Nikon D500 - first impressions

[Andrea B.]

Frank, practice this with auto-ISO perhaps?
Manual Mode. Fix speed to between 1/500 - 1/1000". Fix aperture to f/5.6. Set Auto-ISO to on to take care of the exposure.

Now, set focusing to back of camera on AE-L button.
Set AF-C. Choose one of the clustered AF point settings.
Set Ch for burst shooting.

One initial AF lock-on is not always enough! So perform AF lock-on more than once with your thumb as you are panning and tracking the bird while engaging the shutter to make bursts of shots with your other finger.

Remember the camera does not do the tracking of the bird, rather the photographer does the tracking of the bird with the help of the camera's tracking settings.

I'm sure you will get this. Practice makes perfect, yes?? 

[Frank Fremerey]

Thank you Andrea. Practice. Practice. Practice. That is the idea. Have to try the swallows in our backyard.
These are darn fast. Oh my...

yet this special kind hunts mostly at dusk when light levels are really low.

on the island we  had f=8 plus t=1/800 s easily at low ISO

here it will be more the upper limit.... 20k ISO... difficult.

[Peter Connan]

Remember that when practicing, poor-quality images due to high ISO's are not necessarily important...
For swallows, the shutter speed should be at least 1/2000!

[Frank Fremerey]

Thank you, peter!

[Frank Fremerey]

For me with all other cameras the development in Photo Ninja is superior than the development in Camera Manufacturer Software.

Not yet with the D500. I cannot reach the quality of the Nikon JPEG

1) conversion in ViewNX-i
2) calibrated conversion in Photo Ninja 1.3.3c

Verdict: The PN shot lacks in green differentiation a lot, the shots get very coarse and are then ironed down by Noise Ninja, so colour information and details are lost.

[Jan Anne]

A serious upgrade in the battery department. These are ENELOOP black, 2500 mAh per piece x8 = 20.000 mWh = 2 Watt hours. With another 1900 mWh battery in the

Not even close Frank 

Wh is Ah times the resting voltage of the battery, the latter is 1.2V for NiMH and 7.4V for Li-ion with two cells (just ignore the 7.0V mentioned on the EN-EL15).

So for the mentioned batteries the Wh is:
- EN-EL15: 1.9Ah x 7.4V = 14Wh (the correct Wh is mentioned on the back of the battery)
- Eneloop Pro: 2.5Ah x 1.2V x 8 = 24Wh

So combined you have 38Wh which is 2.7 times what a single EN-EL15 would do

[Bjørn Rørslett]

Frank: bad green colour is a sure sign PhotoNinja has inadequate profiles for D500. I experienced the same with Df the first half year or so.

[Frank Fremerey]

Not even close Frank 

Wh is Ah times the resting voltage of the battery, the latter is 1.2V for NiMH and 7.4V for Li-ion with two cells (just ignore the 7.0V mentioned on the EN-EL15).

So for the mentioned batteries the Wh is:
- EN-EL15: 1.9Ah x 7.4V = 14Wh (the correct Wh is mentioned on the back of the battery)
- Eneloop Pro: 2.5Ah x 1.2V x 8 = 24Wh

So combined you have 38Wh which is 2.7 times what a single EN-EL15 would do

I should stay away from math when I am tired
38Wh instead og 20 means I can shoot two consecutive days..

[Frank Fremerey]

Frank: bad green colour is a sure sign PhotoNinja has inadequate profiles for D500. I experienced the same with Df the first half year or so.

need a new profile or profiles.  But that is not the only issue. NX-D delivers all those beautiful fine details
PN cannot yet develop. Yesterday I did a group shot and can show later the  difference.

[Bjørn Rørslett]

As I ran my first batch of D500 NEFs through PhotoNinja, I can verify this converter isn't up to the challenge of dealing with D500 yet. I do have the slightly older version (1.25 I believe) which could explain some of the inferior results, but not all of them. I dislike the idea of splurging more money to Picturecode unless their product gets closer to the promised v.2, though. For now, I can do some internal tweaking in PN and/or use the jpgs if necessary.

Slowly getting closer to learn the camera. At least I managed to turn OFF the pesky Wi-Fi/NFC Snapbridge  "feature" in the menus and will ask my Nikon repair tech to decouple it internally if possible. The form factor of the D500 required a little bit of Dremel action on one of my GPS units from Foolography before it would seat itself correct. A few drops of silicone sealant completed the job. GPS is now working. I took some satisfaction in removing and throwing away the rubber covers for the front PC flash/10 pin terminal as well. I found an older L-bracket in my bins that fits adequately. Got an XQD Express Card adapter perfect to slide into the relevant  port of my Thinkpads. Thus I'm all set to play around with the camera and a lot of DX and FX lenses in the days ahead.

[Andrea B.]

Wow, that is a surprise, Bjørn. I'm quite happy with the D500 fotos which are converted in Photo Ninja.

[Frank Fremerey]

Bjørn: Which of the older L-brackets work???

AndreaB: I got some nice results from PN133c but the NX-D-results of the very same files smoke them all.

I will show the difference in the Scotland-Thread as soon as I find some minutes to do so.

[Andrea B.]

I'm using Photo Ninja 1.3.1b Everything looks good for D500.
To illustrate, I'll use a snapshot of the Loch Tay Lodge grounds which I made to show back home.

(1) This is the unedited JPG extracted from the raw NEF. It was resized to a 1200 pixel width. It may preserve some of the sharpening set in the Pic Control.

(2) This is a JPG made from the Photo Ninja conversion. In order to match the OOC JPG of #1, during that conversion I opened up the shadows a bit (Illum +5 & Shadows +.55) and increased contrast a bit (+10) and increased saturation (Plain +70, up from default +50). That's it. No sharpening was added during or after the conversion.

The extracted JPG looks pretty much like the converted JPG to me. The extracted JPG has slightly higher contrast, but that could be added to the conversion.

[Andrea B.]

I forgot to add that there is some distortion control and chromatic abberation control in the D500 JPG engine. Photo Ninja "loses" both of those correction during its conversion.

So if you layered these photos and diffed them, you would see that distortion correction show up. And you can see the aqua tint in some of the trees in the PN conversion due to uncorrected chromatic aberration. Photo Ninja does have a chrom abb tool, but I did not take the time. Don't hold that against PN, OK?? 



[On a side note here:  I feel slightly stupid for not being upgraded to PN 1.3.3c. Oh well.]
 

[Andrea B.]

I downloaded the old Photo Ninja 1.2.5. It gave me the exact same conversion as did 1.3.1b.
Bjørn, you must have had something set wrong???