Chinatown, Sydney

@ally (:: Oh, you're around again Ally! I'll come and check your page out in a minute. This is only one little bit of Sydney's chinatown, although I must admit that it's pretty small. The main part is basically just one walk through city block, although it does spread out to the surrounding streets, somewhat.

@Mandy: Thanks, Mandy. I guess it all depends what you want or need, but I can tell you that after that first experience of walking around last night, shooting with total freedom in low light, I would never go back to using a lens for general photography without a stabilizer. You would have the choice of either buying the Sigma with a Nikon mount, or getting the similar Nikon lens that also has a stabilizer. If I were you, I'd do some searches on Google for lens reviews/tests on both of these, although I can recommend the Sigma for sure. You wll have to deal with some barrel distortion, but that would be the same for all zooms -- even shorter ones. I take care of that when it's noticeable with the lens correction filter in Photoshop.

PS. I could have gone down to at least 1/8th of a second, and maybe even to a 1/4. I just didn't think of it at the time. It's going to take a while to get used to these new "rules".

@Kristina: You've raised an interesting point here, Kristina, because when I compare this sharpened uploaded version of the photo that you see on aminus3 with the full size original, shot as RAW 8 megapixel and converted to TIFF, I see that the latter is quite a bit sharper looking, even though it's not been sharpened for upload. I'm viewing this shrunk to fit my 15.4" supersharp wide laptop screen. The resized sharpened jpeg I uploaded still looks just as sharp on my screen. Here, I'm refering to it before aminus3 shrunk it to their maximum width.

I hadn't thought about this before, just accepting things the way they were, but I'm now thinking that it would be better use 800 pixels as the maximum width when resizing, as I see now that this is the limit on aminus3 . I'm guessing that this would solve the problem. I hope so, anyway.

There seems to be no other explanation for this problem. I'm going to contact aminus3 support about it. Then I'll update this message.

I should say, though, that although they are not originally really as soft as they appear here, this one probably lacks sufficient depth of field to have the foreground diners as sharp as the signs in the background. Even so, I'm quite happy with the result as I see it in the original.

UPDATE:
I've just realised that uploads in portrait orientation are not reduced in quality as they are not resized from my uploads which I've already resized to 760 pixels in height. This is even though they are reduced to less than 200kb from my 400-500kb jpegs.

@Kristina: Sorry, Kristina, I added an update to my reply to you, above, before i noticed you'd written again.

The reason that the version of the photo resised on upload by aminus3 is less sharp can only be because of their resizing method. When you alter a jpeg and resave it you lose quality (unless you have some way to compensate for this) and that's what's happening here -- and I don't like it at all!

Have to think about all these issues a bit more...

@Kristina: Thanks for your thoughts on this. All I can say is that I've checked a number of my landscape mode posts and compared them to the pre uploaded versions, and in every case, the latter appear sharper.