I did a little wide angle horse trading a few months ago. Sold
my Nikon 12-24mm zoom on eBay and purchased a Sigma 12-24mm
zoom with virtually the same features as the Nikon. The
Sigma’s about an inch shorter, including its built-in lens
shade, weighs a few ounces less, and naturally, costs a few
hundred dollars less.
Mounted on my Nikon D100, the lens gives
me equivalent 18-36mm coverage and I’ve found it extremely
useful. The Nikon 12-24 is designed specifically for digital
cameras and covers only the D-series image size.
So I was truly amazed when a few days
ago, a friend wanted to see the lens and mounted it on his
Nikon F-5. The Sigma covers the full 35mm frame! The idea of a
12mm lens for full-frame Nikons, Canons, Pentaxes, Minoltas
and of course, Sigmas, is startling, especially when you
consider the cost of any wide angle near that range.
•••
Mac users get pretty complacent with their built-in Google
search in systems Jaguar and Panther. A month ago, David Pogue
of the New York Times, wrote a column about Google and its
many features. And so, I went to the Google home page instead
of using my Safari browser search box and tried out Google
Images, a truly wonderful tool. Search for nearly any subject
and Google will return images that fall under that category in
a world of websites. For instance, I’m working on my newest
novel and wanted to know exactly what a flatboat looked like.
GI returned 164 hits in .11 seconds with all manner of
drawings, etchings and even a few photographs of flatboats.
Next, I Google-Imaged my name. Jim Patterson resulted in 696
hits in .08 seconds — all kinds of Jim Pattersons but it
wasn’t until page 5 when I found something familiar: a story
and pictures of Quebec City from the Toronto Sun. Next to it
is another of my images, this one from the website of Sculptor
Hal Stowers. Google Image is an excellent tool for
researchers, writers and photographers.
•••
Nikon is joining the competition in the
portable storage device market with its coming Nikon
Coolwalker, a 30-gig hard drive with a 2.5 inch viewing screen
and port for CompactFlash cards (and others with optional
adapters). The Coolwalker will come with what looks like
user-friendlier software than my FlashTrax but will
essentially perform the same functions. With an estimated
price of $700+, the Coolwalker’s success will depend greatly
upon image viewing quality and software ease of use. The
device is expected to ship at mid-year.
•••
Finally, DxO Optics Pro, is about to
ship from DO Labs, which introduced the revolutionary software
product at PMA. Using digital camera profiles, the Optics Pro
engine will automatically correct for distortion, chromatic
aberrations, vignetting and apparent sharpness, depending upon
the profile of a specific lens. The DxO will originally ship
with camera profiles for Canon, Nikon D, Fuji, Olympus E1,
Pentax *istD, and Kodak DCS Pro 14n with a variety of branded
lenses. Additional lens profiles will be available in the
coming months. Eight-bit JPG will be the first format offered
and will be followed in RAW 16bit mode.