Do Nikon teleconverters work on the Sigma 105 macro?

In a word:  no.  And not just “they’re unsupported”, or that they have optical issues – they physically will not connect.  They are deliberately keyed to be incompatible.  Nikon teleconverters have a protrusion on their lens mount, which prevents any ‘standard’ Nikon-mount lens from attaching, unless that lens is missing a particular obstruction on the rear… Read more

Thoughts on the Nikon 600 f/4D ED-IF on a D7100

Soft wide open.  Likes to make everything glow like you’re on the set of The Bold and the Beautiful. Never particularly sharp even when stopped down. Over-exposes by exactly one stop when stopped down by one stop (i.e. to f/5.6) or more. Note that the AF-S 200-400 VR also does exactly the same thing.  I’m currently… Read more

Df burst rates varying by card

The contenders I chose not to test as many cards as last time, when I tested the D7100.  Partly because I hope that anyone spending the money on a Nikon Df is using a good quality card to go with it, and partly because the initial results made it fairly clear that performance correlates between the… Read more

D7100 burst rates varying by SD card

The contenders SanDisk Extreme Pro 95 MB/s 32 GiB SanDisk Extreme Plus 80 MB/s 32 GiB SanDisk Extreme 45 MB/s 16 GiB SanDisk Ultra 30 MB/s 16 GiB Lexar Professional 600x 128 GiB Maxell MaxData 16 GiB SanDisk Ultra MicroSD 64 GiB Samsung MicroSD 32 GiB Note that the last two are MicroSD cards, not regular SD… Read more

The death of Aperture

I wish I were surprised even a little. I look forward to seeing how comically under-powered “Photos” is in comparison. I hope Adobe actually fix Lightroom enough to be usable, and add support for importing Aperture libraries. Though I’m not holding my breath. I’d prefer that someone actually develop a good professional photo management and… Read more

Swift[ly crashes]

Finally got around to trying out Swift today.  Literally within thirty seconds of actually writing code, it started crashing the Swift compiler.  And almost anything I could come up with crashed it.  In fact, I spent about an hour just trying to figure out how to create an NSDirectoryEnumerator without crashing the compiler, before just… Read more

Time Machine gets stuck on downloads

Evidently, when Time Machine encounters a file that’s open and being written to (e.g. a Safari download), it sits and watches the file, periodically copying the new data to the backup.  As opposed to going off and copying everything else first, and then coming back to the open file. This has the lovely effect that… Read more