In 2019, I had the opportunity to spend a week at the Tranquilo Bay Eco Adventure Lodge in Bocas del Toro, Panama. I discovered Panama’s incredibly rich biodiversity, with hundreds of species of birds, mammals, and reptiles. This is my story of that experience!
Some lenses change their apparent focal length as you move from infinity to near focus. This phenomenon is called “focus breathing.” In the video above, I demonstrate what this looks like using the Nikon 50mm f/1.8G and Nikon 50mm f/1.8S lenses on a Nikon Z7 mirrorless camera.
I just received the new Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8S Nikkor Z for Nikon Z mount mirrorless cameras. I’ll be testing this lens in the coming weeks, but here’s a quick preview of how it looks and feels:
Thanks to B&H Photo for loaning me a copy of this lens to review!
The 14-24mm f/2.8S for Nikon Z mount is available for pre-order here.
When photographing landscapes at twilight that include the moon, proper exposure can be nearly impossible to achieve. That’s because while the dim light of twilight requires a relatively long exposure, the moon requires nearly a sunny-16 exposure. As a result, there is no one camera exposure setting that will get the scene right. Your options are:
All of the above options have drawbacks. In an under-exposed image, you’ll be prone to getting noise when you try to recover shadow details, and you may or may not be able to recover detail in the moon. If the moon is very small in the frame (as with wide-angle lenses), you can make the conscious choice to just allow it to blow out completely. Bracketing exposures is another option, but I’ve found that traditional exposure blending or HDR tone-mapping just doesn’t quite produce the results I’d like, because the blown-out areas around the moon often bleed into the sky or are exacerbated by thin clouds.
Recently while I was in the field, I decided to try a variation on exposure blending. I captured two shots: the first was exposed only for the moon, and the second shot was properly exposed for the landscape. I then used Adobe Photoshop to combine the images, but instead of just blending them (as with a traditional composite), I had to completely remove the blown-out moon from the landscape photo using Photoshop’s Content-Aware Fill tool.
I’m pleased to offer my recent Nikon birding class as a Quicktime movie presentation with printable PDF Notes.
