technical difficulties
So many pictures to share—though far less than there might have been—and I’m already through 1/4 of the days? I need to get to sharing!
But first, a problem to note.
I pressed the shutter button on the D7000/Nikkor 28-105 D combo close to 400 times while I was in Costa Rica. Admittedly, that’s not much, but 1) I was working and 2) the D7000 is a bit big and I lack the confidence to go shooting with it alone in public.
Of those 400 shutter presses, about 50 were shots of the new team there. I was all excited to share the new team there with the old timers here, but alas: the left side of the frame is progressively out of focus compared to the center. This is a big problem when shooting group portraits.
Most of the rest were at the Sanatorio Durán, an abandoned sanatorium that is now a bit of a regional tourist/family outing/boy scout campout/spooky late-night teenage hangout type place. Everything shot there came out just too contrasty, or required too much work to process, or was just hackneyed shots of beautiful decay.
That, and the left side of the frame was more or less out of focus on every shot.
See, for example, this picture:
(I’ve made no edits to this bad picture beyond bringing it into Lightroom 5 and exporting a jpeg for the blog.)
The focus is not spot on anywhere, but check this, of the flowers just to the right of the entrance:
Not spot-on, but sharp enough, more or less.
Contrast with these flowers, from just to the left of the door:
What’s going on here?
EXIF for this shot: 1/500th (AP mode) at f/8, ISO100, 28mm (42 equivalent).
Whatever it is, it plagued every shot I took in Costa Rica. More testing is required, but it seems to be an issue with this lens only, which is a real shame, since it forms an integral part of the Scan-O-Matic 7000 mk 2, and I’ve praised its sharpness in the past.
Maybe it was off all along, but my usual composition style hid it. If so, I’m past the 180 day warranty period with KEH, so it looks like I’ll be researching lens repair options. Fun times, lucky me, and Alhamdulillah.
Anyway, the focus errors mean that I ended up with about 400 pictures that I probably won’t share because the focus is bad, but that I’ll likely keep most of to jog some memories. It also means I didn’t get good shots of the new crew. Sorry everyone!
