New "camera" -- again...

Well, actually, since my Sprint contract was up and I wanted an iPhone, I got one of those. I initially bought the cheapest 8-gig 3G version, but the day the 3GS came out, I took that back and got that one.

A week later, I finally am getting a chance to play around with the built-in camera and on-phone photo editing tools. Wow. Just. Wow...



I'm going to have to swap it, however, because as you can see in the top-right corner of this photo here, Apple's QC has... issues... I love my Macs, but this flaw in the brand new iPhone camera (only on my phone at least from what I've seen this far) is a bit frustrating...

Film, Revisited...

I just essentially traded my old film camera for the film camera I've wanted since I first started getting into photography - the Nikon F4s. Granted, digital offers so much more for so much less in the long run. With as many pictures as I take during the year, I certainly can justify spending $1000 on a dSLR. But I still will always have at least one film camera body. And I LOVE LOVE LOVE my 'new' F4s. I haven't even uploaded the pictures to my computer from my D2H, but here's one shot I made about three hours ago on my F4 (with the Nikkor 400mm f/3.5):



Granted, that's a crappy scan from the 1-hour photo center at Fred Meyer. If I scan the negative, I can get a little more tonality and texture out of the wall. But, honestly, that's pretty darn good!

And there's something about the smooth whir of a frame of film advancing in the back of a Nikon F4s. Plus the camera itself is a work of art.

Film is not dead. Not by a long shot. I can't wait to get some Fuji Velvia 50 through that thing...

Edit -- here's the same shot w/the 1.5x 'teleconverter' that's inherent to the dSLRs, from my D2H:

Testing the Tokina 300mm F/2.8 AT-X SD

Finally got a chance to put the Tokina 300mm through some tests outside. Fortunately my puppy was a willing subject. What an awesome lens! Between the two of these superteles, I can hardly wait for baseball season -- the 2008 season -- to begin...

First Impressions: 400mm F/3.5 EDIF

I happened to luck into my first supertelephoto over the weekend. These lenses don't become available very often, let alone at the price I paid for it. Fortunately I had just enough in my lens fund, and was able to purchase this awesome lens. I can't wait to shoot a baseball game with it, although, I really have to get used to not having a zoom and using a monopod. This lens is heavy!

I've never shot with a supertelephoto, so I'm trying to get the technique down. It's a different world, that's for sure. I need to practice practice practice...





So, I took a break from using my son as a model. I decided to chase our poor dog around the back yard this time. With the compression that a telephoto gives you, I probably could've used a smaller aperture, to get the nose and other features more in focus.



I was blown away by the crispness of the numbers in this picture, when zoomed in at 100%. I don't think the full 4.1 MP image will display when you click on the picture, but you get a good enough idea.

This lens will change my photography. Heck, at this point, that should be my goal in acquiring gear. It's not about the gear you have, really, but about how you use it. It's too bad the Rainiers' season is over, otherwise I'd head to Cheney and shoot away. Need to practice a bit more before I head to Safeco...

New Camera!!! D2H First Pix (And a comparison w/my D1H)

I had the opportunity to purchase a second body, as with the wedding I shot a few weeks ago, I realized that I badly needed one if I'm going to continue shooting weddings. Not only that, but my D1H is having issues with the sensor. There's this long red line down the left side of all my pictures, and it's getting more and more difficult to clone it out. After much deliberation, I decided I'd stick with my budget and buy a D2H. Yes, for a few hundred more, I could've bought a D200, but I didn't want to stretch out the budget any further than I already planned. I also wanted to save hard drive space, since megapixels take them by the droves. While I'd prefer the D2H had a sensor that was 6 megapixels, its 4.1 MP should be fine for most of what I do. Heck, I was able to print out 12 x 18s from the 2.7 MP of my D1H, so I expect that's not going to stop (and the prints I do make with the D2H should be better at 12x18 than those from my D1H).

One of the things I was most curious of was how the color rendition compared between my D1H and the D2H. Since my D1H didn't have Color Mode III (Nikon's weird, proprietary scheme for naming colorspaces like Adobe's sRGB, etc...), I often enjoyed the extra saturation that Mode III provided by converting my Raw NEF files to Mode III. Since Mode III was actually introduced with the D2H (IIRC - I'm not sure the D100 didn't have it first), I was curious how the conversion compared with shooting in Mode III natively w/the D2H. So, I made my first shots with the intent of making such a comparison.

Nothing scientific, really. I just took the same picture twice -- once on each camera, swapping lenses on the cameras -- and tried to keep the settings the same. Here are some side-by-side comparisons of the two cameras. Natively shot in Mode III on the D2H, and converted to Mode III on the D1H frames in Capture NX. I made sure to use the same White Balance settings, ISO settings, and saturation settings.

D1H (saturation set to 'moderate' in Capture NX):


D2H (saturation set to 'moderate' in Capture NX):



(yeah, mom, I realize my backyard needs a visit from the lawn mower, and the clean-up crew -- just wanted a quick snap of something with a lot of different colors)

D1H (saturation set to 'normal'):


D2H (saturation set to 'normal'):



D1H (saturation set to 'normal'):


D2H (saturation set to 'normal'):


Nothing special in any of these pictures -- I literally grabbed my cameras and headed out to grab some quick pics, and didn't but barely tweak the settings in Capture NX so they matched. No PS work here.... I think the tomato blossom picture shows the difference the best. The other photos have too many variables involved that were different. But the yard shot does show, too, that the in-camera setting for Mode III is a little more saturated than the conversion of the D1H NEFs in Capture NX.

It only took me about 5 minutes to figure out where things were on the D2H that I wanted to tweak. Awesome.

I love, love, love this new camera. My only gripe is that the aperture setting on my 100 f/2.8 E lens attached to the PK-13 tube seemed to not work correctly all the time when I programmed the focal length and f/stop into the D2H. I had to wiggle things several times, and unmount the lens to get the aperture setting on the camera to change back to 2.8, when I changed the aperture on the lens. This will take me some more research.