Well sometimes people ask me to take a picture of a coworker. This time it was Kirsten who needed a simple picture for a poster.

Well it's nothing to sing about since it's extremely simple and effective. But I noticed something terrible, my little SB-600 had not enough power :(

I had to shoot at ISO200 (and under exposed a stop, by accident) to get this picture done and my flash was already at 1/1 power.

And I'm still not really comfortable to shoot at ISO 400 with my D80, it's getting to noisy.

I also keep noticing that my fast lenses have a problem with precise focusing since the AF fields of my camera are pretty big, compared to the modern models from Nikon, which can analyze a much smaller field.

yes I setup an umbrella in the lab and I'm official a geek, but hey the pictures look so much nicer and it's so much easier and faster to get the right exposure (mostly...) and effect in manual mode.

Sure you could shoot in A mode, but why if you can do so much more in M mode?

Example:

• aperture= effects flash and ambient
  
• shutter speed = effects only ambient light
• iso = effects only ambient light

So the increase in shutter speed equals less ambient light and the decrease means more ambient light.

Someday I will understand how the whole ratio thing works...

...ok I am proud of zero reflection's in the glasses, but some shadow's are off and could have used a second flash or a reflector in front of her.

well currently I'm playing a little bit with manual focus since my macro does beautiful pictures (ok it's the photographer, but well the lens helps a lot) and my eyes can't be to bad, it's just that i have to learn the technique, but so far I have a hit or miss ratio of 50% which is not to bad.

Are I'm going to invest in a manual focus lens? Well I'm not that sure about it yet. But hey used classics are much cheaper than new lenses.

on the other hand since I sold my 70-300mm. Mhm I found out that I like my current collection very much and just miss something in the 35mm range.

anyway the best candid of the night to the left, in B&W since it was shot at iso 1600. Yes the Nikon D80 sucks for low iso compared to modern cameras like the Nikon D3 or D700. But hey in two years you can get them most likley for very nice prices. And I just took 8k pictures so far with my D80 and I'm totally happy with it, except that it's a bit small in my hands.