Saturday, February 25, 2006

Today I received my birthday gift, and yes I know my birthday is in a couple of days, but I couldn't resist and opened it today.

It was a nice backpack, specially designed to carry a slr, a couple of lenses, a tripod and a laptop. Actually I'm pretty amazed how well it is constructed and about the adjustments you can do. It's extendable, so you can plug other stuff on it like bags or lens holder.



The picture is the Okland By Bridge in San Francisco.


I also read a couple of articles about my new hobby, photographie and come more and more to the decciscion that the hobby gets more and more expensive. For example I always thought a filter cost 20 - 30$ and you can simulate the most filters with software like photoshop or gimp. Thats quite true, but neural density filters, graduated neural density filtes and ploarisation filters can't be simulated for obvious resons. I think I order them used and a couple of stepup rings, so that I buy one filter and can put it on every lens I own.

The picture was a random shot in Berlin, from the "Potsdammer Platz Arkaden".

I also made a couple of hundred shots from a skycraper, but no one of them was actually so as exspected. The reason for this was that the sky was to bright and darken so everything else. The solution would be a gradute neural density filter and a circular pol filter. I tried to simulate these effects with photoshop, but they turned out very bad. As we can see to the left.

Friday, February 24, 2006

after spending a week in germany, celebrating my dad's birthday I'm back in the us and had a nice suprise. I have 2 new roomates now and they are so clean. Every day I come home now I have a nice polished flat and they even had the idea to adjust the bills, so that everybody pays a fair ammount of money and not way to much like I.

Sad thing my car passed the smogtest and now I have to replace the front bearings. This car is ripping me off. So I reschedule my plans again and get my car fixed now.

Monday, February 13, 2006

ok first point done, my room is now a little bit cleaner, so I thougt lets give photoshop another try. And I have to admit the magic ward tool, is just great. It selected the areas of the different pictures exacly in the way there where supposed to be.

My originally idea to the pictures was to take the plane from the blue sky and put it into a sunset. Afterwards I added some trees and more clouds. I surrounded the plane with a nice blurry shadow to hide the cutting corners and to emulate movement. I also pasted a house in the left corner. And blurred everything, except for the plane, couple of time until it looks nice. To give it a drastic look, we converted it to black and white and played a little bit with the insensity channels.

It was a breeze, tomorrow I will try something similar with gimp. And the working speed of photoshop is great, except for the raw file handling what takes forever and a day.

it's a damn cold night...

actually not I just got home from dinner with my girlfriend and where supposed to clean my room, pack some stuff doing my taxes and go to bed, but after I started to clean up, I got so bored that I was reading a little bit at a website about the method: convert color to alpha. Sounds interessting. So I took some pictures, converted them to black and white to get some similaritys.
The result of 45 minutes of playing you can see to the left.

Now I could go back to the important stuff, but no I had to read another website about taking pictures and night time... this was even more boring. But I got some really nice results and the only reason that I stopped doing this, was that my cam run out of power, time to buy a spare batterey for 30$ for the next time. ( I only made 6 shots in the bulb mode with a totally senseless noise reduction afterwards. The exposure was arround 10 minutes each shot at iso 200 and F-Stop 11).

The other pitty was, whenever I tried to make a pictures of, say many stars at once. I was stopped by my cam: sorry you need an ultrawide lens for this kind of pictures. Now is the problem, there are only 4 lenses for this on the market (to get an ultrawide range with a nikon) and they are all arround 500$, or even worst the nikon brand (recommended, if you ever want to update to another nikon D-series) at 900$. Ok I could live with 350$, 500$ are way to much (out of the toy range.) and 900$ is insane.

The last 2 problems with pictures at night are, It is cold, so I finally have a reason to buy some new shoes (yes even I consider to wear something what's not called flip lops ) and even worse.: Why are stars and leaves moving. Please how is it possible to have a nice sharp picture at night, which needs a long time exposure, of say several minutes. And the wind moves the leaves and the stars are also moving somehow (or the earth was moving)

Sunday, February 12, 2006

After beeing at work all weekend long, I tried to compare photoshop cs2 and gimp 2.10. What I wanted is to convert a simple picture of a sunset to black and white (ir) mode. The reason for this was just, that I need a nice programm for maipulating my pictures and I always want to go with the opensource version, so why should I use photoshop, except that I have more experience with it.

For example the picture on the right was created with photoshop cs in 2 minutes of adjusting some layers.

In gimp it was a little bit more difficullt. At first I had to play with the channels and afterwards I needed to optimize the curve to get a nice picture. The gimp version (left picture) has also a little bit more noise in the picture compared to the cs2 version. And less details

anyway I don't see me buying a photoshop license for 700$ just because some things are simple.

I also fixed my problem with the "Nikon Capture It" software by using a gimp plugin what can convert the files for me from nef to jpg, or just shoot in jpg mode anyway. Sure the software provide some nice features, but like always, gimp gives me at least one alternative.

To the left again is the original picture taken with a D50 and my 300mm zoom. I also figured out what I really need is a wide/superwide lens, because I tried to make some landscape pictures today and with my smalles zoom (28mm - 80mm x 1.5 factor). It's just not possible.

That means up to now I can take nice shots of flowers, can take shots of birds and airplanes, if I get them close enough. Sure these shots are all kinda unsharp, because I can't make a picture of an airplane, flying 300 mph with a stativ. Because the airplane is than already gone. And birds are even less patient! I think they had fun, watching me assembling everything, setup up the cam, setting the right settings for the light and finally I wanna press the shutter and the bird flew to the next tree. But on the other hand.




I just don't see me spending money on a 80 - 400mm VR lens from Nikon what you can buy for 1400$ from amazon. And the cheapest wideangle, cost also 400$ ( due the factor of my cam).

So lets focus on things far far away and not moving... Because for this I have everything I need, except for a flash. But this comes later, I have to learn to take pictures without a flash first

Thursday, February 09, 2006

current events, actually nothing happens in the last week so far, me and my girl are trying to get rid of one of our flats so that we can move together. I went a couple of times snowboarding, this weekend I will try to go to the chinese new year festival in san francisco.

yeah life is boring right now. The picture is by the way a nice sunset in Davis and I have 3 days left until my Nikon test software expires and afterwards I running in problems to edit my raw pictures. Mhm I think I try a gimp plugin and if this not works. Then I have to buy it in March/April, whenever I have another 100$ to play with. But I stil think there are a couple of things which should be included in the camera package, like the 10$ remote I just ordered or the 100$ software, which is essential for this camera.

Anyway so I have right now 5 things on my toylist i wanna have up to the end of the year

1. a speedlight
2. a nice bag for laptop and camera
3. a 2.8 zoomlens
4. a surfboard
5. 3000$ in savings

hm part 5 sounds the important one right now to me... lets start with this , and I think I have to much and to expensive hobbys, a rough calculation

1. snowboarding during the winter time, 800$ a year
2. windsurfing during the summer, 1300$ a year ( need a new board, old one is to small)
3. camera stuff 600$ a year -> needed for other hobbys to make nice pictures