720$ why oh why can't it be something like 300 :(
oh the power of python, I try to use it whenever possible since I hate it to be stuck with just java...
a simple program to find all files containing a space at a certain position and to rename it to the correct name needed for my system:
#!/usr/bin/python
import re, os
rxin = '.*bsksa.* _[0-9].txt'
foo = re.compile(rxin)
for fname in os.listdir(os.getcwd()):
allowed_name = re.compile(rxin).match
if allowed_name(fname):
os.rename(fname,fname.replace(' ',''))
or short, find files and replace spaces with nothing. The reg expression just filters the data.
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...
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.
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.
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...
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?
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
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.
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.
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...
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.
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...
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
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:
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
