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Well my request for presents for the next fews years are now taken.. Nikon have announced the D300 (I’ve a D100). See the initial summary at dppreview
I love the D100 – wonderful build quality and I’ve really got some good use from it. The D300 has some great advances over the D200. Noteably to me are 100% viewfinder, 12MP, auto focus that is way superior that the D100. UDMA CF cards, and HDMI video out could be useful.
Plus it has built in sensor cleaning… yes excellent.
Having just got some new lens and filters; no way will I be able to get a D300.. so perhaps Christmas 2009?
50 people experience the seasons, originally uploaded by flipzagging.
An absolutley stunning set of images – they are produced by combining 50 different pictures that represent the same topic. The texture of the photos is quite stunning. What I really like about these is that colours of the seasons really stand out well.
Well worth checking out!
Despite the threat of more rain, I ventured out this morning. Having spent much of yesturday inside, I very much wanted to get out side. Checking the BBC’s weather page this morning hinted that today would be notably better. The satelite pictures suggested that better weather was coming in from south-east.
Buoyed by a promising conclusion from the amateur meteorology, I headed for Broughton Down. A location I’ve wanted to visit for sometime, due to the tag of “the best views in Hampshire” from the Hampshire Wildlife Trust.
Following the HWT’s directions I got there eventually, although the car is now muddy and it’s suspension has less life in it. Walking past the burnt out shell of Ford Fiesta, I was not confident in that tag line. Nor did passing the supposed location of one of these view points. I sure it was a nice cornfield, if cornfields are your thing. After landing flat on my back after slipping on some exposed chalk, I had firmly removed “best views” from my thoughts.
Things started to look up, when I found that the actual view points where on the other side of the small wood I had walked down. Looking over across the village of Broughton, the countryside opened up. A small but pleasent chalk down with numerous low growing flowers, but without the usual butterflies that accompany such land. The weather at this time was turning bad so macro shots would have had me soaked, so I head into the woods. Some wonderful old knarled tress.
However whilst in there, the cloud started to break up giving some better light and I headed out again to the chalk down. The expanse of the flowers, much like bluebells looks like a great shot but capturing it is always difficult. A few shots with the 200mm looked promising; will attempt similar at a later date.
Time was now approaching lunchtime; the (virtually) unmarked track and that burnt out car had been at the back of my mind at the time. This seemed like farily remote and safe part of the test valley but was it? Plus I was hungry
Would I go back? Possibly, but I think I’d like to park in in Broughton, or similar go through the down on a walk to somewhere else.
Well finally a photo paper made from recycled components has been released. The GreenPix Photo Matte is the paper in question.
The only problem of course is that the paper is currently made in the US, so I would have to ship via a carrier across the atlantic. Now can I deliverably do this? Should I do this? What’s the carbon cost of air freight… (ps I don’t want to know)
This raises a great question – in that we really don’t know the full lifecycle of anything that we buy. The final product may have been assembled in the UK say, but where have the constinuent components come from. For example, one report suggests (also cited here) that buying roses from Kenya instead of from Holland will produce a fifth of the CO2. Essentially because of the fact that in Holland, the greenhouses will have to be heated.
There are other issues involved of course including work conditions in the various countries. Also it does raise the issue of should be get away from requirement to give roses early in the year. So can we move Valentine’s Day to later in the year so I can give truely English grown roses???
oh.. and I’m going to check where my Epson photo paper has been made!
I started using Flickr a while ago, and I’ve just upgraded to a pro account. I’ve not yet completely got it integrated into my photography workflow, but I’m getting there.
Some tools that certainly looked interesting.
Multiple Uploads from a watched directory. Perhaps I could now just set this to watch the portfolio directory that I have, and it would keep Flick updated
Picasa is a great local browser of images, but only set to go to Google’s own blog. Being able to blog from Picasa to Flickr looks attractive
Finally a very nicle way of showing Flickr hosted pictures on your own site!
I nearly didn’t get the R2400, for one very simple reason. It didn’t seem possible to do anything with the ink cartridges afterwards. You can collect from various places, bags to send used cartidges, from which some money for charity can be gained. What exactly the part that is worth something I don’t know. I would send mine to the Hawk Conservancy for example.
Most of these bags don’t accept Epson cartidges – so why not get an HP that could? Well when on Cartridges4Charity, they gave Epson’s address that I could send back the cartidges to the manufactuer. Epson on the phone confirmed this was the case.
So I will be sending them back – hopefuly they will be reused and not thrown away. Here’s the address
Service Materials Management (SMM)
EPSON Telford Ltd.
Hortonwood 40
Telford
Shropshire
TF1 7YD
http://cartridges4charity.co.uk/epsons.htm
We’ve just run a photography competition at work. The winning picture was an infra-red shot. This really stood out and was absolutely wonderful. Sadly the picture isn’t available on a public site, so Ican’t point at it, but it got me thinking!
Could you do infra-red with digital? The answer appears to be ‘yes’ so I’m going to have a go! I’ve a D100, and the process looks very straightforward. Just need to get the IR filter for the camera. Probably going to go with the wideangle lens, as general views seem to produce the best images.
A good selection if IR images shows up some of what can be done.
Indeed it appears that not only IR but UV is possible!
Additional Links
- Warehouse Express page for Hoya Filters. (R72)
The Epson R2400 is a great printer, but has two different main black inks – Photo (i.e. glossy) and Matte. I got my printer profile today, and wanted to try it out. Sadly I had just swapped on to the matte inks, so had to switch back.
Of course the printer driver didn’t spot I had swapped the ink cartridges so the list of papers was. Well internet to the rescue againg…. solution is here. Go into the Epson ink levels utility, click about a bit, and things work.
Really annoying!!
20070306-0037, originally uploaded by Calanais.
Camera: D100
Lens: Nikon 18-70mm @ 29mm
Exposure:f9 @ 1/640s ISO 200
Post Process: Capture One Raw Conversion, Photoshop Level correction
Location: The Circle, Bath, UK
This circle of houses in Bath is very striking architecturally, even more so as the frontage of all the properties have been kept the same.
This appealed to me purely from the symmetry, the challenge being that it was impossible to show the entire circle, so I need to communicate a sense of whole but only showing a very limited part.
(submitted to the Developing Vision and Style project)
So what tools do I use for various photographic jobs:
- I take RAW images from the D100. These have been processed in Phase One’s Capture One LE. Pretty good and very reasonably priced. It does all I can ask of it for RAW processing. No library features, and is a straight RAW editor. Has a very good feature to do a rough conversion to jpg. Very useful when the wife wants to see what pictures I’ve taken.
- Recently though I have started to use the Adobe Lightroom, just coming out of beta now, this has a very good interface. Browsing images is very nice, and can work not just with RAW but other formats we well. Not quite got to grips with the curves here, and I think it needs some reasonably procesing power.Capture One seems better at doing bulk image handling. No difference in output quality as far as I can see.
- Image manipulation, and I only do very basic stuff realy was done in Photoshop Elements 2. Now that I use Lightroom/Capture One, all that Elments does is to crop, rotate, compression of JPGs for web use, and converting formats.Elements 2 is missing 16bit support, plus curves and the channel mixer. Something that is offered by Earthbound Light
- Recently I was given as a present PaintShopPro X. Not used this a lot, but is looking good. I need to adapt from the Photoshop terminology and interfaces.
- For output, I use QImage. A great little program for solely printing. It’s interface does take some getting used to, but after that it is great for getting things exactly where you want them, and the exact size. Please do work with this program and read the tutorials. Not be put off by the interface!
- For catloging images, and keeping a track of what I’ve got IMatch DB is great. Nothing else quite comes close; it has the ability to handle a massive collection of images. Plus it handles the ability to take a set of images, say from one shoot and move them to offline storage.
- I will confess that I am also now using Picasa to browse the images that are on my harddrive. It is set to only look at the RAW images, so it is great for looking at my recent work. It is fast and slick. Also it is great for other members of the family to browse the images I have recently taken.
- Some landscapes really do have to be taken with a panorama to do them justice. Not having a X-Pan to hand I use Panorama Factory – A great program that produces some stunning results
- To produce DVD images, ProShowGold is pretty good.Very easy to use, and work through. Have found a couple of defects in this, and it doesn’t have short-keys for the functions. Means a lot of mouse use for a large presentation, but the options within it are unrivaled.
- For web galleries JAlbum is brilliant. It has produce mh-white.com for example. It is very easy to use and has some great submitted skins for to generate some good sites.
- Flickr is now starting to appear in my list of tools (look up Calanais as a user and that’s me)
Any planned changes? Well Paint Shop Pro may well take over from Elements. I have tried to use GIMP, with the Photoshop look and feel. But it just not worked for me. Picutre Window Pro was looking promising, but never got the time to do it justice.
