All of the tips and tricks of photography I’ve learnt that are fit to print!
But we certainly didn't have any problems with shooting it! Any decent lens will do to really get the colours of the flame to pop...were I shooting on a DSLR, I'd likely have the 50mm f/1.4 lens at hand. That f/1.4 aperture is huge...so large that I can shoot that lens in total darkness without using the flash! But in this case, these all came from the back camera of an iPhone. The technology is…
The last picture shows the eight logical CPUs (four physical cores and Intel's Hyperthreading means each core appears as two CPUs) during a big export of a little over 2,000 pictures from the recent photo shoot at the Gilbert Theatre. Maleficent blasted through that export roughly five times faster than Callisto would have and that was with the virus scanner actively scanning the hard drive at the same time dramatically slowing down the machine's performance.…
Originally, my eye was caught by the contrails of an Airbus A320 passing overhead but when the hawk decided they wanted to come round and play...well, who am I to refuse? All of these were shot on the D810 with the 300mm f/4 lens. The tricky bit of these shots is keeping the bird that is randomly flying round visible in the viewfinder and getting the autofocus to lock on properly. In situations like this…
The time of great change is finally upon us with the arrival of a new laptop to replace the nearly six year-old current laptop that is finally starting to show its age. Laptops by their nature tend to be evil with all of the hardware crammed into an itty bitty space and this new one actually embraces it. The naming scheme of laptops in this house is always for evil characters and thus the name…
Here's yet another gallery featuring the 105mm f/2.8 Micro-Nikkor lens, this time playing with a lizard that is holding onto a branch of one of the Japanese Maples in front of the house. I love how the lens really shows you the details of the scales that is breathtakingly sharp! :)
Today I did my first real wedding photo shoot at the Cape Fear Botanical Gardens...the same place I had scouted a week ago with my sister Meghann. The wedding was for her boss Robyne at the Gilbert Theatre and it was a wonderful ceremony to experience. Mind you, I was nervous as it was my first wedding shoot and I can assure you I invoking Alan Shepard's prayer more than a few times down I-40…
October's special treat comes from the world of astronomy with the planets Venus, Jupiter, and Mars in a lovely conjunction (Mars is pretty hard to see compared to the other two but the iPhone 6 Plus still did a pretty decent job of getting it). Of course, the D7000 or D810 with the 50mm f/1.4 or the 70-200mm f/2.8 probably would have done better but then I DID have a kid I had to collect…
This is the other roll of slide film I shot at Ocean Isle Beach using Provia 100. You can see that it is much less saturated with color and as a faster speed film is much better in retaining contrast details even when shooting in the evening. Provia 100 is my go-to general purpose slide film and it was what I was using when I was wandering round the mountains in the spring. In darker…
The slides I shot at Ocean Isle Beach came back from AgX Imaging in Sault Saint Marie in Michigan and I couldn't be happier with them! As long as Mike keeps processing E6 slide film, I'll keep sending my rolls of film to him because you can see that the processed frames are very nicely done even with me really pushing the limits of the film shooting until it was almost dark. The really cool…
The camera so loves the colours of fall and they were particularly vibrant whilst waiting for Nicholas to finish his school day! The trees having a nice diagonal alignment certainly didn't hurt... :)
After all of the hustle and bustle of unpacking for a couple of weeks of holiday at the beach house we've hired, it's time to take advantage of a "super moon" where the moon is at its closest point in its orbit to Earth. The moon was quite large in the sky thanks to atmospheric lensing so I decided to take advantage of the opportunity to play around with it a bit. The shots that…
Today's fun involves giving a bit of love and attention to my workhorse lens...the 70-200mm f/2.8 ED VR telephoto lens. This lens has accounted for over half of the pictures I've snapped through my various Nikon bodies through the years because it not only has really nice reach on the telephoto end of the range but also that big f/2.8 aperture throughout the entire focal-length range means I can shoot in near darkness without a…
They say "into life some rain must fall". We wholeheartedly agree! It's also a wonderful opportunity to take the 105mm f/2.8 Micro-Nikkor lens out for a spin to capture the individual water droplets on Patience and Fortitude (the two Japanese Maples in front of the house named for the lions guarding the NY Public Library entrance who were originally given their names by Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia as qualities he felt all New Yorkers should embody).…
Here are some more macro shots using the 105mm f/2.8 Micro-Nikkor lens, this time having sun shooting the neighbour's flower garden which also included a bumblebee doing the pollination thing. What makes macro photography so much fun is just how close you can get to your subject to see really small details like specs on the petals of the roses or the hair/fur of the bee.
This gallery started out as an exercise in playing around with the 105mm f/2.8 Micro-Nikkor lens ("micro" in Nikon-speak is actually "macro" for everyone else on the planet!). Between the centipede and the leaves on "Fortitude" (one of the two Japanese Maples out front named for the lions guarding the NY Public Library on 42nd and 5th), there was plenty of macro fun to be had! The rest of the time was playing with the…
Tonight was the night I caught more awesome shots of lightning bolts than I have in the over four years I've been shooting storms from my front porch. Not only was there frequent lightning bolts but the storm ended up regenerating giving another hour of shooting which exhausted the batteries in the D700! The actual technique is simplicity itself...set the camera on the tripod and set it for manual focus to infinity. Dial in an…
There's a bit of a story with this gallery as I was hoping to shoot some rolls of Velvia 50 I'd just picked up a couple of days earlier. Velvia 50 is color-reversal slide film (so the film aren't negatives, they're positives!) with truly obnoxious color saturation. So I'm driving along to Asheville when suddenly I had a rather disquieting thought after having gone through the mental inventory of what I had packed. Nikon F5…
It's time to see what the D810 can do with the 36 megapixels on offer with a nice big full moon hanging there in the sky! I had fun playing with the settings to see what effects I liked best for the next time that atmospheric lensing provides us a supermoon. All of these were shot with the 300mm f/4 lens and the 2X teleconverter which on the D810 full-frame (FX) sensor is effectively 600mm…
Unfortunately, by the time I got back out the door with the camera, the hawk was well off in the distance. But it wasn't a huge disappointment…got a few moon and tree shots while I was out there just for the heck of it. :)
This particular storm provided two incentives: Unplug anything of value that uses electricity as the storm was very active!Grab the D300 with the remote trigger that's already on the tripod and go have fun shooting lightning! However, when shooting lightning one should always keep in mind the old adage that there is a reason it is called FISHING and not CATCHING!Out of 507 frames shot, only 29 made it into the gallery and of those…
Imagine that you've got a 3TB hard drive that is the primary backup for a computer system that is now doing quite a bit of photo processing and video production... and you start to see very scary data errors coming from the drive!Imagine also that you've got a 750GB hard drive in the laptop that is completely stuffed and dangerously low on available disk space. And before you say it...yes, there is a lot of…
