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.

The pictures of the 17-55mm vs the 50mm speak for them self. The 50mm looks much better at F/2.8 than the 17-55mm F/2.8 at the same aperture.

How are the pictures prepared?

• tripod
• same exposure settings
• two flash setup
• taking pictures at F/2.8, F/4,F/8

The prime is at this point already stopped down, but to make clear. I do not want to proof that a prime is better than a zoom. This is obvious.
I want to make clear for my self, if I can justify to keep the zoom or if the prime is good enough.

Well the pictures make clear, I'm more happy with the 50 and can live with the inconvenience of swapping lenses for my goal. It's also so much lighter to carry several primes with you than this zoom.

conclusion

• the prime is much sharper
  
• the zoom has a nicer out of focus rendering, but the prime is pretty close, but not as smooth
  
• the prime has much better CA values (at F/8) and the CA is the same at F/1.8
  
• the zoom has better contrast

There is no reason to use the zoom at 50mm instead of the prime. So the prime wins.

well after taking about 400 pictures in the last 48h and also some more bunny shots...

...I know they are stupid, but hey they provide nice results and are a good lesson to learn how to keep the lighting constant between several shots. (More or less, my exposure was mostly 0.1 stop off between shots)

Now what did I actually compare and does it make sense todo this?

• 1 x Nikon 17-55mm F/2.8, for 1200$
• 1 x Nikon 50mm F/1.8, for 110$
• 1 x Tokina 19-35mm F/3.5 - F/4.5 for 149$

The result of the test should show how much better the Nikon 17-55 is wide open and stopped down compared to the other lenses.
One thing is sure the build quality and focus speed is far superior to the other lenses, but how much better is it optical? It is also very convenient to have one lens instead of two.

The next post is about the 17-55 F/2.8 vs the 50mm F/1.8 and the post after wards compares the 17-55 F/2.8 against the Tokina at 19mm and 35mm

...let the games begin...

maybe I have to high exspectations, but after playing with the 17-55mm F/2.8 3 hours straight, I'm still not satisfied with the quality.

At least not for the amount of money I paid for it. It is razor sharp at F/4 but at F/2.8 it seems kinda soft or has slight front focus. I think I give it a rundown over the next week and if i'm not 100% happy at Sunday I send it back and get a refund.

Which translates into the original combo of two primes, which are less convinient, but much cheaper and smaller.

In the worst case I loose 30$ shipping, which is a fraction of what it would cost to rent.

experience so far:

• + excellent build quality
• + wonderful CA handling, nearly perfect
• - not possible to shoot into the sun with it
• + razor sharp at F/4
• - kinda soft at F/2.8
• + very precise focus and very fast
• - a touch large and heavy
• + beautiful out of focus rendering

bunny on the left is 2.8 on the right is F/4

well sometimes things are going well and sometimes everything just goes wrong...

Originally I found a very nice deal on a 80-200 F/2.8 and promptly ordered it. At the same time I sold my 70-300mm VR to pay for this new lens.

so far it's simple. Now it turned out that they send me the wrong order and my original order was send to another customer. Which is very annoying, since it causes me all kinds of trouble. Now a smart person would had said, ok shit happens now wait it out...

...well I'm not smart and do stupid things when I frustrated. Basically I start shopping to make me happy again, which in this turn resulted in a 17-55mm F/2.8 lens from nikon which will force me to save the next two month. At least parts of the lens are covered by the money I got for the 70-300mm VR and If I need money I can always sell it for like 90 - 95% of it's value.

But it was defiantly not the smartest thing todo, speciall since I got now lenses to cover:

• 10 - 20 mm
• 17 - 55 mm
• 50 mm
• 90 mm
• 19-35 mm

which means the 19-35mm has togo and I have no lens over 90mm anymore. Well maybe I get me something nice for my birthday and use the time to recover my finances.

But hey my new banking software tells me I live well in my limits and related to the expenses I had this year, well it suprises me quite alot

(ikea, more ikea, apple toys, tv, dentist, car trouble)


...at least I did not spend that on shoes! (you know who I'm talking too....)

Mhm now the big question is why did I not buy the sigma or tamron version? Basically I love my sigma 10-20 and hate it since it's so god damn unsharp and the reports for the 18-50mm Sigma are pretty bad (very soft till F/4, so defeats the purpose of F/2.8). If I ever have the possibilty to sell my 10-20, I'm most likley going todo this in an instant, if the price is right.

Now the tamron is supposed to be as good as the Nikon 17-55 F/2.8, If you get a copy which is able to focus. Everybody reports that they have issues to lock the focus, which makes it also useless.

And last but not least I can use the nikon in dust/rain since it's weather sealed. (Ok my camera is not, but it's easier to wrap a plastic bag around a camera than around a lens...)

Guess I will be busy at the weekend taking lots of pictures.

...ah and I also keep fighting with grails and I'm not winning here, which is another reason I'm frustrated...

well after 1 hour of fighting with the apple tv, it finally accepted that it has now a 250 gb harddrive and is useful now.

...at least until we got more than 150 dvd's...

how todo it?

http://img.engadget.com/2007/03/23/how-to-upgrade-the-drive-in-your-apple-tv/3

it was really fairly simple, once I got the right screwdrivers

well today my picture arrived and I have to say it looks wonderful and I'm really amazed at the resolution of the camera, specially since I took this picture with a 100$ lens (was the only 35mm lens I had...)

The only problem is, it needs a frame to be mounted to the wall. So another 70$ are gone for a frame.

the other problem is now I want to print 2 or 3 other pictures in this size, but I guess this has to wait till next month and the month afterward...

the more I look at current high end compact cameras the less I understand why people actually buy them.

I mean

• Canon G9 - I don't like the handling and too noisy
  
• Nikon P5100 - no raw function, noisy over iso 400, high CA
  
• Ricoh GDR2 - noisy and too expensive, for 400 - 500 it would be a buy, but 600$+ are to high since I can get the DP-1 which has much better picture quality for 100$ more
  
• Ricoh GX200 - pretty noisy

So the only compact camera which does really nice pictures and which you actually can take with you instead of a D-SLR is the Sigma DP-1

except:

• to slow

This is the only thing which really bugs me. I can live with the awful menu. I mean I want to use it for street photography, so I put it in aperture or shutter priority mode and to iso 100 or 400 dependings on my goal.

Done nothing else todo.

That the lens has F/4 which is sad, but I don't know how to put a faster lens into such a compact camera. And again for street photographie it should be fast enough. But to wait 7 seconds between pictures is a damn long time. Specially at this price tag.

But it looks at iso 800 better than my D80...

I mean these pictures look nice

But one thing is sure If I'm going to buy a compact camera it's going to be soon.

well,

today I wanted to print and frame on off my pictures in a decent size and was shocked about the cost.

Appr. Outside Dimensions:	22 5/16" x 29 11/16"
	DSC747_1	15 1/4" x 22 5/8"
	Giclee print on Premium Semimatte Photo Paper	$28.80
	BM7 Black Magic - Beaded Profile 21" x 28 3/8"	$57.00
	Arctic White w/Black Core Mat 21" x 28 3/8" Window 15" x 22 3/8" - Delete	$21.00
	Framing Kit: Premium Clear Acrylic & Foamcore Backing	$43.00
	Professional Assembly Fee	$29.95
	Total:	$179.75

179$ for a frame and print is just a little bit steep for my taste. Sure the preview looks beautiful, but still...

it seems like I need to look at some frames from ikea and cut my own mat boards. To save some money on this process.

I did order a print of this picture to see how large I can print with my camera, after post processing and how good of a job mpix does. There print costs are defiantly way lower and if I'm happy with the quality I can order the prints there and the frame somewhere else.

So much about saving this month...

cloth: 200$
hd for mac: 110$
print: 50$

enjoying live, priceless

	Mpix Lab
	Products		Quantity	Item Total
	20" x 30" Very Large Print (True Digital B&W Paper)		1	31.99
	Water-Based Lustre Coating		1	3.04
	Double Weight Matboard		1	13.25