Well I'm still not sure if the left picture is my favorite from today or the right picture...

The colors an light are just wonderful in this picture. Sadly it's taken from a shaky boat with an even more shaky mono pod around 6.45 am at ISO3200.

Well with a D700 there would be no noise at this ISO level :(

Me and my stupid Idea, for some reason I wanted to go fishing an made sure about everything...

• like the fishes? check
• can afford it? check
• camera can survive it? check
• nice company? check
• are i'm able to get up at 3.00, well I didn't sleep so yes, check
• do I have cloth for this? check

i only forgot one small details...

I'm getting easily sea sick,

well result of the day:

• getting picked up at 3.40
• arriving in berkley around 5.00
• getting on the boat and leave the area
• happily snapping pictures of the san francisco bay
  
• arriving at the spot around 8.00
• donating my breakfast to posidion, 8.01
• laying down, 8.02
• donating my lunch to posidion, 3.00 pm
• coming back into the bay area and try to ish for 10 minutes and wreck the fishing rod
• arriving in port around 5.30 and was not able to catch a single fish and got sponsored by donations

what a waste of 130$ and a perfectly fine salami

The complete gallery of 1001 golden gate pictures can be found here

I guess I'm bored and have way to much time on my hands, but my self portraits start to improve.

They are still not perfectly sharp and in focus, but they become usable.

All shots are done with a 3 light setup,

1 x SB-600 1/2 power on the left
1 x SB-600 1/2 power on the right
1 x SB-600 1/1 power on the front left slightly above me

35mm
1/500s most of them
F/10 to get them somehow sharp since I had to guess the correct focus point

conversion to B&W done during adobe lightroom and slightly enhancement of contrast,coloring of highlights and vignette

The complete collection can be found here


My nose in the second picture is sadly slightly over exposed (guess 1 stop or so) and could not save it in lightroom.

I really like the first one, to sad that only the nose is really sharp in focus. But I was not able to repeat this and started to get dizzy...

Originally uploaded by Salman Hamid

just a wonderful picture and I definably going to try to copy it some time.

possible setup:

1 x background light on a purple/pink background positioned slightly under her shoulder
1 x soft box or umbrella from right above, more likely a large softbox
F/20 and 1/125s with a 200mm lens (FX)

And I guess this was it.

just sitting here and try to blackout backgrounds with the use of a flash,

- simple just reduce distance to subject and increase the shutter speed

Now I want to have nice soft light and so I use a shot threw umbrella.

- does not work, you need to block the light partwise, since umbrellas spell the light in every possible direction. Does not work, since the background comes to a black grey in the best case

So I tried to gobo the umbrella, which basically did not work, there was a difference but not as much as I liked it.
Afterwards I tried a reflective umbrella, which can did provide the same result as before, so no help either.

Result?

a) use only hard light
b) get your hand on a softbox (easy) and a adapter to connect it to the falshes (nearly impossible)

well getting up at 4 am on a Saturday morning and trying to shoot pictures of birds starting at sunrise is way more challenging than I thought.

I took 200 pictures, run out of batteries once (the SB-900 uses way to much juice) and not one really nice picture. So were so so, but not worth it to be stored/posted.

-

Well like always there are challenges, for example shooting pictures in the dark of people playing soccer if there are no overhead lights on...

The SB-900 worked very well for this and has some serious power, but the recharge time kinda kills it and you really have to time your shots.

Well at least I got 2 shot's out of 64 or so

---

Da mein SB-900 am Mittwoch geliefert wurde konnte ich es nun gar nicht mehr erwarten ihn mal ausgibieg zu testen. Der erste war, wie gut ist er um damit aufnahmen in der daemmerung zu machen un er war ueberraschend gut, allerdings ist die ladezeit viel zu hoch. Jedenfalls mit meinen billiegen batterien.
Nun man kann sich ja mal ein powerpack basteln, sobald jemand die schaltung des nikon powerpacks veroeffentlicht.

ok after reading this thread and seeing what you can do with just a single flash,

well I'm not there yet and need to practise way way more...

I just love the softbox effect and that's the one thing I can't do with speedlights :(

and the lord said there will be light and light it was.
Basically I was bored and played with my speed lights and since I always wanted to try to make a self portrait, well here it is.

Is mostly hard light and a little bit soft light to make me a little bit younger...

ok correction,

the damn flash has so many different modes, I was not in TTL, I was in something else. The TTL mode actually works extremely well and I can see me using it for the first time. So in 'A' mode I need to use an exposure comensation of +1 and in TTL mode it's just perfect.

We will see how it performs during soccer tomorrow.

But I really need to read the manual, anyway back to work.

surprise,

my toys arrived 2 days before there estimated delivery and the SB-900 flash is quite a novel of technology. I did not bother yet to read the manual, but I got quite some nice pictures with just playing around with it, except it underexposes by 1 stop, which is kinda sad. But this underexposure could also be related to the use of Tamron lenses and I need to test it a bit more with some Nikon lenses.

A really nice feature is that it calculates the maximum reach for you based on your entered settings. Like ISO and aperture.

Now I just need to find a model to test some 3 light setups...

I finally found a really good review for a panoramic head which explains how to use these things and what's the idea behind it.

link

it look's indeed much better and cheaper than the bogen variation, but I just don't get point how to level this thing in the first place. I mean it's nice to have a level build in, but how do you actually level it?

Specially the whole thing is so simple constructed, nothing can break and the indentation rings are such a nice and simple idea.

some early users are happily shooting movies with the new Nikon D90 and what I see so far is not that impressive at all...

link

It's actually a pretty sad performance, shaky, no precise focus movement. It just looks that AF lenses are not perfect for this kind of stuff and it would greatly benefit from a tripod or in body stabilization.

Which I'm not a huge fan off, just one more thing what can break in the camera...

well time will tell

sleepless and hungry (for some reason our ridge is totally empty) nights in davis.

Well I'm still trying to understand why is the 85mm F/1.4 Nikon lens so famous and people keep writing about it.
I guess this particular gallery is one of the prime examples why I should not get money into my hands anytime soon...

link

These pictures are just gorgeous and I'm actually pretty confident that I could pull it off to take similar pictures, they seem to be 'simple' enough from the lighting and the post processing is also pretty easy to analyze.

My first guess is that he uses 1 large reflector below the model (the bottom) to lighten the shadow under the chin and 1 flash in a softbox to the right. I'm also guessing softbox since it's very soft light which means it has to be large and most likely close from the reflection in the eyes and does not have the look of an umbrella.

I'm not sure if there is a second flash involved as a kicker for the hairlight, since this can be easily done in postproccessing.

Well I could also be totally off since I'm pretty bad at analysing pictures to begin with :P

But in my favorite of this set, well I got no idea, I would guess he just uses natural light which comes from behind him, but I just can't tell since it could be also a gigantic softbox.

well casio did it again, they announced a nice toy which is very interesting for a couple of reasons

40 fps pictures (at 7 MP) or 1000 fps video
520mm zoom
internal IS

it won't replace an slr, but I could see me using it for several applications.

the name:

EXILIM EX-FH20.

Now if Nikon would release something like this which could use my existing lenses, it would be truly interesting.

(the picture is taken from dpreview.com and all the rights belong to them!)

just calculating what the wonderful radio poppers cost,

720$ why oh why can't it be something like 300 :(

• 3 x receiver
• 1 x transmitter
  

another thing which makes only sens if I ever go 'pro' but the system is so nice.

so who want to hire me...

I might get a transmitter and 1 receiver for my birthday, so that I can fire a flash out of sight. But I'm very unsure about this, but well 2 years ago I also thought 1 flash is all I ever need and look were it ended...

oh the power of python, I try to use it whenever possible since I hate it to be stuck with just java...

a simple program to find all files containing a space at a certain position and to rename it to the correct name needed for my system:

#!/usr/bin/python

import re, os

rxin = '.*bsksa.* _[0-9].txt'
foo = re.compile(rxin)

for fname in os.listdir(os.getcwd()):
allowed_name = re.compile(rxin).match

if allowed_name(fname):
os.rename(fname,fname.replace(' ',''))


or short, find files and replace spaces with nothing. The reg expression just filters the data.

well we finally found a perfect way to transfer money from spain to caliornia. It's called nikon flashes ordered at adorama.

I guess my flash collection is now complete and I just have to wait till my SB-600 and SB-900 arrives :)

now the state of the collection:

3 x SB-600
1 x SB-900 as controller and for wildlife, walk around flash.

and way to many light stands and umbrellas.

(Picture is taken from stobist.com, http://strobist.blogspot.com/2008/07/review-nikon-sb-900-speedlight.html and all rights belong to strobist.com!)

my favorite quote,

A very talented photographer was given a special showing of his work before a large group of dignitaries, in appreciation and recognition of his fine works.

The showing was preceded by a world class five course dinner, which was created by a world renown master chef who was flown in from France just for the occasion.

After the dinner and the showing, the master chef approached the photographer and said "Your photographs are outstanding, the best I've ever seen! You must have a very good camera?"

To which the photographer replied "Your dinner tonight was extraordinary, the best meal I've ever eaten. You must have some really good pots and pans"...

sadly it's so true, you here this all the time...

This picture taken by a D300 and iso 3200 is another reason that I really really want this camera...

the quality is just impressive, well if I put one year 90$ each month to the side and sell my D80 for like, mhm 500-600$ I could buy one...

but I don't want to buy once a year a new camera and I rather have a second body than to give my D80 away :P

I did nearly buy a Nikon D50 today, sicne somebody sold one in excellent condition for 250$ on craigslist, which is incredible cheap and I still miss my first D-SLR.

When I saw my ticket for my flight from boston to washington I got excited. Row 10, finally close to the exit. The only thing what looked weird was that it said 10a...

well it turned out to be a tiny buisness jet with 12 rows and each row had a seat on the left and one of the right.

Long story short it was fun to fly in such a tiny aircraft and it was so close over the ground, I was actually able to take some snapshots of boston from the air.

ok this was like 10 minutes after the start so maybe not really boston anymore...

so is he stalking me, or are I'm stalking him?

this is here the question...

well the metabolomics conference in boston is now more or less over and it was quite an interresting experience. Basically during the day you attended several very nice talks (I even understood something of the biochem talks), walk around and look at some posters or be in little meetings with people to present the binbase system.

Well the presentation would have been much easier if you would had access to the internet and if the hotel would not have blocked all my webpages, which was pretty annoying. basically I was only able to present the administration frontend to several people who all liked it and the possibilities it gives you. The query speed was not exceptional fast, since the hotel connection was extremly slow and i discovered several bugs during the presentation, but they will be fixed easily.
Basically I need a feature which shows the user what's happening right now and have to change the error handling.
We also noticed that all people like the idea behind our system and were impressed by it, but they all told me that it needs to support quadropoles, lcms and GCxGC to be really successfull. Right now I guess the easiest and most important feature needs to be quadropole support and I'm going to invest a couple of my weekends to add this on my own, if people send me some test data which are created to our standard method.

The best parts were like always the evenings, we basically hit on bar after another which I notice quiete baddly on my checking account, basically you spend on a nght easily 30 - 40$ for drinks and additional 20 - 30$ for food. But well you get connections and connections are important in live and for your future career. It also gave me the chance to talk a bit with the developers of mzmine and to get a rough idea what kind of talk I have to prepare for finnland. Right now it looks like a short overview what we do, where is the problem and how we do it. I also guess I have to prepare an in detail talk for the developers to demonstrate the concepts.

What's about boston as a town? Well it's just a beautiful city and I'm defnatly going back here for some vacation, since I was pretty limited and had barley any time to take pictures. Anyway you can find a couple of shots here

Now I just have to find a way to get back to davis, since I'm pretty worried that the hurricane is going to kill my flight connection over washington. They shut down the airport for several hours yesterday and most likley do it again tomorrow...

well fter an exciting flight with united airlines (which sucks badly...) I arrived in Boston and spend sofar

• 15$ to check my baggage, are they kidding me? It's not even included in the price
• 20$ for a taxi
• 5$ tip to the taxi driver for returning my phone which i forgot in the taxi
• 10$ for beverages on board of the flight and food
• 15$ for dinner

and this was just the first day...

The picture on the left is hamburg and I will take some boston pictures in the next couple fo days

currently I'm bored and frustrated and just got paid. Which is a very very dangerous combination for me...

So I went online, look around and found a nice deal on a sigma 400mm F/5.6 prime and promptly bought it,after goggling it and get some information about it. The reason is, I wanted a 300mm F/4 prime since two years, but could never convince myself to actually pull the trigger on it, since it's 1200$. The 10 year old sigma in excellent condition and quite good reviews on the other hand sold for 400$ and 12$ shipping. So I decided to give it a little try and if it wont work out, well I send it back and pay another 12$ shipping.

What's to know about it?

• quite an old design (10-15 years old)
• heavy, 3 - 4 lbs
• slow, F/5.6 basically means auto focus is slow or wont auto focus with a TC
• low contrast, which is not that big of a deal
• around 400$ used and not optically perfect, but still better than all the 1xx - 5xx zooms these days
• optically better than my Tamron 70-200 + TC
• slow autofocus, so no bif's with my D80, maybe in future with the D300, if I ever get one
  

Basically it's the only affordable way to reach 400mm for an amateur, since the closest Nikon lens cost around 4500$.

I serious have to say what is nikon thinking latley, every new released nikon lens in an interresting range is 1400$+ and the third party producers like tamron and sigma are only producing these stupid megazooms, which never hold what they promise.

The picture of the bird is taken with the 70-200mm F/2.8 Tamron and sadly unsharp. I have no idea why this keeps happening, the Tamron is able to provide extremely sharp pictures, but I guess it's really the camera.

I just wished I would had waited 1 month and bought the D300, than I could use all these cheap old manual focus lenses. Like a Nikon 85mm F/1.4 MF for 400$ instead of 1050$ as AF version.

Well, I guess I put everymonth 150$ aways and can buy the D300 july next year...