Infrared night shots
Today I thought I should try some infrared night shots with my new Fuji S3 Pro UVIR.
Because I dont want to make some experiments about the qualtity I decided to use some of the best Nikon lens for infrared. My choice for the first test was the old Nikkor Ai 28mm f/3.5 from the 3rd Series which is one of the very good performers in Infrared (Thanks Bjorn). Very easy to get on Ebay and not expensive (between 50 and 100 USD). But be careful, dont buy the Pre-Ai Version, it doesnt fit on the Fuji S3 Pro UVIR. This very old nikon lens is a great performer without the well known problem of getting hot spots in the recorded image.
The funny thing with the first picture from this test is, that the Fuji Hyper-Utility Software says it was made with 647sec exposure time, but the file info from Photoshop believes that it was made with 724sec exposure time...??? I really dont know where this big difference came from.
The next picture shows you the unprocessed 100% crop from the image above in the size 1850x1238 pixel. Just converted from the original raw file to tiff and saved in photoshop with 70% Quality. Thats all!
I used the external power adapter AC-5VX plus my study gitzo carbon tripod for those test pictures. If you want to do some night shots you must also enable the bulb setting from the camera, therefor you have to set the costum setting "6" from 0 to 1. After that you will be able to use a cable release or just do it manually, press the trigger for the whole 647seconds ;-) same I did. The only sad thing with this camera is, that it doesnt have the most importend feature for long time exposures, the mirror lock up.
Lets see now what the camera does when we change the Iso setting to 400 and try the same thing again:
The exposure time was set to 129sec at f/16 in this picture.
The next picture shows you the unprocessed 100% crop from the image above in the size 1850x1238 pixel. Just converted from the original raw file to tiff and saved in photoshop with 70% Quality.
And at least, the Iso 1600 shot which should be the worst.
The next picture shows you the unprocessed 100% crop from the image above in the size 1850x1238 pixel. Just converted from the original raw file to tiff and saved in photoshop with 70% Quality.
Its difficult to say which image is the best, but for my feeling the Iso 400 setting delivers the slightest noise. Eventhrough the sharpness seems to be better at Iso 100. At Iso 1600 there are some near black artefacts (like known from high jpg compressions) visible at 100% in the sky.
All of these Test Images are 100% Original without any processing in photoshop except reducing there size to 1850x1238 pixel and changing the file fromat from raw to tiff and atferwords into jpg at 70%.
And because I am not lazy.... lets take a look at something you might not have seen until now in infrared.
Our Moon.
For this real unusual test I use 2 very different Nikon lenses. The old manual Ais Nikkor 200mm F/4.0 versus the brand new Nikkor VR AF-S 18-200mm F/3.5-5.6 G ED DX! The difference could not be bigger you must guess, right?
For the beginning I want to start with the new VR 18-200mm Nikkor lens. Lets see which performances we will get at f/16, 1/1000sec and Iso1600 at 200mm. The focus was slightly turned away from infintiy like you must do it with the old lens which still have the red infrared dot beside the infinity mark. To find out where the sharpest setting occur is real tricky and demands a lot of testing with this lens. For sure its not really made for IR you will say now, but let me tell you that there is no better lens at 18mm right now. The filter I used for the following shots was the Hoya R72.
And now, lets see the qualitiy from the old AiS lens:
Unbelieveable, isnt it? The very old manual nikkor lens is the much better performer at f/16 in Infrared. Look at the noise in the picture from the VR lens!
Now the same procedure at Iso 400, 1/250sec and f/16.0 again.
compared with the AiS lens at Iso 400 f/16:
Nearly no difference visible.....
I also made shots with Iso 100, but because I am not sure if there is some unsharpness resulting from the rotation of the earth at 1/60sec I dont want to show the results here. Hope you can understand that.
Concluision: The old Nikkor AiS 200mm manual lens is still the better performer in IR. Thats not really astonishing for me, because until now I´ve never found a sharper lens in IR then this AiS 200mm Nikkor, but for some of you it might be new.