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Author Topic: Best FF Landscape camera?  (Read 35187 times)

Two23

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Re: Best FF Landscape camera?
« Reply #40 on: March 19, 2018, 09:35:14 pm »

Everyone has their own biases and opinions. Having come from a large format background (up to 8x10), I have found that single shot images from 36MP cameras in 30-inch sizes (on the short end) are unacceptable (call me spoiled because I am).


I still shoot 4x5, and sometimes 5x7 (b&w only).  I've been shooting three shot stitches with the Nikon D800E & 24mm t/s and am quite happy with the result.



Somewhat OT: Hey, fellow tripoholics - check out the "tripod measurement" thread on this subforum for an interesting new website.
 



I am a tripodholic, but I can change, if I have to, I guess.



Kent in SD
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NancyP

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Re: Best FF Landscape camera?
« Reply #41 on: March 20, 2018, 10:38:22 am »

Monopolic? or is that someone who incessantly plays Monopoly?
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Rob C

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Re: Best FF Landscape camera?
« Reply #42 on: March 20, 2018, 11:18:46 am »

Monopolic? or is that someone who incessantly plays Monopoly?

On the matter of monopods, I would prefer the duopod trick, where's a light tripod is used with only two legs extended, usually the two side-supporting ones.

It offers excellent stability in one axis, letting you control the image in free-style on the other axis. This is far easier to pick up and move if you feel you want to alter the framing just a little. It works reasonably well with my Nikon bodies and the 8/500 Reflex, which I find completely impossible to frame with on one leg alone.

Tilting manually (unsupported by a leg) on the up/downwards axis feels a lot more natural than trying to do it on the sideways axis.

Rob

danielc

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Re: Best FF Landscape camera?
« Reply #43 on: March 20, 2018, 06:32:50 pm »

Without starting a new thread, I recently upgraded to the D850. I'm currently using the Tamron 15-30 for most of my landscape work and am reasonably happy with it, but is there a better lens I should consider? I've heard maybe the Zeiss 21mm is a killer, and I've also heard about the 19mm tilt shift, but at $3.5k it's outside my budget.
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ErikKaffehr

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Re: Best FF Landscape camera?
« Reply #44 on: March 20, 2018, 09:01:32 pm »

Hi,

I had a quick look at: http://www.opticallimits.com/nikon_ff/989-tamron153028vcff?start=2

It seem the Tamron is a killer lens, too. As almost all zooms, it suffers from distortion, but that is correctable.

So, the Tamron should be a good lens, if you have a good sample. You could try Jim Kasson's screening tests: https://blog.kasson.com/lens-screening-testing/

Best regards
Erik



Without starting a new thread, I recently upgraded to the D850. I'm currently using the Tamron 15-30 for most of my landscape work and am reasonably happy with it, but is there a better lens I should consider? I've heard maybe the Zeiss 21mm is a killer, and I've also heard about the 19mm tilt shift, but at $3.5k it's outside my budget.
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Dan Wells

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Re: Best FF Landscape camera?
« Reply #45 on: March 22, 2018, 01:42:36 pm »

Another consideration, especially for landscape farther from the car (where size and weight is more of a consideration) is Fuji. My X-T2 accompanied me for 450 miles on the Pacific Crest Trail last summer. The system is small and light - lenses as well as bodies are smaller than the FF equivalents, with excellent lenses. I'm getting really superb prints up to 24x36". with excellent sharpness and dynamic range.
Is it a D850 if you can carry both to the image with equal ease? Almost certainly not... But it's about half the weight with equivalent lenses, and it has the durability to survive anything you can throw at it. The D850 is also very durable, but most lighter DSLRs and the Sonys aren't.  Substitute an A7rIII for the D850, and you lose durability, but not much weight - many of the Sony lenses are huge (there are a few small, sharp primes if you pick carefully, but all the zooms are either big and heavy or lousy).
Fuji's new X-H1 is a little bigger than the X-T2, but smaller than any reasonably durable DSLR except the Pentax KP. but that uses the same APS-C sensor as the Fuji. It's even more durable than the X-T2 - I haven't seen real tests yet, but it may be up there with Olympus, the higher-end Pentaxes and the top pro DSLRs, and it has an IBIS system (for those times a tripod just isn't practical) that looks to be in the same category as Olympus' uncanny version in the E-M1 mk II. Mine is sitting in the back of my car waiting to charge the batteries tonight, but I'm very excited by its potential as a landscape camera - an X-T2 with excellent IBIS, and even more bulletproof...
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danielc

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Re: Best FF Landscape camera?
« Reply #46 on: March 23, 2018, 12:16:06 am »

Another consideration, especially for landscape farther from the car (where size and weight is more of a consideration) is Fuji. My X-T2 accompanied me for 450 miles on the Pacific Crest Trail last summer. The system is small and light - lenses as well as bodies are smaller than the FF equivalents, with excellent lenses. I'm getting really superb prints up to 24x36". with excellent sharpness and dynamic range.
Is it a D850 if you can carry both to the image with equal ease? Almost certainly not... But it's about half the weight with equivalent lenses, and it has the durability to survive anything you can throw at it. The D850 is also very durable, but most lighter DSLRs and the Sonys aren't.  Substitute an A7rIII for the D850, and you lose durability, but not much weight - many of the Sony lenses are huge (there are a few small, sharp primes if you pick carefully, but all the zooms are either big and heavy or lousy).
Fuji's new X-H1 is a little bigger than the X-T2, but smaller than any reasonably durable DSLR except the Pentax KP. but that uses the same APS-C sensor as the Fuji. It's even more durable than the X-T2 - I haven't seen real tests yet, but it may be up there with Olympus, the higher-end Pentaxes and the top pro DSLRs, and it has an IBIS system (for those times a tripod just isn't practical) that looks to be in the same category as Olympus' uncanny version in the E-M1 mk II. Mine is sitting in the back of my car waiting to charge the batteries tonight, but I'm very excited by its potential as a landscape camera - an X-T2 with excellent IBIS, and even more bulletproof...

I like your thinking and I like where these manufacturers are heading.

I know Sony has packed an A7RIII sensor into a P&S, I'm hoping another manufacturer can figure out the keys to getting it to work, obviously prime lenses are one thing.

My ideal at the moment would be a D850 sensor with 1 FPS or so, decent single point AF, Mirrorless, 14bit lossless RAW and a few lenses which all share the same filter thread size. If someone can do that at half the weight or (hopefully less) than a D850 + wide angle I'd be pretty happy.

I know the Fuji's are getting close to it, I just really want the resolution that they don't have yet.

EDIT: If I was doing any sort of serious hike like you mentioned I would also probably purchase a second camera, lens system and lightweight tripod for it. Most of my images are shot within 2km of my vehicle at the moment, so I just make do and carry the weight.
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NancyP

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Re: Best FF Landscape camera?
« Reply #47 on: March 23, 2018, 11:24:56 am »

Through-hiking is an entirely different beast than day hiking or weekend trips. It isn't just weight and bulk. You have to charge batteries - either by carrying a bunch of charged ones and a charger (or a big storage battery to dispense power to various other batteries), and stopping at a town to recharge on AC house current, or by deploying a solar grid and storage battery on the trail. Backup might also be an issue, if you are nervous about just retiring non-copied filled cards for the duration of the trip.

So, Dan Wells, how did you manage the power issue? And did you back up en route?

Power is a problem with the mirrorless cameras, some more than others. In my mind, the short battery life (~150 shots, with conservative usage) is one of the two or three annoying features of the Sigma DP2 Merrills, the others being the clunky and buggy post-processing (Sigma Photo Pro - crashes more than it should, slow too) and the lack of a wired or wireless release capacity, leading to lots of use of the 10 second delay. Power is something that the DSLRs handle well, I get about 800 shots from my Canon LP-E6 battery (standard size battery for non-gripped SLRs), which is about twice the capacity as the Sigma by battery weight.
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ErikKaffehr

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Re: Best FF Landscape camera?
« Reply #48 on: March 23, 2018, 03:56:05 pm »

Hi Nancy,

Good point. It seems that Sony has much improved their power consumption, but charging batteries while traveling light is a big challenge.

Best regards
Erik

Through-hiking is an entirely different beast than day hiking or weekend trips. It isn't just weight and bulk. You have to charge batteries - either by carrying a bunch of charged ones and a charger (or a big storage battery to dispense power to various other batteries), and stopping at a town to recharge on AC house current, or by deploying a solar grid and storage battery on the trail. Backup might also be an issue, if you are nervous about just retiring non-copied filled cards for the duration of the trip.

So, Dan Wells, how did you manage the power issue? And did you back up en route?

Power is a problem with the mirrorless cameras, some more than others. In my mind, the short battery life (~150 shots, with conservative usage) is one of the two or three annoying features of the Sigma DP2 Merrills, the others being the clunky and buggy post-processing (Sigma Photo Pro - crashes more than it should, slow too) and the lack of a wired or wireless release capacity, leading to lots of use of the 10 second delay. Power is something that the DSLRs handle well, I get about 800 shots from my Canon LP-E6 battery (standard size battery for non-gripped SLRs), which is about twice the capacity as the Sigma by battery weight.
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BAB

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Re: Best FF Landscape camera?
« Reply #49 on: March 23, 2018, 07:44:21 pm »

Regarding power I have the CRANK works great! Many other power options including solar which are lightweight.
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armand

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Re: Best FF Landscape camera?
« Reply #50 on: March 23, 2018, 09:11:52 pm »

So far I used either the Fuji X-T2 with the 10-24 and 18-55 or the Oly E-M5ii with 12-40 or 12-100 (prefer the 12-100). Only the Fuji was on a overnight but for both the hikes were quite long, 10-12 hours.

I got results that I liked better from Fuji but it could have been secondary to a particular trip.
Both are workable, with Oly you should be more willing to try some exposure bracketing and sometimes I felt they were a little too flat.

shadowblade

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Re: Best FF Landscape camera?
« Reply #51 on: March 24, 2018, 01:27:29 pm »

I think any professional FF camera is capable of making great images. My feeling is that the K1 Mk II is too limited with respect to lenses. Sony has great potential but needs another generation or two to fill out the system and allow complete in body sensor shift (without software). Nikon and Canon have been too conservative and are significantly behind. We shall see if they can pull a rabbit out of a hat and blow us away with their mirrorless prowess. My recommendation would be to wait until the fall and see if any new professional quality mirrorless system come into existences, then make a move. If you must make a move, I’d recommend any of the 40+MP FF cameras with top quality prime lenses...

In-body pixel shift may seem convenient, but, ultimately, causes more problems than it solves. Doing it in post-processing gives you much more leeway to deal with subject movement - rustling leaves or grass, moving water, even clouds. You can simply mask out the affected areas and cover those with a single-frame image, while using the pixel-shift image for all the static parts of the image. But, if pixel-shift was done in camera and you didn't have the individual component frames, you wouldn't be able to do that and would be stuck with the motion artifact.

For landscape photography, I find that prime lenses are a trap which can just as often reduce your final image quality as improve it. When shooting landscapes, you have little control over the focal length you need for any particular shoot. If you want a particular composition, you need to shoot from a particular location - you can't move trees, mountains and rivers so that you can stand somewhere more convenient. 'Foot zooming' changes the composition, and, even if that isn't a major issue (e.g. if the scene is all background, with no real foreground elements), is often physically impossible. Therefore, there are only three ways to get the angle of view you need - crop, stitch or zoom. Stitching is ideal, but often impractical (wind-related movement being the bane of any landscape photographer). Cropping from a wider lens costs you valuable megapixels. Zooming to the required focal length allows you to get the desired angle of view in one shot, without cropping, but is obviously not possible with a prime lens. And it is not often that the required angle of view corresponds exactly to a 24mm, 35mm, 50mm, 85mm or 135mm lens.

Given that you're likely to be shooting stopped-down, there is minimal difference in image quality between a good prime and a good zoom, even when using the entire frame. There may be some differences wide open, but you're unlikely to be shooting most landscapes at f/2.8. And, since, with a prime lens, you'll be cropping almost every time you can't stitch, you end up losing further image quality, that you wouldn't lose had you used a zoom that allowed you to use the exact required focal length in the first place. If you need 168mm f/8 for a shot, a quality zoom set to 168mm f/8 is going to beat a 135mm prime cropped to the same angle of view every time.
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