Good lord, I forgot to post any pictures from the 2007 Wings of Hope Air Show here. I was there in a press capacity and fulfilled obligations to get images to the folks that I was shooting for, but never got my sampler out here for comment.
Please go take a look and let me know what you think.
As anyone can tell, I have an Amazon Associates store that I have connected to my blog. That way when I review something, and you, the reader, are sooo compelled that you must buy it RIGHT NOW, you can. So when I saw that Amazon was offering context ads, I thought I would give it a try.
You need to have an Amazon Associates store to begin with. If you have one, go to your familiar “Build Links” section and choose “Context Links (Beta).” You’ll be given a little javascript to add to the footer of your site. It will then spider your content and turn phrases into links all on it’s own. Pretty sweet if you want to be a lazy salesperson.
Lets give it a try. . .
Hormel Chili makes me gassy but tastes good, I guess. I’ve never really had it. I like to use Adobe Bridge on my work Mac Book Pro, I wish I could get a Mac Pro for home, part of the reason I have ads, to generate money for toys. I like Lego, right now I’m into the Lego Castle theme, I just bought a few Lego 7090 sets so I could get extra knights and skeletons. I love my Nikon D40, theres a D40x but even though it offers more mega pixels, it lacks some crucial features.
O.K. that was almost as bad as an episode of The Price is Right. I feel dirty.
While on vacation, I finally had a chance to do a little project I had been planning for a while. A few months ago I got the UCS Lego Batmobile (Set 7784) for about a third of msrp. I had also been playing with Nikon Camera Control for a little while and had been trying to think of a cool time-lapse project. I decided to bring the set with me in the event of a day on vacation that we decided to just take it easy, and sure enough one of those came along. The result is below, though it looks like google video made the images a bit crummy.
For anyone that hasn’t done this type of thing before, it’s pretty simple, at least at this amateur hour level of quality. You’ll need some way of controlling the camera. This could be done manually, or in my case I used Nikon Camera Control Pro Software for Windows and Mac
You’ll also need a tripod. I set mine up so it looked down at the table roughly at a 45 degree angle. This gave me a trapezoidal view of my building area. I marked my boundaries with masking tape, which mostly matched the color of the table. This way I knew what would be captured and what would not. Important for keeping the bottle of beer off screen as you work. ;-) Finally, when the capture process was complete, I batch resized my images (while preserving the originals) with Adobe Fireworks to a size more appropriate for DV video size (720×480) then imported the files to Adobe Premiere as an ordered sequence. Finally export your movie and thats it!
If you don’t have Premiere, you could use either Windows Movie Maker, or iMovie depending on your platform. Sorry Linux Folks, don’t know what you have available, but I bet there’s lots of it.
The process was smooth, and a great proof of concept of doing time lapse. I did find however it is a power consuming process. Over the 2-3 hour process of shooting a frame every 2 minutes I drained a mostly filled battery. Which means, to do a full day project you would need the AC adapter for your camera.
As for the build, it was fun! The Batmobile was very cool. A lot of neat details, the one thing I was upset about was the lack of steering. The front wheels drive the gears that simulate an engine, while the steering wheel raises and lowers the front armor over the turbine intakes. There were also a lot of great parts in the set. Lots of roof pieces and wedges that could be used in castles or other vehicles. For now it’s still one of the few assembled sets in my house. We’ll see how long it stays together. To have lasted this long is a feat for sure.
Short and sweet. Raw update 3.7 for Photoshop CS2 now includes the D40.
Narrator:And there was much rejoicing.
Monks:[Sullenly] Ya
http://www.adobe.com/uk/products/photoshop/cameraraw.html
For Windoze go to C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\Plug-Ins\CS2\File Formats.
backup the original file and put the new one in place.
Or download updates through the help menu.
I’ve been holding out on everyone. Just over a week ago I wandered into Rivers Camera in Dover to pick up something I had ordered, and there, on the shelf was the highly sought out 70-300 AF-S with VR. I’ve been watching this lens slowly hit “In Stock” status and disappear very quickly at all the usual places online. I tentatively asked if it was just a pretty box on the shelf, or if it truly were the 70-300 in stock. The reply was, “Sure is, its the last of three we got from Nikon. Want a look?” YES!
I begin a nature photography class tomorrow, and since I got the lens just over a week ago I’ve been prowling our yard, the U.N.H. campus, and anywhere else I suspect wildlife to be hanging out. I’ve been having so much fun shooting with the lens that it’s taken me this long to sit down and finally write a short review. I’m not going to get in to a lot of technical detail. Others much more qualified have already done that. Rather, I’ll take the approach of posting some of my favorite photos I’ve taken with it over the last week.
Anyone that knows what it’s like to handhold a telephoto out to 300mm will know that without VR, none of these images would have been free of camera shake. I have yet to mount this and my camera on a tripod to make any images. The VR (vibration reduction) is simply amazing. It detects when you are panning and stabilizes, it detects plain old wiggle, and stabilizes. Its just AWESOME.
The only downfall of this lens is that wide angle stops at 70mm. If your looking for a do it all lens, look at the 18-200 with it’s excellent reviews. If your more into trying to convince that blue bird not to fly away just long enough to get a beauty shot, keep the extra 100mm and save about $300.
And now, the photos. I won’t post all here, you’ll have to go to a small sample gallery I put together to see them all.
I’m a geek, when I hear something out of the norm in the sky, I go running. Now I do so with camera in hand. Both of these went over Sunday morning. The red one is my favorite picture of this weekend. I think it’s the colors and just enough spin to the blades that it doesn’t look awkward like the Huey.
Two of four Bluebirds at Adam’s point Sunday. These little guys and gals seemed happy to keep their distance and let you photograph them. Get too close and they flew a bit away. There are more samples of this fine species in the gallery, have a look. I even got all 4 of them in the same tree hanging out and one point.
Bokeh, or how the lens renders out of focus areas is superb. These two photos, though not technically astounding, can speak to that.
There’s more in the gallery, have a look. There’s some ducks and geese a blue jay, and others. I’ve saved some gems for the gallery so you won’t be disappointed.
I love happy accidents. When they happen, you think wow, why didn’t I think of purposely doing that. While playing with lighting last night I accidentally hit the zoom ring on my lens. What came out of it was a pretty badly ghosted image, but it showed potential. Now, I’m sure I’ve seen this technique before, so I know I’m not bringing anything wild and new to the world of photography, however it did look neat and was kind of fun to try to get right.
Basically, I threw my camera on a tripod, turned out all the lights except what remains on our Christmas tree and set the shutter speed to a second or two. Once I released the shutter, I let the focal length sit for a ‘second, then twisted the controls to zoom in on the tree. After a lot of experimenting, with how fast, how much, etc, I accomplished an effect that looked like the tree exploding from the center, or the lights shooting out like lasers while the rest of the room looks blurry, but normal.
Shown here is my personal favorite. It links to a gallery of 4, which I may add the other experiments later, but I think these sum up about 40-50 pictures well.
I’m not a morning person. Don’t even bother talking to me about anything, unless it’s work related and I’m at work, before I have at least a cup of coffee. That’s what makes this a little more amazing to me. In a lull in the Christmas morning festivities, I happened to look over at my cup of coffee I had just poured and captured a few great pictures of steam. I like this one the most because in some ways it resembles a Greek column or an explosion.
I shot several different pictures with different framing, but the 4 in the gallery I uploaded, IMO, are the best. I guess this had to have been my second cup. I shot this with my brand new shiny Nikon D40. With my old point and shoot, this would have been impossible to capture. In fact, I had a lot of fun with my camera over the week. I ended up with roughly 1.6 gigs of photos in ~3meg jpg format.
Most if not all was family stuff, a lot of candids. In that is a lot of fat that can be trimmed. Learning to photograph two nieces as they run around and play in poor lighting without flash ends up in a lot of blurred images. I also experimented more with some astrophotography, which I’ll post soon. It’s amazing what the naked eye can’t see until you throw in a 30 second exposure.
Until next time, I hope everyone had a safe and happy holiday.
For this review, I took a few photos for comparison with the D40 and the D70. I set up a tripod roughly 80 inches from our Christmas tree and cycled through the zoom levels on each lens. I set both cameras to auto mode, allowing each camera to take the picture as it wishes, which for both cameras meant automatically popping up their flashes and taking control of aperture and ISO equivalent settings. Because there is currently no way to open the raw NEF files from the D40 in Photoshop, I set both cameras to write jpg files at the “fine” setting. So really, what we have, is the typical user settings. So enough with the talk eh? Lets take a look at the photos.
Because of differences in the lenses, I had to settle for close enough to the same. The zoomed in photos will be at 50mm for the D40 and 55mm for the D70. The other photos are both at 35mm. For the photos, the D40 decided that an ISO equivalent of 400 was good, while the 70 chose to shoot at 200. Both cameras went with 1/60s shutter speeds. Below is the D40 shooting at 35mm, f/4.8.
The next photo is the D70 at the same distance and focal length which ended up shooting at f/4.2
As you can see the exposure is a bit more washed out on the D40, but not enough so that the picture looks bad. The D70 is a bit darker and subsequently you could bring more out in Photoshop, but to snap a pic and dump to print I think the D40 might be the better choice. Lets zoom in and take a look.
The D40 at 50mm f/5.6 still looks pretty good. As does the D70 at 55mm f/4.5(below). The D40 still ends up a little washed out, but I’m not a fan of flash on camera anyway, and will always try to shoot without flash first. If you have to use a flash, diffuse it, or better yet use a flash like the SB-800 so you can reflect it of the ceiling or wall to keep your image from showing signs of harsh shadow and flattening of detail.
The following are cropped from the original size jpegs at 100%. I still needed to re-size them to make them fit in this blog’s framework. It should however, show the detail available from a mere 6.1 megapixels. Again, the D40 followed by the D70, crops taken from the center of the focal area.
Both of these are from the 50/55mm pictures taken roughly 7ft away at night under typical lighting conditions. (That means no strobes, and no extra lighting for these pictures. With just a little more detail you would be able to tell from the two whit stripes on the bottom of the needles that that indeed is a Balsam Fir. These final two are from upper left corners of the image. Note the D40 stays sharp, where the D70 does not. Now this is most likely due to aperture or something, and if I had bothered to manually set stuff it probably wouldn’t happen. However, except for using a tripod for control of distance and subject, I’m shooting these as a general user would.
Now I know it’s hard to tell from 400px wide images, so go get yourself a look at the directories with the original photos. The D40 here and the D70 here. For fun, you can find two photos from Ye Olde Coolpix as well. They are less then impressive.
I uploaded the full-size photos with no resizing in these directories, so make sure when you look at one individually click on the link (3008×2000) to see the full size image. So what does this all add up to? When I printed basic quality jpegs from the D70 (I was shooting in Raw+Basic) I was able to take those basic quality jpgs pop them directly into my father’s Epson r500 and print them up with AMAZING quality. The same should be the case with the 40, but I have not yet had an event worth printing from. My friends in photo say that a 6.1 megapixels should be able to easily print up to 20″ without having to first run any fractal software, and even larger with some processing. So who out there (besides the occasional great shot, or pros) is printing larger then 8×10? If your the average user, forget chasing megapixels and go with a camera that you can afford and spend your hard earned money on more glass and a good flash for your camera. But don’t take it from me, read “The Megapixel Myth” article written by a pro.
One of the interesting features of the D40 is it’s display of settings like shutter speed and aperture. Above you can see a close-up of the screen. For the photo, I set the camera into aperture priority mode. This means I can set how much light is allowed in through the lens. The left concentric circles both illustrate the shutter speed and aperture. In the outer circle we see the shutter speed and in the inner circle we see how open the aperture is. In the picture below, I closed the aperture up and it will help illustrate how the display changes.
As we can see, when we allow the camera to control everything except the aperture, it automatically adjusts the shutter speed, and thus the display shows a graphical representation of the settings. This isn’t the only time the camera helps you out. With a simple push of the help button, it will explain what a setting is, what the mode means, or even prompt you if the current settings might result in an underexposed image.
What you see in these few pictures is a small portion of help that can and will be displayed at a push of a button. There’s a lot more to find, and as I work more with the camera I’ll keep you posted on anything of interest. Next time, I’ll discuss the real truth about mega-pixels, and why 6.1megapixels is more then enough for 80% of people. I’ll also share some photos as examples that simulate real world scenarios for those of us without fancy lighting equipment.
Let me start off by saying, I am not a professional photographer. Or for some of you, that’s request.getParameter(“Mike”) != “Pro Photographer”. (BTW, I know that’s not a correct string comparison, so don’t write me.) In college I majored in New Media, with a focus in web development. That offered me the unique opportunity to experience classes in art, photography, digital video and of course web development. In my photojournalism I learned the basics, flash on camera is bad, mmmkay (w/ exceptions like fill flash), fill the frame, etc. But when it comes to photography, at this stage in the game, I’m a prosumer. Granted I have my coworkers in photo services at my disposal for questions, which puts me at an unfair advantage to most. But the prosumer angle is the angle I’m taking when I write anything about my camera, it’s ease of use, or it’s picture quality.
The D40 is small and light, or as one pro said, “cute.” Despite my testosterone telling me, no gadget should be declared cute, I humbly agree. It’s much smaller in size then ‘more professional’ models. At left you can see it side-by-side with a friend’s D70.
Please note however, that the D70 in question also has a larger, faster lens then the D40 with it’s kit lens. However, the body itself is still much smaller, and the kit lens is also smaller and lighter in weight, but a bit slower due to smaller diameter glass and smaller range in aperture.
Despite the D40 being smaller, it still packs a lot of punch, and offers some feature’s from it’s big brothers and sisters. For instance at right, you can see the drastically larger LCD pulled from the D80 which almost dwarfs the rest of the camera body when looking at it from behind. When looking at it from the top, you’ll also note that the status LCD, familiar to those of us that used modern film SLRs, is missing from the D40, which is a departure from the styling of the D70 and the majority of Nikon’s dSLRs. Don’t worry though, this information can be prompted to display on the LCD, and in some ways, offers the information in a much more understandable fashion. More to come on that, in a later write up.
The only drawback I find from the physical size of the camera however, is a lack of space for my pinky.
I apologize for the pics, these were taken with me holding my D40 in front of the D70 on a tripod, in an attempt to show my hand size compared to the camera body. What you can see however, is that without squeezing all my fingers together, my pinky is bumped off the camera body where it is left to it’s own devices to find a place to hang out. I don’t find this a major drawback, as I have medium size hands, but anyone with larger hands should try holding the camera for a while before buying it.
Overall, I rate it’s size as a selling point. As a prosumer, I won’t be conducting multi-hour photo shoots. I’ll be looking to be able to compactly pack this camera to go on vacations, kayaking and to family gatherings, where I don’t want a huge, heavy camera getting in the way.
In my next review, I’ll look at some of the features of the D40, including it’s built in help system and graphic representation of settings.
