ok today I spend all my day time working on a self portrait of me. This seems like the final result and I'm quite satisfied with myself.
I also figured out that I give myself a Nikon D80 + MB-D80 for (early) Christmas and trying to see what I can get for my D50 before I invest the money to fix it.
Time to go to a party now :)
ok so I played the last couple of hours with:
stripes
eclipse
myeclipse
and testing how simple it is to develop applications. So far I have to say that vraptor2 is much easier to use than stripes, but stripes itself is pretty mighty and easy to use. Specially compared to struts.
Sadly the combination of myeclipse + stripes + jboss doesn't work very well together which means I need to have two installations up and running.
first developing using myeclipse, the jsp editor is just wonderful
second deploy and testing with eclipse wtp
time to find another jsp editor, which is at least as good as the myeclipse editor...
this week I spend most of my time with paypal.
The basic idea was to create a couple of accounts to synchronize my banking accounts in the us with the accounts in germany and other way around. Which was supposed to be a easy task turned out to be a freaking nightmare, we will see if it worked mid to end next week.
I also checked out a couple of nikon cameras and got several estimates to get my camera fixed.
Final solution:
I get an IR filter as soon as i get my paycheck and switch the scratched element with the help of a friend. He does the soldring, I take the thing apart and lucky me, I have access to a dust free enviorement at work.
I never belived that it can have so many advantages to work in a lab.
The weekend will be pretty boring, just a party on saturday evening and the rest of the time I will end up working. Like always, the todo list gets longer and longer and I want to learn some new programming standards.
Last but not least,
http://stripes.mc4j.org/confluence/display/stripes/Home
seems like a pretty cool webframework.
Dear readers as you can see I have several advertisements on this website. These are created based on content in the blog and I would highly appreciate if you click on these advertisements from time to time.
This supports me with some money which I can put in better camera gear...
For example this is the report for the last couple of days:
| Date | Page impressions | Clicks | Page CTR | Page eCPM | Earnings |
| 7/10/2007 | 10 | 0 | 0.00% | 0 | 0 |
| 7/11/2007 | 4 | 0 | 0.00% | 0 | 0 |
| 7/12/2007 | 9 | 0 | 0.00% | 0 | 0 |
| 7/13/2007 | 15 | 0 | 0.00% | 0 | 0 |
| 7/14/2007 | 14 | 0 | 0.00% | 0 | 0 |
| 7/15/2007 | 25 | 2 | 8.00% | 30.46 | 0.76 |
| 7/16/2007 | 10 | 0 | 0.00% | 0 | 0 |
| 7/17/2007 | 4 | 0 | 0.00% | 0 | 0 |
| 7/18/2007 | 4 | 0 | 0.00% | 0 | 0 |
| 7/19/2007 | 5 | 0 | 0.00% | 0 | 0 |
| 7/20/2007 | 1 | 0 | 0.00% | 0 | 0 |
| 7/21/2007 | 30 | 2 | 6.67% | 44.88 | 1.35 |
| 7/22/2007 | 5 | 1 | 20.00% | 134.64 | 0.67 |
| Totals | 136 | 5 | 3.68% | 20.45 | 2.78 |
| Averages | 10 | 0 | 0.21 |
Ok thats the best I can do to remove the scratch on my camera using photoshop.
Basically the scratch causes reflection which darken specific pixels and in return you have the dark line of the picture. Now I can lighten this line with very careful dodging...
The problem is this is really time consuming and took me close too 2 hours to correct.
So I came up with following plan,
1. order an infrared filter
2. replace the scratched element with the filter
3. sell the converted nikon D50
4. buy a nikon D80/D90, this will be around august/September
The reason that I convert the camera instead of fixing is, the IR version have a higher resale value than normal versions.And I'm quite sure i can find an electrician who is able to install me this filter for 50$.
After I read more about this procedure it seems fairley easy, except for the soldering part.
i'm also starting to like the vivitar el cheapo flash.
The bad
- sucks batteries dry
- not many adjustments possible
- very large and ugly
- problems to trigger with the optical trigger
The good
- it does what its supposed todo
- very easy to use
- very powerful compared to the sb-600
Over all I prefer the SB-600 compared to the vivitar. Mainly because I can adjust it in very fine steps and works perfectly with nikon cameras. But the SB-600 cost also 189$ compared to the 89$ of the vivitar, which does what it's supposed todo.
And its wonderful to have a second flash, as you can see with the fish pictures. These shots would have not been possible with only a single flash. it also works very nice to highlight shadows in case of 'teddy' portraits.
Basically what you are going todo is put the vivitar somewhere to provide enough light to fill your object of interest. And use the second flash for removing unwanted shadows or setting highlights.
today I decided to play a little bit with chanel based saturation. And for this I decided to annoy lindsay fish 'diablo" a little bit which is by now 33 cm long.
So we put on flash to the right site of the tank, one flash on top of the tank and taking 10 - 20 picture to find the right exposure for this job.
Sadly I was not able to use autofocus, cause the water was playing havoc with the system from my D50. If you look at the picture, specially close to the Fin you can clearly see the scratch, which I still need to correct in photoshop, but this will take a little bit. The fish is fairly complex with all his scales.
now about these specific look,
this is actually very easy to accomplish you just need to reduce the saturation of each color channel. In this case it was green/yellow to remove the color from the plant and blue/aqua to remove the water color.
did I mention I love light room? It is so simple todo these kinds of things. And like always we have trouble with the blown highlights. Because the scales are so reflective. I tried to compensate for it, but it doesn't always work as i want and these where the only usable shots out of 100 pictures or so.
oh last, but not least use a circular polarizer to remove reflections from the fishtank. This can be even improved if you turn off all lights in the room. The used aperture was around F/8 and the used shutter speed around 500 to get rid of the ambient light. The flash's where triggered over pc cord or an optical trigger. And the pccord is just frustrating, you need to check the connections all 2 minutes
ok now after trying a couple of hours to remove the 'scratch' in the picture I gave up. i'm just not able to remove it and all what happens is that the picture looks fake. i tried dodging and cloning.
ok these two pictures are the same. The left is before "photoshop repair" the right is after repair. It took roughly 20 minutes to fix these simple picture up and tommorrow I going to shoot some birds to see how hard it is to fix these up. And afterwards I will figure out what next.
At least I learned for the future dust cleaning is easy, but I wont do a wet cleaning again.
Just to dangerous...
http://www.nikonians.org/nikon/d80/nikon_d80_2.html
here we can see an overview off all camera systems. The D50 and D70s are not longer produced and only used available for around 400 - 600$. Which means it makes not really sens to fix my D50 because it is already close too 2 years old, has a third of its lifetime down (15k releases, rated arround 30 - 45k releases before shutter needs to be replaced) and the flash is dead.
So it will be most likley the D80 or if they announce the new model i will prob with this. The 1500$ for the D200 is just way to much for a hobby. And the main difference is shooting speed (would love to have 5fps) and all controls are accessible over buttons instead of a menu.
And 869$ vs 1500$ is quite a difference...
So I read a little bit more about the idea to replace to scratched sensor element with an infrared/new element and this element cost around 95$, but the problem is you need to take the camera apart in all little pieces which scares the hell out of me for obvious reason. The instructions are here
http://www.lifepixel.com/IR.htm
I could do it except the soldering part, where I'm missing the tools and the practice. So it seems like I have to pay the fee for it, if i go this way.
Ok this is the result after a simple test series of some stepuprings on a white cutting board.
And as we can see the scratch becomes clearly visible at f/5.6 and barley visible at F/4.0. Which tells us we can use the camera for portraets, but nothing else. So I need to find a solution for this problem.
The pictures are at aperatures of f/1.8, f/2.8, f/4.0, f/5.6 and I used a sb-600 on ttl settings for this pictures.
ok the first test of making a realistic picture with a scratch sensor as we can see we can't see anything because the aperature is to large. We used 6.3/7.1 and one flash in the top picture. As you can see you got some very hard shadows on the right side and all over the 'teddy'. For this reason we fire the second flash bounced of the the ceiling. It takes care of removing most of the unwanted shadows.
The setup was a sb-600 from the left connected over a standard pc cord and set too manual. The second flash was triggered over an optical trigger. Sadly the trigger works only once out of 5 times. Now the question is, is it related to the cheap vivatar flash or is it related to the trigger. The trigger also wont fire on my sb-600.
The main problem was that the flash both where to powerfull. Specially the vivatar, cause I can only set it to 1/16th output. The sb-600 can be set to 1/64th and can be adjusted in 1/3 ev.
So the vivitar flash does what it is supossed to be, but I could need 45 feet of pc-cord and a y-adapter so I can trigger both flash over the synccords. Which is more reliable, than the optical trigger. Basically I need to adjust the trigger so that its show directly to the sb-600 or it wont fire.
Time to make a test series at which aperature the scratch in the sensor becomes visible. I still don't understand how it happend, it makes no sense. That the specialiced cotton pads are able to scratch the sensor. Maybe it is just residue, but it certainly does not seems so. I tried to remove it with several sensor cleaning solutions, but nothing works.
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 trul
y 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.
