I Like Nikon's 16-35mm f/4 Zoom!

One of the reasons why I switched away from my "generalist" lens, the AF-S DX VR Zoom-Nikkor 18 - 200 mm  super zoom was its tendency to produce heavy distortions at the wide angle end, see my post on super zoom lenses. I have since switched to a set of lenses, covering more than the 18 - 200 mm range super zoom. For the wide angle end, I'm now using the AF-S Nikkor 16 - 35 mm f/4G ED VR wide angle zoom lens.

This week I needed to take pictures of a piece of furniture (a bed) that I want to sell at an on-line auction (and I take some pride in documenting my auction items with good photographs). Unfortunately, that item was stored in pieces in our shed, so we had some extra work to do: Lea and I put the bed together in the little space that we had, we tried creating some white (whitish, maybe) "walls" / background using old linen, then I took my D300, the tripod and the 16 - 36 mm wide angle zoom lens — by squeezing myself into a corner and setting the focal length to 16 mm (24 mm full frame equivalent) I just managed to catch the object complete, though I was not able to keep the camera in a horizontal position, resulting in vertical lines converging towards the bottom. I could have used portrait format to avoid the tilting — but that caused strange shadows with the flash light, and due to the dark ceiling, indirect flashing did not produce the desired results (should add a reflector for indirect flashing, and/or a second flash, but — after all — this was just for a single on-line auction, so I did not want to invest more money than what I might eventually get back from the sale!). The result (raw image) is nothing to be proud of:

Furniture shot for auctioning, before processing
Nikon D300, Zoom-Nikkor 16 - 35mm f/4
ISO 200, f/5, 1/60, 16mm (24mm equiv.)

After doing some exposure correction, straightening and cropping in Aperture, the result looked as follows:

Furniture shot for auctioning, after cropping, contrast adjustment, etc.

Still nothing special, of course (I wish I had removed the carpet beforehand!), but — sort of — usable for an auction. I did want to remove the tilting / perspectivic distortion in order to have vertical lines; I did this in Photoshop:

Furniture shot for auctioning, after post-processing and geometry adjustment

There are plugins and third party software for perspective correction, but I normally just use the "Free Transform" in Photoshop: here I selected the entire canvas, pulled out the lower right corner horizontally until the rightmost lines were vertical, then I (horizontally) shifted inwards the upper left corner by the same amount (can easily be verified by ensuring that the picture retains the original width in the center). In this case, this second operation caused a "gap" in the upper left corner (as I did not want to cur the ladder) — this could easily be amended by stretching out parts of the unstructured background.

Still, the result is nothing to be proud of (the carpet is very disruptive, the background is amateurish at best), but at least it serves the purpose of showing the object in a half-way representative, undistorted view: auction photos in my opinion must be truthful (no photo surgery on the object itself) and show the true state of the object (I always add a meticulous verbal & verbose description), the rest (professional background, lighting, etc.) would be nice to have, but is not prerequisite (to the contrary: if auction photos are too professional, people might doubt whether they are representative for the object on sale!). Actually, the carpet & the background make it unlikely that others steal such images for their own purpose!

What I'm really getting at: I was very pleased to see that the result has no visible (pincushion or barrel) distortion — I'm sure the 18 - 200 mm super zoom would have driven me crazy with its barrel or (worse) moustache distortion at the widest angle setting! It also lacks 2 mm focal length at the wide angle end, so may have imposed further restrictions. OK, I only used the central portion of the image, where distortions are minimal anyway. Also, the 16 - 35 mm lens is a full frame lens: with a DX format sensor I'm only using the central part of the image circle, which probably helps further reducing residual distortions. On the other hand, on a full frame body I could have done the above shot with a mid-range zoom position (24 rather than 16 mm focal length), which would also have helped keeping distortions at a minimum.