I happened to see this bird sitting on a chair in my garden. He stayed long enough for me to get my camera and take this picture. When I tried to get closer since I’m using my 50mm prime lens, he finally flew away.
Photography
Daily Pics
Here are two great pictures I took today that I’d like to share.
My neighbor’s gardenia is blooming and it happened to have one perfect flower.
This 6-toed cat has been hanging around my house. I managed to get a good closeup of his paw.
12 Things to Photograph Before You Die
You’ll photograph lots of subjects and reel off tens or even hundreds of thousands of images before you lay down your camera for the last time. Some of those pictures will be memorable; a few will serve as milestones in your life. One or two might even change it.
Eclipse
I tried to take some pictures of the eclipse tonight, but they came out pretty bad. I was using my 18-55mm lens, which is my highest power zoom lens, but it wasn’t sufficient. I shot raw using a tripod with extremely long exposures. Since it was too dark for AF, I had to manually focus. It was also extremely cloudy.
This is the best one:
While I was setting up the camera and testing the exposure, I took this shot which I think looks really cool:
Mini Photo Walk
Inspired by a flowering bush and a traveler’s tree, I decided to walk around the condo and take a few pictures. By the time I was finished, I ended up taking 85 shots. I uploaded 33 of them to Flickr.
Aperture 2.0 is amazing
I took a few photos this afternoon, mostly to practice using manual focus with my new lens. One shot I took of the sky facing the sun came out pretty dark, but Aperture was able to do an amazing job of bringing out color & detail.
Here’s the original image:
Since I was shooting raw, I was able to work with the exposure. After some adjustment and enhancement, here’s how it looks:
The rest of my pictures are posted at Flickr.
SDHC Card Compatibility
I got a 8GB SDHC card, since my D40x creates very large images and can only hold about 500 in large (10MP) JPEG and less than 200 RAW images on my old 2GB card. The SDHC card worked perfectly in the camera and can hold about 600 raw images or about 2000 large JPEGs.
However, when I tried to read the card on my Mac, I found that my Griffin ExpressCard/34 5in1 reader won’t recognize it. I also tried an older USB multi format card reader, which also wouldn’t recognize it. Fortunately the USB reader that came with my EyeFi card is able to read it.
Aperture 2.0
I downloaded the Aperture 2.0 trial this morning and I really like it. I’ll probably purchase it in the next few days.
Initially, there was a screw-up with the download link & trial serial number. The acknowledgement page gave the correct link to download 2.0, but the link sent in the email was for 1.5, as well as the serial number. When I requested another trial about an hour later, I received the correct serial number.
Aperture has some nice features for working with raw files, but unfortunately it won’t open a raw file in an external editor such as Photoshop; it will always convert to tiff or psd. Even without using Photoshop, I can do a lot of adjustments.
A new lens for my D40x
I got a Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 lens for my D40x, which I ordered a few days ago from Amazon. It takes amazingly sharp pictures, especially in low light, since it’s a lot faster than the kit lens. Unfortunately it doesn’t support auto-focus on the D40x, since it doesn’t have an internal AF motor. Even with manual focus it’s pretty easy to use with the AF indicator. This is an excellent basic lens. At $109 it’s also one of the least expensive.
Here’s the first picture I took with it.
I did some more experimenting with HDR this evening, with slightly better results.
Experimenting with HDR
I did some experimenting with HDR photography at sunset today, although the result wasn’t as impressive as I had hoped, for several reasons. I didn’t use a tripod, so the shots had to be aligned. I probably didn’t use enough exposure range; I only used EV of -1 and +1. Finally, since the sky was very clear, the sunset wasn’t that colorful.
I used my D40x, shooting raw using program mode with exposure compensation. I imported the pictures into Photoshop and used the Merge to HDR function.
