Recurring common problem

[Seesee]

OK, I'm a bit fed up with getting CA and various fringing on some of my pix, in particular birds in flight. It's common on most of my longer reach lenses including and and often on my Nikon 80-200 f 2.8 AF ED. Is it my technique, the lens or the D50, or all and can anyone give me some tips on how to avoid it. It's often difficult enough to get birds in flight shots, and even more frustrating to get home and find defects like CA and fringing.....see pictures

The Nikon 80-200 is supposed to be a Pro grade lens, so it must be me or my camera body......any thoughts .

[arthurking83]

CA is a problem with the 80-200mm!
Alwasy has been, but it gets worse at smaller apertures! ????? yep it's true!

f/2.8 to f/4 seem to be around about the best apertures for minimising it.

Capture NX does an auto CA removal/minimisation becasue it recognises the camera body and lens!.... so you will see less of it(even though it's still there, if that makes sense!)

With PS, you have to manually go to 'lens correction tools' to manual adjust sliders to remove it.

[I @ M]

Col, my non expert opinion on CA is that it is more a function of lenses than camera bodies. In all the articles / reviews I have read regarding lenses the handling of CA's seems to be determined by the build quality and the specific coatings applied to the particular lens. Everything I have seen indicates that even with a good quality lens, if the subject matter involves a high contrast situation that some fringing will occur and the amount seems to be determined by either the contrasting colours or the aperture in use at the time. Stopping down in many cases will usually remove some of the problems.
The worst examples I see with CA's in any of my shots usually involve trees or wood against the sky and using Capture NX to process the files is interesting to watch it disappear as the file is rendered when opened.
I wouldn't be in a hurry to blame the camera any more than any other model / brand and from memory the D300 has built in abberation controls in its processor to reduce the effect.

[Seesee]

Cheers and thanks, guess I may just have to live with it and delete more lol

Agree it seems more common on contrasting images like bright skies, foliage etc
but the frustrating thing is it's inconsistant ? For example the pictures in this thread were taken at the same time and settings as my Heron shots using my speedlight in the birds heading, taken against the same kind of bright sky, yet the Heron shots seem CA free.
Cant afford to be buying a new editing program like Capture NX, guess I'll just have to come to terms with the fact some shots just dont work

[ving]

ah good old CA, my dear enemy...

you will either have to manually remove it as arthur sugested of get a lens that doesnt do it...
I believe the 80-200 is getting a bit old now, so the newer lenses may not be as bad....

doesnt help tho does it?

[arthurking83]

With Nikon lenses ED is the trick!

More = merrier and supposedly does a better job.
I think Nano crystal coatings are supposed to help.

But as an example with Nikon.. 80-200/2.8 has 3(but in two groups) ED lenses... 70-200/2.8VR has 5(but in 3 groups).

Guess which one is better?

[ving]

the 80-200?

just kidding!

guess which one is more expensive?

[Seesee]

Yep and sadly it's price that is going to dictate whether I endure {dramitic wording lol } a bit of CA from time to time, an extra $1000.00 or more for the 70-200 VR is a lot of extra bucks for only a bit extra functionality.....I'll suffer with it, it doesn't really matter anyway in the long run eh