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...

well I'm sitting here and look at the pictures I took with the DP-1 from sigma and have to say that I'm very very happy that I did not buy this camera. It's not the fault of the camera, the pictures are nothing special, but very nice for such a small camera and the handling of the camera was very good, but boy the software sucks. I never saw just an ugly piece of software. Even the nikon software is nices, which says a lot..

Well my current result

• manual focus is nice
• fixed lens is interesting, but bad on a compact camera, some zoom would be nice
• it's just to pricey, half the price would be good
• software is impossible to use
• manual controls work very well

final conclusion, lets wait 1 - 2 years or see what the EVIL standard brings.

I'm also so frustrated right now and really tempted to just buy anything. But for some reason all the things which are interesting are out of stock...

Well time to go back on the balcony and wait that the hawk which is circling my house finally lands somewhere close enough for me.

I can convince myself to buy a 300mm F/4 (out of stock) but why the hell is there no 400mm F/4 of F/5.6? the next bigger lens from nikon is the 400mm F/2.8 for 5k+ or the 500mm F/5.6 for 5k+ too.

well being back from Germany and preparing my self to go to Boston for a week.

On the left a tree in the berlin tiergarten, exciting isn't it?

...still trying to figure out how to take great landscapes...

just some dog shots for lindsay...

Just spending the day outside and still working on my street photography. And well so far nobody complained that I took there picture and most of them I deleted anyway.

Basically these are the only ones which had a nice expression. If you happen to recognize your self and don't want this picture be able to see, please drop me a line and I remove it.

just being bored at the airport in chicago a couple of days and happily snapping away till I got the 'look' from one of the airport security guys...

The car picture was just taken to practice panning at low shutter speeds and get some feeling of speed into the picture.

...i'm weak...

I bought an ipod touch 16GB...

...and I still don't really know why...

...maybe I don't want to pay thousands for an iphone?

A couple of days I was asked to take a couple of pictures at a soccer game to help somebody to evaluate the tamron 70-200 F/2.8.

His focus was to use it for highschool sports at night times and in the evening. Now noramlly there are lights on during these kind of events, but in my case it was very dark, I was barley able to see anything in the viewfinder and the lights were off...

Means I went to the absolute max of the Nikon D80 and shot at ISO 6400 (3200 in camera and +1 stop in pp) at F/2.8 and 1/50s. Normally you would shoot soccer at 1/500 - 1/1000s to freeze the players.

After all I was surprised that I got some usable pictures at all out of this. I would never imagined that the camera could focus or produce an usable exposure.

Well needless to say, the person was very happy with the result.

...i really need to stop starting all my posts with 'well'...

Well I really have to learn to take good macros. I normally get the color right, but i never get the sharpness I'm looking for.
Maybe I need to stop using natural light for this kind of stuff and use speed lights again.

But I seriously need to find a way to make money with this hobby, since it becomes way to expensive. There are so many toys I want and I hate to wait and save...

some things are weird I was really not happy with the 17-55mm F/2.8, but I'm really sad that I returned it. For some strange reason I miss this lens.

Some squirrels are to curious for there own good...

And my tamron 70-200 + TC seems to have front focus issues at really close distances which is normal for a combination like this. I did not really expect to ever need the macro functionality of this lens...

I always woundered how people get these really nice sunset color done, whenever I tried it, well It never looked real...

So I kept reading and the answer was like always very simple. Define a fixed white balance instead of auto white balance. If you use auto white balance, it just washes out and looks like 'blah'

The picture itself is nothing special and really boring, acceptable composition, blurry trees, but the colors start to go the way they are supposed to be.