information in the top LCD blinks and resets.

I was not sure whether this resets every setting in all the menus, and anyway I wanted to work my way through all the settings to make sure they were where I wanted them to be. I am away from home at the moment, so I googled for the D200 manual and came up with Ken Rockwell’s guide to the settings. It can be downloaded as a pdf, but looking at it in his site enables one to hyperlink to different references.

So I discovered that I had the hue setting in SHOOTING MENU > Optimize Image > Custom > Hue Adjustment, set to -3degrees. I have no idea when I did it, but having done it, I decided to google for hue adjustment in the D200. None of the people whose stuff I read suggests altering it and Ken Rockwell says ‘leave it alone!’. Which begs the question of why it is there.

Pressing the info (‘?’) button on the D200 brings up a the following. “Hue adjustment: Adjust color hue. For example, choose positive values to make skin tones more yellow, or negative values to make skin tones redder.”

Which is more of a mystery because I cannot imagine I would ever have wanted to make skin tones redder. It is just not something the D200 needs, because it exposes skin tones very nicely without adjusting hue.

Which leaves the possibliity that I adjusted it ‘blind’ while I was intending to do something else.

Hue corrected to ‘0’

The bottom line is that having seen the result of adjusting hue in the camera settings, I second Ken Rockwell’s opinion – leave it alone.

It may be that the adjustment setting can be re-adjusted in Camera Raw in Photoshop, but I have not had much success and as there are several sliders to move, it is not something I want to do as a matter of course.