Archive for the Category Technical

27.09.06 | 0

Dear Santa…

Please bring me one of these:

“The M8 uses Leica’s standard magnesium and brass body. It also has a 10.3-megapixel sensor and Leica’s range- finder viewfinder and 2.5-inch color display.”

I own no Leica lenses, but I’ve always wanted one of their rangefinder cameras. I think this may be the one.

Technorati Tags: technerd

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Have I mentioned how much I love Flickr? Have I mentioned how cool it is that it has an open API? Well, look here for the latest example.

Technorati Tags: badass, me

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25.06.06 | 0

What’s in your bag?

Make sure to click on the picture so you can see the notes
I shot the Music Maker Relief Foundation Warehouse Blues concert on Friday (my plan is to shoot the whole series over the summer). Finally unpacked my bag today and thought I should do a “whatsinyourbag” shot.
This is my concert gear: 2 Nikon D2H [...]

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15.06.06 | 4

The big question

Ok, so you’ve gotten yourself a digital SLR. After reading the owner’s manual (yes, Sput, people do that) you think to yourself, “what’s this RAW setting and why should I use it?” Simple question, yes, but it has generated a whole lot of heat (if not light) in the “pro-sumer” folks and probably some in [...]

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12.06.06 | 0

The gift

(photo of ’70s era Nikon F removed by me)
This is the first “real” camera I can ever remember using; certainly the first pro camera. No, I don’t mean it’s the same model, I mean it’s the actual camera. It was a gift from my father this past week. I am/was beside myself. I have been [...]

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20.05.06 | 0

Gear stuff

So. It’s 1:22 in the a.m. on a Saturday morning. What are you doing? Me? Oh, I’m re-reading a D2H manual because I think my focus problems have been self-induced. Well, look at that…”camera automatically selects focus area containing subject closest to camera.” That explains so much. Clearly, reading the manual isn’t enough; I have [...]

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19.04.06 | 0

What I aspire to…

Take a look at these:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/hailun/sets/72057594054541868/

I do not yet see the world quite this way. I’m hoping that as I continue to practice I’ll eventually get there.
Posted to: I Wasn’t Really Drunk from the album “Bitter Honey” by Eef Barzelay

Technorati Tags: badass

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Finally, someone has a tutorial on how to make my images look really, really small.

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05.03.06 | 0

Gut check

Yesterday I conducted an experiment and I think the results are more than a little illuminating. I decided that I was going to make prints for the purposes of hanging on my walls. The idea was that these were to be the types of prints that I would feel comfortable selling for more than a [...]

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I just got a gig. My buddy Keith has hired me to come to CA and shoot some stuff for him. But first, some background…

Right. So. Keith is a commercial lighting designer. That means that when someone hires an architect to design a commercial space (store front, hotel, etc.) the architect turns around and hires [...]

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Sputneck and I rolled into downtown Raleigh this morning (6 am on a Sunday!) to shoot the implosion of the convention center. The pictures are downloading now and I’ll have them up later. Just so I don’t forget though, here’s a list of things—in no particular order—to remember the next time I shoot an implosion:

Just [...]

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09.01.06 | 0

Adobe v. Apple

Right. So. It appears that pro and wanna-be photogs are the hot new market segment for software. First Apple releases Aperture (with it’s somewhat obscene minimum requirements), and now Adobe has released a public beta of it’s new Lightroom. The cost for trying Aperture is $500, thank you very much, and the reviews of it’s [...]

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30.12.05 | 0

New Year’s Eve eve…

…and I’m sick and cranky, so what do I do? I decide I need to take another whack at how Nikola Tamindzic (so very, very unsafe for work! Mom, just don’t go; Trust me.) gets those interesting shots. (Let’s hear it for Noodle! My uncomplaining model.) And the verdict is: I’m getting closer. Close enough [...]

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And they solved my biggest bitch, namely that they now generate a full-size preview for Adobe DNG files. Why do I care? Well, DNG is designed to cary metadata in it…meaning that I can convert my RAW files on import (imbedding the original RAW, of course) and then have the metadata follow the image through [...]

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29.11.05 | 0

Trading up

Today I traded up my mid-range telephoto, moving from a 70-300 f/4-5.6 to an 80-200 f/2.8. The “why” of this decision is pretty simple: at the shorter focal length I gained a stop, at the far end, two. For a guy who pretty much insists on shooting with natural light this is a huge, huge [...]

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29.11.05 | 0

A tip for RAW shooters

Up until this weekend I had been using Adobe’s Camera Raw conversion to take my Nikon NEF files and bring them into Photoshop CS2. No more! After doing some experimenting I discovered that the Nikon Raw plugin for Photoshop does a much better job of getting the colors right. It takes a bit longer but [...]

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22.11.05 | 0

Film scanner hell

So I’ve been scanning in some old negatives for the past three hours. With that amount of time you’d think I’d have done lots of rolls…but, no. Instead I’ve limped through a single 24 frame roll; and I didn’t even capture all 24 frames. This is more than a little frustrating.

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04.11.05 | 0

A new piece of kit!

After much searching and consideration, I finally decided on a replacement point-and-shoot camera.

This replaces an absolutely horrible Nikon point-n-shoot that I got with credit card points several years ago. That camera is slow, cumbersome, and generally frustration producing.
So far this Casio has proven to be the right size, quick to shoot, and have all the [...]

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02.11.05 | 0

A word on Flickr

I just wanted to let everyone who might happen across this site know that I’m using Flickr to host my photos. The big reason is the networking portion of it. This past Sunday I sat down to try and figure their services out and was immediately struck by the quality of images that are all [...]

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02.11.05 | 0

More on Halloween night

Now that I’ve gotten a little rest, there are a few things I wanted to add about Halloween night. It was a big win for me technically. I shot with a 4 Megapixel camera (a Nikon D2H) vs. a newer, 6 Megapixel one (Nikon D70) that I know has great low-light shooting capabilities. Why? Well, [...]

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