after I received my wet cleaning kit it happened that it scratched my sensor or in other words I can throw my camera now away.

life sucks :(

Now I try to figure out what my options are.

1. I send the camera in to get it fixed and pay 300$ for it
2. i send the camera in and get it converted to IR which includes a new filter (which replace the scratched) and it cost 300$ + I need a new camera
3. I buy a nikon D80 which cost 900$ - need to save money a month
4. I buy a nikon D200 which cost 1500$ - need to save money 3 month

for the moment I wait till the new Nikon products are released and decide than what I gonna do, but it truly sucks. It also makes no sense to buy a used D50 which cost 500$ and the Nikon D80 is better, but i would prefer the D200 which is a truly better than the D50.

time to save money...

the big question is can I justify spending 1500$ for a camera body. And the D80 just is missing a couple of features i really want to have. For example the 5fps or that you can set everything with a button on the camera instead of browsing the menus.

So basically what is different:

- 5fps vs 3fps
- weather sealed vs non sealed
- metal vs plastic body
- can meter with all lenses instead only with newer AF lenses
- d200 has no problems with metering vs the buggy matrix meter of the D80
- D80 feels wrong in my hands and needs battery grip to feel right

But for the 1500$ instead of 900$ I could also get my D50 converted, which would allow me than to shoot infrared and a nice lens. I also could afford the D80 in august/september compared to the D200 which I could not afford before Christmas. And I would hate to have a vacation and having no camera...

So most likely I do the smart thing and get a D80 or the new model which is supposed to be released next week. And send the D50 in to get converted to RI and use it in this mode or sell it over ebay. Maybe I can recover 200$...

yay, not

today I received my flash and I have to say I should have ordered a nikon SB-600 instead. It works nice but its so bulky and the sb-600 is way more accurate. So I think I will play with it over the weekend and in the worst case it goes to ebay to recover some money.

i also ordered to much stuff with it. Like 2 adappters instead of 1 needed and 2 wires instead of one because i could trigger it with a integrated slave...

lesson learned only buy nikon flashs in future.

and another 50$ spent for a wet sensor cleaning kit. I so hope it gets the damn camera cleaned. I think I tried everything now...

All what happens is that I very successfull spread the dust from one corner into another corner and the blower is not strong enougth to get the stuff of the sensor.

i'm honestly getting broke on shipping costs. maybe I should make a plan for the next time to get all in one shipment and don't order useless stuff like 30 feet flash wire when I need 3 feet. lesson: don't shop at 4 am in the morning, you tend todo stupid things...

Maybe I find somebody who needs flash cables or hotshoe adapters...

Btw the las vegas paris to the left. And I need to find a programm to correct the distortions in my ultra wide angle pictures.

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$...

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.

for some weird reason all people ditched me tonight so I spend a nice evening home and watched some tv and read some articles. Long story short I read about a technique to make details in paper visible related to the angle of flash. So I started to play with light and shadows and got soon some first results. They are not perfect yet, I miss some more details in the lettering, means I want that the single letter have a kind of 3D effect. But for a first try it was not to bad.

These shots specially look very nice at 100% when you can see the fine structure of the paper.

btw the first person who finds out which book it is get a cookie, which is quiete easy if you know how to use google...

duck breast with zuchini in tarragorn sauce for 4 persons

you need

1 liter chicker stock/broth
60 gram flower
60 gramm butter
2 lbs duck breast
some fresh tarragorn
salt
pepper
1/2 cup whipping cream
2 zuchini large

how to do it

the duck

- season sautee pan
- sautee duck
- serve hot

the zuchini

- sautee zucchini in well seasoned pan
- once they are done serve it as side to the chicken

the sauce

- heat the broth in a 2 quart pan till it slightly boils
- take a 2 quart sauce pan
- gently melt the butter in it
- stir flower into melted butter till you have a toaster smeeling paste
- add the hot broth from the other pan in small steps and keep steering
- gently cook it for 2 hours
- skim of the fat from time to time

- 10 minutes before you serve the dish take some tarragorn and use your pestel and mortar to "crush" it
- add a little bit of your sauce to the crushed leafs in the mortar
- keep working the motar and pestel for 5 more minutes
- add these deep green liquid paste now to the rest of the sauce and gently cook it
- add the cream to the sauce and salt/pepper to taste
- keep it slightly boiling for 1 - 2 more minutes

serve it to the duck and the zuchini. And again I recommend some bread to the dish.

chicken in white wine sauce with zuchini for 4 person

you need

1 x cup heavy whipping cream
1 x cup white wine (pinot grigio/sauvignon/chardonay)
some flower
1 x fine chopped onion
4 x chicken brest filet
2 x sliced zuchini
salt
pepper

how to do it

chicken + sauce:

- season pan with some salt and pepper
- sautee chicken breast till its done in a sautee pan
- remove chicken from the sautee pan and put it on plates
- add onions to the sautee pan
- put some flower over the onions and keep hot for 2 - 3 minutes till the flower is all spread out and nice and brown
- add wine and cream at the same time
- put to low heat
- stir it a couple of minutes till it has a smoot texture
- add salt and pepper to taste, if you seasoned the pan enough you don't need todo this
- filter sauce
- put sauce over chicken

zuchini

- sautee zucchini in well seasoned pan
- once they are done serve it as side to the chicken


the complete dish takes arround 10 minutes to prepare and 20 minutes on the stove. Enjoy. As I tip I suggest to provide some bread to the dish.

currently I'm sitting bored at home and decided to check lufthansa.com to see how the safety regulation changed since last year and how large a backpack can be. And suprise my favorite backpack is not longer allowed on board because it exceeds the new limits.

Thx lufthansa for doing this to me.

today I read a new article at one of my favorite sites, strobist.com. Vivitar just introduced a cheap all manual flash which I promptly ordered.

I want to try to work with several flashes since a long time, specially related to macro stuff. But i just refuse to pay 320$ for a Nikon flash which would allow me todo this...

...so i paid 80$ for the vivitar which does the same and just looks ugly and is 100% manual. So i gonna learn something and don't have to toy with this fancy i-ttl from nikon. I use the i-ttl with my nikon SB-600 which is nice but not really needed.

now it just needs 7 - 8 days till its delivered. So I gonna play with it at the weekend afterward. I also ordered some color filter samples which where free of charge (0.01$)

to the left is a picture taken with my 50mm f/1.8 lens of ceasars palace. Like always its not straight. Some day I will invest 20$ for a bubble level...

an example for las vegas prics. The cube on the left is arround 1 inch x 1 inch x 1 inch and was filled with ice cream. You also can say it was maybe 1 - 2 scoops of ice cream.

This little cube cost 10$, if I had this known before, I think I would have skipped on this. But so we got two of these and yes the ice cream was good, but not worth 20$ in my opinion...

...yay caesar palace is fun, but what you exspect from a hotel where the cheapest room cost 500$ a night?

two days ago we went to las vegas to check it out and figured, its a very nice place to be, but boy its expensive.

Lindsay's mum was so nice and paid for a very nice room in the luxor (picture to the left), so that we had once a nice hotel. i'm just always to cheap to pay 150$+ for a night for a hotel room (no breakfast or sood), motel 6 was always ok...

Food prices where interresting, the cheapest we got was some tacos for 10$ or a quesadia for 11$. This was our lunch...

For dinner we went to the luxor buffet, cause the steak resturante where I wanted togo was a little bit to pricey. I'm used to pay for a good ribeye or filet mignon arround 30$, but that sirloins are starting at 35$ and filet mignons arround 50$ was a little bit to steep for my wallet. The buffet was "only" 20$ a person and damn bad. At least we where full afterwards.

For a obvious reason we only spend a day in vegas, which means we where walking arround a lot (120 Fahrenheit/48 Celsius) cause we wanted to avoid traffic and some walking could be only good...

six hours later we where sitting in a corner, lindsay feets hurt and something was wrong with my hip, basically i'm still limping which is just rediculous. So we went back to our hotel, had dinner, dressed up and went back outside. Idea was to check out the club 'coyote ugly' which has quiete a good reputation. So we went there and had to bribe the bouncer to went in. Which was a waste of money, cause the club basically just sucked. imagine an empty room with a bar and 0 tables or chairs. So we left 2 minutes later and had some drinks in our hotel. The bar was nice and each drink was arround 12$, which was pricey but not too bad. We where supposed to had fun and we had. I was just disappointed that it is not lik you see in the good old movies (casino...)

To say short, if you see one casino, you saw them all. no free shows, the show we wanted to see was 85$ a person, so we passed on this. We both thought later that we maybe should have spent the money. But still its a rediculous ammount for the cheapest seats. We didn't even bothered to ask what the blue man group costs.

What else to say I drove back to davis today and only need 6.5 hours for the trip, new record and needed to stop 3 times to fill my tank up. Which is rediculous for a 400 mile drive. I think it was related to my average speed...

like every year at 4th of july there are lots of firework and bbq's around. So I made my first attempt shooting a firework.

After a couple of minutes I figured out that 70mm and 50mm are to long and switched to a 19-35mm lens. it turned out that the 35mm worked perfect for the job.

i set the exposure to 30 seconds and an aperature of 25.

Out of 20 shots, 8 turned out pretty well and can be found on

http://picasaweb.google.com/berlinguyinca/Firework

tommorrow we try to figure out how to make pictues of fancy hotels in las vegas. We are staying at the luxor.

this morning I went to circuit city because I read they have SD cards in stock. So I decided to get some for our Las Vegas trip in 2 days.

So I got 3 new cards and wanted to pay, when I noticed that my credit card was gone. So I paid with my secondaery card and started to figure out where I used my card.

And remembered I that we went for dinner last night at claim jumpers, so I took my trusty gps and told it find me the closest claim jumper and drove there. It worked and they handed me my card which was than used to get another piece of cake and a cheap (20$) graduated nd filter to find out how usefull it is.

I will test it tommorrow and maybe I can get some nice sunset pictures...

after my extremly exciting drive down to san diego and thx to my gps I didn't get lost, but it choice of wayfinding is retarded...

basically after the third tollroad I was out of money and now I can pay a 50$ fine because I was missing 10 cents to 1.75 for the toll...

So I decided to give this hdr hype a try and did 3 quick shots of this truck (under/neutral,overcomposed) and merged them together in photoshop. And it works quiete nice. /sofar I like it for static scenes like a parked car in an area with barley any wind. The disadvantage is that you can't use this technique if you got movement in the scene. so I going to get 2 or 3 graduate ND filter tmmorrow or so.

lets see how many i can put on my ultrawide before I get in trouble with vignetting again.

still the same picture and the same approach after some corrections in photoshop to remove dustspots.

I really need to clean my camera sensor again. Problem is only that I never got the last piece of dust of the sensor.

since lindsay is in temecula I got the whole apartement to me with gives me wounderfull possibilities to play with towels and try to shoot nice artistic pictures. Which helps me understanding the principles of flash better. For example the influence of shutter speed with the use of a flash. Basically the slower the shutters speed the higher the impact of ambiant light. This means with a very fast shutter speed the only light which hits the sensor/film is the ligth of the flash and the ambiant light is removed from the pictures.

Now I just need to understand how the aperature affects this effects.

Btw I like the picture to the bottom more, the cooler tones are something different. Normaly all the pictures I see have really warm tones.

Today I decided to give my lens a rundown and shoot some birds in Davis. Which are rediculous hard to track.

I also received my 10x15 prints and looking now for frames to hang them on the walls.

At least 1 or 2 of them.

mhm something is fishy for a weird reason my camera just stopt metering and after I turned it off and started it again it worked again.

i truly hope it doesn't break right now, cause I need at least 6 month to get the money for a new camera and the D50 is not available anymore which means I would have to get a D80 or D200 which are way to pricey for my taste. I don't see me spending 1000-1500$ on a simple body. Specially the performance of the D80 is worse (metering sucks) compared to my D50 and the D200 is way to pricey and ways like 900g.

As of matter a fact the on board flash is dead, which is a very, very bad sign.

So I truly hope its not dying on me, but it looks pretty bad so far. So I think I should start saving, I only took 10500 pictures and the warranty just ended :(

On the bright site some random guy at nuggets stopped me today and talk all kind of stuff about my car. and told me he had a 1998 Dakota and put 280k miles on it before he sold it. Which is very nice to hear, so I don't need to get a new car any time soon. Which I prob couldn't afford anyway...

...Sofar I got 150k miles...

at 4 am in the morning I finally figured out how to put maps on the gps and now it seems to work fine.

I also decided at 3.40 in the morning to drive to work to pick up my cdrom and got promptly stopped me for:

- driving with a broken headlight, didn't know it
- driving 15 mph to fast

after testing me if I was drunk and also telling me i need to have a proof of registration with me... He let me go and i was very happy about this. Just saved me a couple of hundred dollar.

yay my gps arrived lets and it works somehow. Except they send me the wrong wire and I can't upload maps, which basically makes it a pretty expensive compass...

...which doens't point north, except you move for a while..

so I try to wdo some work arrounds and put maps on an sd card or so, we will see.

To the left a little curious fellow who decided to be my daily victim

what can you do on a Friday night in Davis,

how is about running away and making a bbq at mikes place to wish Barret a good bye and much fun in San Diego.

So what we got, several programmers and it's which have all something in common. Sharp knives and cameras.
Which means we ended up with around 4 cameras and nearly every consumer lens Nikon produces.