Well does anybody know what kind of flower this is? I hate to take pictures of stuff I don't know. As a reference bunnies eat it and is ca 12 wide.

Taken with Nikon D80 + 90mm macro + 1.4 TC, hand held at iso 800.

yes would be nicer without the noise, but there is no space for a 70-200mm F/2.8 + camera with 90mm macro and a flash. So the flash had to stay at home for now...

Well my quest for the holy grail of chipmunk images starts to return the first results. I still don't get closer than maybe 8 yards of them and I'm covered in dirt after trying to sneak up to these little bastards. But at least I start to get reliable results with the tamron 70-200m F/2.8 + TC 1.4

now I just need to get 7 yards closer to them, maybe I should watch caddy shack again...

I discovered Herby, he was hidden under tree and covered in rust and dirt...

he is even missing his number :(

Like with every embassy appointment, I arrived early, way to early, about 2 hours to early. So I took the time to take some pictures in the area of the German consulate and I really like the area so far and would love to live there.

It's just so beautiful.

At least 3 shots out of 800 turned out to be pretty nice. And I really like the flying bird, which is pretty sharp.

• my first successful bird in flight
  
• just four birds
  
  
  


• the three stugges
  

At moments like this I wish I had a Nikon D300 and a Nikon 300mm AFS, the Nikon D80 is a wounder full camera, but the focus tracking is really really awful sometimes.

And it finally managed to catch up and focus when the bird landed with the crab...

well the longer I look at this picture the more it bugs me, for example all the detail in the hair was lost.

Well now it's back and I really should be happy with this look.

Btw this is the original picture our of camera with 0 adjustments

Since I was not really happy with the original version, I went back to the drawing board and did some more magic. I guess now it really rocks :)

well the post processing is done and I got lots of very beautiful shots out of it and think Kim is going to be very happy.
It also gave me the chance to test some new methods of post processing

1. overexposed by two stops to archive this classic pin up high contrast look.
   


2. This picture was just beautiful composition wise but totally out of focus, well 15 minutes of work transform it into a classic piece of art :)
   


3. Kim was trying to reach for her daughter (which tried to knock over my light stands) and I really like the dynamic of this composition (sadly the framing is a bit off)
   
   


4. just a beautiful mum and daughter picture
   
   


5. Well I went a little bit nut's with the lightning, contrast and exposure brush but boy it looks cool!
   
   


6. slightly out of focus but after all a very nice composition with some simple post processing
   
   


7. well simple black and white and just looks nice
   
   


8. it feels nice to look sexy
   
   


9. and last but not least, it's always sunny in davis...
   
   

all the post processing was done using only adobe lightroom, which shows the power of this program quite well. And I had a lot of fun :)

The rest of this set can be found under zenfolio

all the pictures where taken using a Nikon D80, available light and a nikon 35mm F/2 or Tamron 70-200mm F/2.8

And really the last picture,

Just using the sun and the shade in some trees without any post processing.

something smells fishy in the state california,

today I went with Kim and her cute little daughter to take some potraets of them (which turned to be excellent, since I just finished the first sd card and have around 25 shots already) and my camera misfired about 50% of the tim...

you press the shutter button and it just refuses to fire. Now It could be that the onboard flash just overheated, since it worked fine when I use it without the flash. Which I just hope and which tells me I shoot to many pictures and should get a dedicated commander or worse pocketwizards (perfect solution just so expensive...)

I also ended up with alot of natural light shot's which seem to be quiete nice. It's impressive what happens at the golden hour. They just have this WOW quality and need barley postprocessing.

Ok how do I shoot potraits?

available light only:

1. go in manual mode
2. set your desired aperature
3. set your desired shutter speed
4. set auto iso to 800 and let it figure out the rest
5. as metering matrix or spot metering, depending on situation

flash and available light combination:

1. go in manual mode
2. set shutter speed to 1/250th
3. set an aperature of your choice
4. set iso two 200 - 400 to reduce the workload for the flashs
5. arange you light's, basically one on the left, one from the front
6. set them to 1/2
7. chimp with the display,iso,flash power,aperature till you get the correct exposure
8. balance with the ambient light. Rule of dumb, the slower the shutter speed, the more ambiant light you get

important lesson:

put some heavy stuff on your lightstands/umbrellas. Since the wind blows them over which means you loose 40$ for some new umbrellas or try to fix them with ducttape.

well today I received my new bag pack, which I had to order because my old bag pack is to large as carry on these days and boy it's beautiful in a strange way....

Basically it's an ugly sand colored cotton bag which looks like a 15$ yard sale bag and just needs to get really really dirty and some NRA*,Colt,"Shoot first ask later" stickers to become perfect.

Why?

Because it doesn't look like a camera bag, is very small and has enough space for 2 - 3 lenses, a camera and a tiny laptop in the bag.

For example it fits my travel setup:

1 x Tamron 70-200mm F/2.8 without hood
1 x Nikon D80 with 35mm F/2 attached
1 x IBM X60 Laptop and power supply (no love for the mac book, it's to big)
1 x small Lens X - maybe the sigma 10-20, did not test it yet or a small mono pod at the bottom


That's the one


*NRA = national rifle association

lenses for portraits on DX framed cameras (1.5 crop factor)

well after taking a lot of pictures in the last two years and testing a lot of lenses and cameras I'm finally able to make a statement about what stuff to use what situation at a defined working distance.

Currently this is my standard approach

• full body 35mm F/2
• half body 50mm F/1.8
• headshot 90mm F/2.8

This allows me to be 2 - 3 yards/meters away from the model and communicate in a normal way without screaming out of my lungs. It also permits my flash system to work without trouble. If I shoot available light or need to be able to switch focal distances quickly I moving over to the heavy and big 70-200mm F/2.8. It's very flexible but demands shutter speeds of 1/250s and some distance to the model, since it can be intimidating.

well after googeling a bit, I found a nice dual bracket holder:

http://cgi.ebay.com.au/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=250279099019

which could fix my: flash has not enough power problem and should be cheaper in the long run.

1 x SB-800 = 320$
1 x SB-600 = 170$

2 x SB-600 + Flash bracket = 400$

ok It's maybe cheaper to get an SB-800, but two SB-600 have much more power than a single SB-800.
It's a moot point anyway since I need a controller first. The nikon cameras can only control two bank.

I'm not even sure if I want to stick with CLS since it work's perfect inside, but is pretty unreliable outside, since the communication signal can't bounce off anywhere, maybe it's time that radio poppers drop by like 50% in price...

well after taking the potraits of lindsay today, first time ever with two umbrellas in public and testing something totally new. Yes i am a photo nerd...

Well SB-600 are great flashes for indoor work or to work in the shade with, but they are pretty much useless in the bright sun. They have just not enough power and it seems that I won't buy anymore of them.

Seems that the next flash will be an SB-800 or I have to shoot pictures after the 'golden' hour. An SB-900 would be even nicer, but at 500$ a pop and SB-800 for 300$ a pop, well it's not really a question anymore.
After all it's just a hobby...

I also could just shoot at ISO-400 or ISO-800, but this means that I never get nice sharp sparkling eyes. And a portrait without these is just pointless. Ok there is a solution to shoot sparkling eyes at up to ISO 1600 - 3200, it's called D3/D700 and way out of the reach of my wallet. (For now at least)

Why a third flash in the first place?

now I need a hair light or rim light from time to time to give my pictures this particular edge and to be more flexible.

well I finally start to understand adobe lightroom and discovered the greatest feature ever, the exposure brush. Basically you can lighten,darken parts of a pictures with the touch of a brush. The effects are quite amaizing.

For example, before:



and after adjustments and partial desaturation using exposure brush + reducing the exposure in some parts



so you need photoshop CS3/gimp less and less these days, thanks to photoshop light room.

Today I did some potrait shots with my two flashes, umbrellas, couple of gels and my nikon 35mm F/2 and Tamron 70-200mm F/2.8

well this is going to be an interesting weekend, basically I'm going to practice shooting pictures for a small photo shoot with a friend on Monday.

And so far I pretty much decided that I want to use:

• hard light
• long shadows
• black & white

and on the other hand

• very soft light
• some highlights on the wall, most likely snooted and colored
  

only issue I got, I maybe need a third flash (SB600/800/900) for this, which I don't really want to buy right now, since I spend so much money this year on this hobby.

Anyway most of the things I can do with two flash's, just the one thing is unsure.

this are some ideas:

mostly pretty hard and dramatic:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/hlyeoh/2727419975/in/pool-strobist
http://www.flickr.com/photos/hlyeoh/2727419855/in/pool-strobist
http://www.flickr.com/photos/stobe187/2733699624/in/pool-strobist
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dezdemonchik/2735855354/in/pool-strobist
http://www.flickr.com/photos/25565901@N04/2738740399/in/pool-strobist
http://www.flickr.com/photos/24296421@N05/2741171712/in/pool-strobist
http://www.flickr.com/photos/crosswarrior/2734190095/in/pool-strobist

soft and should be pretty easy

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cornelategan/2740679881/in/pool-strobist
http://www.flickr.com/photos/24862159@N02/2736516757/in/pool-strobist
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeremyjuel/2711008187/in/pool-strobist

well i will do a practice run on saturday evening with lindsay and see how it turns out.

Today my 1.4 TC arrived + monopod and some other goodies. So I happily went outside and started snapping away to see how good it is. Well from 100 pictures not a single picture was usefull and the AF basically does not work anymore (only if you have extreme amount's of light). This seems to be a camera issue + tc + lens issue. And I'm not sure if it's related that the lens and TC are incompatible. Who sponsors me a D300 so I can compare it against another camera?

Anyway so I setup a small bunny with a SB600 to the left and to the right, use iTTL to save work and put the camera in aperature mode. This are the results of the 100% crops, and as we can see this combination is pretty sharp wide open a F/2.8 + 1 Stop and get's much better a F/8 + 1. At F/11 + 1 it get's worth again.

All pictures were shot with a D80, on a tripod at 200mm x 1.4, iso 100

results

F/2.8 + 1

F/4 + 1

F/5.6 + 1

F/8 + 1

F/11 + 1

So guess I have to try to figure out how to get some nice pictures now in nature. If I got enough time, than there is no problem to manual focus on the oject on my choice.

Well I'm saving for the 300mm F/4 anyway and that's why I bought the TC originally.

Well these are basically my favorite pictures from today. I just love how the 70-200mm renders the colors and how well it handles. The color pictures are shot with one of two flashes and the black and white are natural light mostly wide open.

I start to get the hang of the lens and surprisingly it's not getting heavy at all.

strobist meeting in davis,

to say short it was a lot of fun, I shot close to 800 pictures, and was happy to have the laptop with me. Since my 3 x 1GB SD cards are really not enough anymore and I have to buy 1 or 2 4 - 8 GB SD cards.

well more comes later, since I have to sort pictures.

the same cat after removing the noise and playing a bit with the colors and crop.

so far I really like the new Tamron 70-200 F/2.8 lens.

And only 2 More days till the TC 1.4 and mono pod arrives so watch out you evil chipmunks!

Pictures are both taken handheld at 1/60s and 1/100s, iso800, boosted 1 stop in post processing to 1600 and slight contrast enhancements.

The first picture was taken at F/3.5 and the second at F/2.8

ok this first images are taken and things too notice

• chipmunks are to fast for me, I can't get close(tc comes on friday I hope, so i can get closer)
  
• !/250 are way to low for this lens, you need at least 1/500 or some kind of support (monopod comes on friday I hope)
• focus works extremely well, I think as good as it gets for my D80. As a reference the chipmunk was the size of the main focus point in the viewfinder

around 9 am this morning I heard a big clunk, and tap tap tap outside my door. So I start to investigate and see, the ups driver dropped... my package in front of my door and left again. Without even knocking. Normally I don't mind if they do this, but in case of a 700$ pacakge, well I expected more.

Anyway my tamron 70-200mm F/2.8 arrived and my first impression are:

• boy this thing is huge
• damn it's heavy
• darn I need a new bag for this thing
• i like it

So it seems all to be good and I went to work.

more comes as soon as I got some pictures done and got used to this lens.

well since exactly 2 minutes I'm a so called professional photographer.

what is the meaning of this?

the definition of an amateur:

An amateur is generally considered a person attached to a particular pursuit, study, or science, without formal training or pay

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amateur


The definition on the other hand is much longer and can be found on the same wikipedia site, but basically it means that you get paid for what you do.

Now how do I get paid as photographer?

It's pretty simple, on average 80 people visit my zenfolio page each month and several print pictures of my work. Now there is nothing wrong with it in principle and I'm happy if people look at my work online, but if somebody hangs a picture of me in his living room...

Well I want a cut, for this reason I started a little experiment. I upgraded my zenfolio account to a professional level and pay for this service a certain fee every year. This gives me the possibility to automatically get amount X of each printed picture depending on size and price.

So lets see how long it takes till the membership is paid for. It also means that family members get a coupon from me and can get any picture for free.

My current pricing formula is:

price = baseprice (set by print provider) * 1.6

which should be pretty fair.

examples:

5x7 print cost 99 cents from mpix + 52 cent my cut + 7 cent zenfolio cut = 1.58 total price, which is more or less the same ritz camera charges for printouts togo in davis.

and hey you can even order mugs and T-Shirts with my pictures...

grails still hates me,

the last couple of hours I tried to figure out why my multipartform did not work with g:actionsubmit as they were supposed to be. They always used "get" instead of "post" and so they failed.

solution:

You need to define this in your interceptor of the controller. It is ugly, but it works.

// temporary hack since g.actionSubmit does not work with multipart forms
if (params["_action_save"]) {
save()
}
else if (params["_action_update"]) {
update()
}
else if (params["_action_delete"]) {
delete()
}
else if (params["_action_Save"]) {
save()
}
else if (params["_action_Update"]) {
update()
}
else if (params["_action_Delete"]) {
delete()
}


you can read more about this issue here:

http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/GRAILS-2774

well it seems that my little photo set is more or less complete after 2.5 years and I'm only missing a 300mm prime, like the nikon 300mm F/4 to take wildlife pictures (which won't happen this year)

after my trading frenzy last month I ended with the nearly perfect set which is more or less future proof, since there will be a FX camera for under 1000$ in the next 4 years.

• 1 x Nikon D80
  
• 2 x SB-600 flashes
• 1 x Nikon 50mm F/1.8
  
• 1 x Nikon 35mm F/2
  
• 1 x Tamron 90mm F/2.8
• 1 x Tamron 80-200mm F/2.8
• 1 x Tamron 1.4 TC
  
• 1 x Sigma 10-20
• 2 x lighstand + umbrella + swivel
• 1 x Bogen Tripod with head
• 1 x Bogen Monopod with head

several bags, filters and other stuff

Stuff which I had, sold, traded

• Nikon 80-200mm F/2.8 push pull
• Nikon 17-55mm F/2.8
• Nikon 70-300mm VR
• Nikon D50
• Nikon 70-300mm NON VR
• Nikon 28-80mm
• Tamron 200-400
• Tokina 19-35mm (still for sale)
• 1 x Nikon MB-D80 battery grip (still up for sale, just barley use it)

Money spend after all this trading and shifting of stuff, 900$ which was 300$ more than I planned too. Yes I really wanted to have the 35m F/2 for my upcoming berlin trip...

Another interesting thing is how many pictures I took with all this stuff and actualy kept

• Nikon D50, 15000 pictures taken
• Nikon D80, 9000 pictures taken

Of these 24000 pictures I kept 2000 pictures on my harddrive, without a backup which I really have to change and uploaded 360 pictures.

If I would have taken these pictures with classical analog film and had it developed (no prints!) it would had been 11000$ developement cost for the negatives.

Now my photo equipment cost roughly 3000$ and has a resale value of ca 2500$ (better than my car!), which translates into 16c per picture, which is not to bad.

why do I do this calculation? To convince myself to stop spending money on camera gear and actually travel more. I'm also really bored right now and sleep deprived.

...but hey I spend 1800$ on beds so far, which have a resale value of maybe 100 - 200$...

oh grails why do you hate me...

ok the last couple of days I was trying to get grails + a webservice server + a webservice client running. So my first choice was the xfire plugin which worked great.

Now I wanted to create a client in grails to access one of my services. So lets use groovy ws for this. Well nice thinking, but like always you get fancy exception and reading onlien just tells you that they are not compatible.

Basically thats the exception you get:

org.codehaus.groovy.runtime.InvokerInvocationException: java.lang.LinkageError: loader constraints violated when linking javax/xml/namespace/QName class

with some pages of stack trace. Now I was tracing down all the jars and try to resolve this conflict which worked out somehow.

It turned out you need to delete some jars, if you use groovyws and the xfire plugin in the same grails application.

so go ahead and remove these two jars from the plugins/xfire***/lib directory

• stax-api-1.0.1.jar
• jsr173_api-1.0.jar

Now you can restart your grails application and it should work.

And least it did for me.

yay I just won my first game of chess against the computer in a long long time

[Event "Casual Game"]
[Site "San Francisco, U.S.A."]
[Date "2008.08.01"]
[Round "-"]
[White ", wohlgemuth"]
[Black "Apple Chess 2.3"]
[Result "1-0"]
[Time "00:29:20"]
[BlackType: "program"]

1. e4 e5
2. Nc3 Nf6
3. Nf3 Nc6
4. d4 exd4
5. Nxd4 Nxd4
6. Qxd4 d6
7. Nd5 c5
8. Qa4 b5
9. Qxb5 Bd7
10. Qb7 Nxe4
11. Nc7 Ke7
12. Nxa8 Qa5
13. c3 f5
14. b4 cxb4
15. cxb4 Qe5
16. Be2 Qxa1
17. O-O Qxa2
18. f3 Qxe2
19. fxe4 fxe4
20. Bg5 Ke8
21. Nc7


thanks to the power of long island ice teas...

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.

now the comparison between the 17-55 and the 19-35mm is a little bit different. Here we can clearly see differences between these two lenses.

The Nikon is definitely superior at F/3.5 and F/4.5 since the Tokina is very soft at this apertures. But since the focal length are used for landscape pictures anyway, well it doesn't really matter. And you also don't really use this for potraits. Well you use 35mm for potraits, but for this I would just order a Nikon 35mm F/2 or Sigma F/1.4 which cost less than 300$ these days.

But once you hit F/8 the lenses are pretty much equal again and the tokina holds it's stand very well and even seems to have better CA values. Once you hit F/11 both lenses start to get soft again, thanks to difraction, but the Tokina seems to be a touch faster.

Well the message is clear. Return the 17-55mm, buy a 35mm F/2, which can be used on full frame in the future and put the rest of the money towards your saving account for a nice trip.

I could test my sigma 10-20 now against it, but this is getting pretty pointless after I already know that I return it.