a review somebody gave me in a photographie forum....

Hey, I went to your link and your images all need work starting from the basic. Composition is off, lack of defined subject matter, exposure, etc… You are not using your photography skills to focus the viewer. I get lost in your images because; I am not sure what you want me to be looking at. Learn some rules like Rule of 3, Leading lines, Sunny 16 etc… Then expand your knowledge by more professional standards by reading, viewing other professional images, workshops, mentorship, etc… You seem to be just starting out and yes, you need better equipment but, what you have is great for learning where to go from here and how to view images in your viewfinder. I think your direction in the images was for an artistic approach so; I edited one of your images for you to see the difference in how to direct a viewer. I did this post process but, you need to learn how to do this in the capture phase of your photography. Your current images are snapshots in nature but, the potential for outstanding image is there.
Your image
My image corrected
My image is not the best for about 5 minutes of work but, I corrected towards what I believe your attention was...Artistic in nature.
Do not get me wrong you seem to be at the place where all great photographer start. They had just enough equipment and a whole lot of desire. Focus your skill to the style you wish and master that skill before moving on to a different skill. Network with other professional photographers you wish to be like.
Take care and be safe.
God be with you,
Tony

damn this is devastating... 

this weekend I wanted to shot some fall pictures. So I got out of the house and jumped into the truck. To make it even more exciting I only took one lens with me. A tokina 19 - 35 mm. To concentrate more on framing the pictures and working with an wide angle of view.

Soon I found the first target, a couple of innocent ducks sitting around and doing nothing...
...1 hour later I finally could close up to them with camera, flash, tripod and could start taking pictures. I was 3 feet ( 1m ) away from them.
I love the look of white angles, but my telephoto would save me lot of time and some cropping of the pictures.

After I finished the ducks I drove around Davis and found a nice tree, a classic tractor and some fields and haystacks.

Finally I kept 5 pictures out of 100. You can find them here or just click on the big picture

Used stuff:

• Nikon D50
• Tokina 19-35mm
• B&W Circular Polarizer
• Manfrotto 3021BP Tripod with Midi Ballhead
• SB-600 Flas h with diffuser
• postprocessing using a trial of photoshop elements 5
  

o oracle I hate you...

currently I'm working on two major things in my favorite monster, called oracle.

1. create a script which automatical duplicates a given database each night on another server.

2. optimize the concurrency of the cluster to avoid row locks and table locks.


Problem number 1 took me only 8h of bash scripting and reading oracle books. I finally put it all together and tested it with a couple of backups.
You can find the result under: script

Basically it allows you to create a backup of your database using rman.

Problem number 2...

...working on it 

yeah I just found out how I can synchronize my blogspot account with my facebook account. Now I can annoy even more people with my stupid photo posts :)

picture on the left is a testshot from my flat too my neighbours (thanks kim for not cleaning you balcony) flat. To optimize my manual focus technique.
Only minor post processing involed to increase contrast and saturation.



me and natasha at her birthday party. Trying to look her in the eyes and serving her a cuba libre... The picture in the back is one of her awesome paintings!

today I discovered a website which finally explained a very nice feature in eclipse.

which saved me about 1 week to locate my current bug and to fix it. Ok I located it, to fix it is another question. At least I can do some math again and actually write some "smart" code instead of stupid gui programming or writing utilities.

i just wished I discovered this features years ago...
http://www.javalobby.org/java/forums/t19825.html

the picture is a red devil and my favorite target for flash fotographie right now. As we can see I have this ugly shadow behind the fish, so I need something to lighten it up. I can't bounce the flash and I cant use a diffuser, because of the glas.
But I discovered If I use my bike light and put it with a diffuser on top of the tank and a direct flash I get some decent results. Another flash or light on the right would be helpfull to remove or at least lighten the shadow. 

its amaizing how much space we have in our flat after I sold my 2 boards and sail and mast...

...and to actually get it out of our flat we had to move it over the balcony. So it was the right way todo.

anyway from a part of the money I just ordered a filter and a flash and from the other part I put away in savings for a vacation.

so what did I got,

77mm circular polarizer and SB-600 flash to learn the basics of using a flash and which can be later used as a slave flash If I ever think I need more than one.

I also made some nice 15 x 10 Inch prints from two pictures and autsch, you see the mistakes I do...

basically I sharpen my pictures to much. 

it only took me 8 month to finally understand my camera. Today I discovered a new button ( you also could say I finally understand what todo with it ) The AE/AF lock button which basically does nothing than:

- lock the autofocus
- lock the autoexposure
- does one of both combined with the shutter









after playing with this for about 30 minutes I configured my cam so that:

AE/AF button - locks the focus
Shutter half pressed - locks the exposure in case you use P/A/S mode
Shutter pressed - takes the pictures

this allows me to move my focus point arround in a picture and to take n pictures with the same exposure and focus. Or if I don't press the AE/AF button the camera keeps focussing, but does not change the exposure. I never know why should I use this. But for action shots it's quite helpfull to always have the same exposure. Ok you can set this using the manual mode. But why should you make your live harder than it is anyway?

the nice thing about focus lock is that I don't need the one feature of the D80, the 11 Focus fields, you can simulate it/finetune it with the focus lock. It just won't refocus, which is a problem with moving objects. For example if you have 5 focus field (left,right,top,bottom,middle) and you want to have the object focussed in the top left corner. You can focuss it using the middle field, lock the focus and than move the camera so that your object of interesst is in focus at the part where you want to have it. Another way would to use manual focus in the first place, but I never can really see when the image is sharp and when it's not 100% sharp.

...the problems with glasses. I really should get some contacts, which reminds me to go to the eye doctor to test my health insurance...

the more I think about it the more I'm happy that I resisted and did not sold my D50 and upgraded to the D80. I also figured out how to simulate graduated neural density filters in gimp using several exposures of the same picture. Which saved me some more money. So I only will get a circular polarizer, once I can force me to pay 100$ for a stupid 77mm filter... 

good by surfstuff,

after I did'nt used it more than 4 times this year I finally bit the bullet and try to sell it for a good price. So it doesn't block the room anymore and stops collecting dust. It kinda hurts, cause it was a dream to have my own surfstuff, but it makes no sense to keep it and it looses from month to month more value...

so lets see what I can get for my rig and boards :(

after I used picassaweb for a couple of weeks now and I'm quite happy with them, they wanna start to charge me money, cause I have to many pictures on it. It is arround 25$ a year for 6 GB picture place and not that much. It's just for 25$ a year I also can get a pbase.com which is way nice and provides more features and a nice search function.

example I can search for pictures taken with a camera and a specific lens to compare my quality with the quality of other people. Means I can learn something how to improve my pictures and whats possible with my stuff. Which leads to not spending so much money on gear and improve my technique in the first place. ( it's amazing what kind of pictures some people shoot with stuff that has very bad rattings, like 2 of my lenses).


...i think I make the switch next month and get a trial account for testing... 

statistics, don't we love them all?

I finally decided to work a little bit with the statistic programm R again, and thought what could I analyse. So I decided to analyse which focal length I use the most with my D50 and was quite surprised by the result.

But first where to get the data from? In modern time like today your camera saves tons of informations in the jpeg files, so called EXIF informations.

what todo to get these data?

1. write a small script in python which reads the exif informations from all you files on the harddisk

2. stores this result in a txt file as matrix

3. start R import the data and do some statistics

After I saw this result it pointed me that my future plans to buy lenses are quite easy,

arround 300 mm prism lens -> not affordable
arround 100 mm prism lens for macro -> affordable from sigma with 2.8

and I'm still dreaming from a ultra wide angle for landscape fotographie, maybe in a year...

( proud of me that I refused the offer to sell my camera to a friend and get a D80! Just saved 500$...) 

after I did some more reading on several filtersystem I discovered that 2 out of 3 lenses have a great problem with filters. The lens barrel rotates and so the complete filter would rotate too and drop on the ground.
The second problem is that I need to use 4x4/4x6 filters instead of P size filter. I can mount the P size filter, but I can see the corner of the filters on the pictures.

This means, I tripple the money which I need to spend. At least I found out that a circular polarizer should be the highest priority and also the most expensive.

and later if money permits:

- graduated neural density 0.9 soft
- graduated neural density 0.9 hard
- graduated neural density 0.6 reverse
- neural density 4 stop
- graduated neural density 0.6 soft
- graduated neural density 0.6 hard

at least you can order sets of filter from adorama.com, which saves you some money and I don't need any warming/cooling filters. Cause I can do this in gimp.

also everybody recommends to stay away from cokin filter, cause they have a magenta color cast. So they recommend hitech, lee, singray.

further there is also the third possibility, you can simulate the effect in gimp and photoshop with multiple exposures. So I only need to buy a polarizer. I will try this for the beginning and save some money until I decide what todo with it.