Sunday, July 15, 2007

live is evil,now I got an offer to sell my D50 and upgrading to a D200. which has a 100$ rebeate right now.

what todo, oh what todo...

I decided now that I keep it for a while The D200 is nice, but its already quite old and I think I keep saving my money.

The nice thing is just you don't have to access any menus and so you actually use all functions of a camera. If I need to walk throw 3 menus, I just wont use the function X i wanted because by them the shot is over...

Btw shipping form us to germany is insane.

quote: (indian guy at upss - american version of post)

we got two quotes for international shipping 40$ or 90$...

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in the last post I was saying that the noise in the pictures was awefull because the exposure was off. The picture to the left is an example how good the nikon D series handles high iso noise if the exposure is spot on.

in this case the picture was taken at iso 800 and is basically noise free, but the composition is slightly off, the lamp is not centered as it was suposed to be. Normaly you could crop this slight mistake, but a we want to get it right first and b we shooting at 10mm which means you have disortions on the sides and it looks wrong if you crop it.

Last but not least I went to ritz camera again and was gone 5 seconds later. I just wanted to get some replacement lenscaps, cause I lost another one. And like always I got the answer, sorry this is a special order and I can't help you. Please order it online. Serious how does this store stays in buisness, they have never any customers and the people who wants to buy something there are just not important enough to get some standard parts in store. Like lens caps of color correction gels for nikon flashs. I order the rosco sample correction catalog a couple of days ago which comes with hundred of sample gels for color correction.
These catalogs are free, because the company hopes to sell 4 x 4 feet large correction sheets which are used to tone windows or studio lamps down. Now my flash head is arround 2 x 1 inch large and one sample is 3 x 2 inch, means perfect to cut these samples into small pieces to attach to the flash.

The problem with this you need the gel in the correct shape. Thats the reason I wanted to buy one of the awefull expensive nikon gels (20$ for 4 pieces) to use it as a mask and cut all the samples to the correct size. But like always the sales person told me:

...sorry special order...

maybe I can find a mask online for my flash. In the worst case I just gonna spend a day in San Francisco to get them there.

edit:

Ok at 5 am in the morning I ended up buying these filter online, its actually 12 filter and also grabed some minor related stuff. Like a 7$ filter holder.

the hunt for the water drops....

what can I say I was bored and couldn't reach anybody to go out, so I shot drops of water. Which turned out to be more difficult than I exspected.

Major problems

- you focus on something you don't see
- it's extremly hard to work out an exposure, i was not successfull to nail it once, all pictures are extremly noisy, needed to adjust it by up to 4 stops in post processing
- one flash is not enough light and after I burned my fingures on 2 ikea lamps I got really frustrated...
- my sensor of the camera is extremly dirty...

so out of nearly 1000 shots I got 4 shots which are nice from the composistion and somewhat sharp. Sadly they are really noisy and have dust spots all over them.

Now you could say I should have cleaned the sensor after the first picture. Which I did and gave up after 2 hours, it just got worse and worse. So maybe I need to send the camera to nikon to get it professional cleaned.

Which is also very nice is that I get more and more used to the fantastic adobe lightroom software. The software makes it so easy to work with raw files and I just wished I always shot using raw instead of jpeg. Now I just need to convince lindsay that she buys the software for me, because she gets a student account which makes it 200$ cheaper. And to pay 100$ for a programm instead of 300$ is way nicer. I just wished there was an open source solution for this problem.

now it's only 1 week till my little cousin gets married and i really wish I could be there, but thx too these awefull flight prices right now this is not possible. At least I will see them arround christmas time.



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