- William Hunton
Oooh! I See Ghosts. (Part 2)
In my previous blog I posted that when I used the Nikon D3400 as a scanning solution for my film negatives, that I noticed ghosting around the edges of objects in the photograph. When I switched to my Nikon D7500 to copy the negatives, the ghosts went away.
I then decided to compare the D3400 “perp”, the one I used when I got the ghosts, to my second D3400. I bought these about the same time last year when I was ramping my photo business back up. I’d been invited out of my previous consulting job when business dried up. It was a long career anyway so I switched to my passion, photography.
Anyway, I have two Nikon D3400’s. The camera has a good reputation, and I use them as backups to my D7500. I photograph real estate, events, casual weddings, portraits, you name it. The D3400 with the Nikon 35mm f1.8 G lens is a remarkably lightweight camera combo, perfect for street photography too. So I couldn’t believe the camera was throwing the kind of error I saw in my negative scans, but it was there.
In the comparison test of the two D3400’s, I simplified my test steps. I set up a target – a literal target I got from a sporting goods store. I put D3400 #2, which I used for scanning on a tripod. I mounted my 60mm f2.8 Micro Nikkor. I set it to f8. The camera was on manual mode, ISO 100.
Here is the thing. I set D3400 #2 to JPEG Fine. For my scans, I always shot them in RAW, both on the D3400 and the D7500 (which scans perfectly). But for this series of tests I started with JPEG Fine.
I set the camera at 8 feet from the target and I made and exposure. Same magnification as in the previous post.
I think you can see there is no ghosting problem visible! Remember this is the same camera, same lens, everything the same except it is a JPEG Fine image and not RAW. The enlargement is about 10% of the image, at the upper right corner. I did not edit the image except set it to monochrome in case there was any color issues with the lens. (A 60mm Micro Nikkor has a superb reputation.)
Now I was really perplexed. So I took may “good” D3400, which I call D3400 #1, and I set up the test conditions exactly the same. Here is the exposure.
Both JPEG images look exactly the same!
Could it be the issue with the D3400 and scanning is with the RAW exposure?
Stay tuned sports fans.