I was out this afternoon doing a bit of field work for my upcoming review of the 1 Nikon 10-100 mm f/4-5.6 zoom lens. I was close to finishing up for the day at Dufferin Islands and came upon some small water features that I thought may have some promise as ‘smooth water’ subjects. I had neglected to bring any variable neutral density filters with me, and since I had left my tripod in the car I thought I’d use the opportunity to do a bit of an experiment. I had my 1 Nikon 10-100 mm f/4.5-5.6 PD zoom with me, along with the 10-100 mm f/4-5.6 review sample that Nikon Canada had arranged. Shooting 1 Nikon 10-100 mm lenses at f/16 is something I hadn’t purposely tried before so I thought I’d give it a whirl.

All of the images in this article were shot hand-held at fairly slow shutter speeds. Let’s start with a couple of images taken with the 1 Nikon 10-100 mm f/4-5.6 non-PD zoom lens.

NOTE: Click on images to enlarge.

I used my standard work flow for all of the images in this article (DxO OpticsPro 10, CS6, Nik Suite).

The two images above were the best I was able to get from over 50 attempts with the 1 Nikon 10-100 mm f/4-5.6 zoom lens.

Obviously when shooting a small sensor camera like a Nikon 1 V2 at f/16 I wasn’t expecting my images to be tack sharp due to the effects of diffraction. All I was hoping for was to get a few, usable images from the experiment.

Overall, the 1 Nikon 10-100 mm f/4.5-5.6 PD zoom outperformed the 10-100 mm f/4-5.6 non-PD lens by a fair margin, as it captured the majority of my usable images. I’m not sure if that was due to the increased sharpness of the PD lens or the effectiveness of its VR, or both. Let’s have a look at a few images taken with the 1 Nikon 10-100 mm PD zoom.

I found that I could successfully shoot the PD-version of the 10-100 mm at slower shutter speeds than was the case with the non-PD lens.

Using the power zoom on the 10-100 mm PD lens to compose my images did not cause any issues at all in terms of achieving the exact framing I wanted.

Here’s an image taken at 1/4 second with the PD-zoom fully extended.

And, this final photograph is the one I consider to be the best image from my experiment – shot hand-held at 1/2 second with the PD-zoom.

As photographers we all try our utmost to capture good quality images, given the shooting conditions and the gear that we have at our disposal. Without any question if I would have used a variable neutral density filter, tripod, and shot these images at f/5.6 rather than f/16 they all would have been much better.

My experiment shooting at f/16 reinforced the idea that we sometimes need to break the rules to create an image when we don’t have the ideal gear with us. The result may be far from perfect, but capturing a usable image is much better than no image at all.

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Article and all images Copyright Thomas Stirr. All rights reserved. No use, duplication of any kind, or adaptation is allowed without written consent.