I got a new camera bag from Crumpler, after reading Michael Mistretta‘s recommendation. I got a slightly smaller one, but it still has enough room to hold my D40x with one lens attached plus two more lenses and lots of accessories.
Photography
Sport mode & continuous shooting with a D40x
The D40 or D40x’s sport mode isn’t only for sports. It’s great for any time you want to capture fast action at the highest possible shutter speed. Using continuous shooting mode you can capture action at 1/500 or 1/1000 second shutter speed. I was able to capture this Polynesian dancer’s torch in midair.
Oakland Park Youth Day
Today was Oakland Park’s Youth Day, one of our biggest events. I took over 2000 photos, which I’m still processing. I used the sport mode of the D40x and did lots of burst mode shooting of Brazilian Capoeira, Polynesian dancing, and martial arts events. Here’s the best shot I found so far. I managed to catch this guy in midair during a Capoeira demonstration. I’ll upload more photos when I finish sorting & processing them.
Aperture 2.1 had no problem handling that many photos in a single project. It took about 5 minutes to import from the memory card.
Photoshop trick of the day
You’ve probably seen photos where most of it is black & white with one bit colorized. If you have a photo with a strong contrast between subject and background, it’s pretty easy to do in Photoshop.
Earlier today I took this picture of roses blooming in my neighbor’s garden. I used the largest aperture for my lens (F5.6) to bring out the subject and blur the background slightly.
Since there was a pretty strong contrast between the flowers and the background, it was pretty easy to use Photoshop’s color range selection tool to select the flowers only. I then inverted the selection and made an adjustment layer based on the selection. In the adjustment layer, I used hue/saturation to desaturate it and darken it slightly.
Here’s the final result.
Say No to Flickr Video
As you probably know, Flickr introduced their video feature earlier this week. Unfortunately their effort is half-assed and only detracts from the site. They only allow videos of 90 seconds or less, which isn’t really useful. It’s obviously meant for the short videos you can take with many point-and-shoot cameras or cell phones, but there are plenty of other sites which do it much better.
Flickr can already be slow at times, and I’m afraid they won’t have the bandwidth to support video without making it even slower. They should keep doing what they excel at, which is being the best photo sharing site, and not try to do something where their effort is only mediocre.
There’s already a no video group and petitions. While most Flickr petitions have been pretty stupid, this is one I agree with.
Aging Photos
I really like the aged photo effect you can create at this Japanese website, so I attempted to duplicate the effect in Photoshop. These pictures I took in San Francisco last year seemed to be a good subject.
For my first attempt, I used the Aperture 2.1’s sepia tone & vignette effects and then used Photoshop’s film grain filter. The result was a little too bright and didn’t really look aged enough.
Finally, I got an effect I really like with a few Photoshop actions. I used the Sepia Tone Grayscale action, the Spatter Frame action, and the add noise filter.
Here’s the original version of the second photo.
Photos of the day
Everything is blooming in my garden, so I have 3 great pictures for today. I find that I prefer using Aperture Priority mode rather than program automatic, especially when I’m photographing flowers. It isn’t any more difficult than automatic and gives me more control while still giving the correct exposure. I like to use a large aperture to get a narrow DOF, which I think looks better for these shots. I’ve been shooting raw almost all the time now, since I can still get over 600 shots on my 8GB SD card and it lets me do more adjustments.
Garden photo of the day
I planted this calla lilly today. It was my mother’s favorite flower.
Photo of the day
I noticed this beautiful rose and had to take a picture of it. I used my Nikkor 50mm/f1.8 lens with the maximum aperture of f1.8 in Aperture Priority mode, which gives a very sharp image with a narrow DOF.
HDR Image of the day
I tried a few more HDR images this evening, this time trying for a more subtle effect. My new tripod, a $30 Dynex, makes it a lot easier to align my pictures accurately.
