Saturday, November 18, 2006

mhm today my photo shop elements 5.0 license expired and I have to admit I really like this program. It provides the most of the stuff what I need right now. So what did I actually miss in photo shop elements? Actually only the curves from photo shop CS2 and the channel mixes. Which brings us to the gimp which is a nice program but lacks one important feature. It doesn't allows adjustment layers which are my favorite feature.

Time to download a photo shop CS2 trial to find out what else is use full.

Oh by the way as you can see in the picture, fall finally started here in California.

What is wrong with this pictures?

I really want to get rid of the shadows under the leaves and get some more details out. This can be done with a second flash on a very low angle.


today I received my big experiment, actually I did two experiments. The first was to order a user totally manual lens ( Nikon 200mm AIS F/4) for 89$ and a couple of years old.

The second experiment was that I ordered some high class steaks online from omahasteaks.com and I'm quite disappointed by the new york stripe steak. It was not tender at all. So I will send them an email in the morning to get my money back or at least a refund. At 90$ ( I got 50% off, normally is 180$)for 4 pounds of meat I expected a better quality.
The second experiment on the other hand surprised me. The lens looks brand new, has no dents, no scratches and an outstanding quality. And the manual focus works very well, I just wish I had better eyes or a Nikon DR6 which magnify the viewfinder and makes it easier to focus for me.
So tomorrow I will try to catch some birds with the 200mm lens to see how well I can focus under pressure. Sadly it won't work to use this lens with a 50mm reversed lens as macro for 4:1 magnifications. The pictures I got are more or less hit and miss pictures.

Which finally brings me to the conclusion that I will get over short or long a real macro lens in the range of 90 - 105 mm. So I can hunt bugs and have a working distance of over 2 cm from the front element.

As we can see in the first picture the reversed 50mm f/1.8 works very well for 1:1 magnification of still objects. But show me one bug which won't run away when you are 2 cm away from him with this combination and your hand is is 2.5 cm away turning on the aperture ring to set the depth of field.

Ok you always can freeze the bug before hand...

The pictures are taken at

  1. 50mm f/18 reversed on D50 with SB600
  2. 50mm f/5.6 lens on D50 with SB600
  3. 200mm f/5.6 on D50 with SB600