Photos

D90 in low light

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After using the D90 for a few days, I’m very impressed with it. Live view is a lot better than I expected and I really like having dedicated buttons for settings like white balance, quality, and ISO so I don’t have to keep going to the menu as I did on the D40x.

This evening I tried using it in low light and I found that it performs beautifully at high ISO settings. All of these pictures were taken when it was almost completely dark and without a tripod. I shot in JPEG and didn’t do any noise reduction or other processing.

Taken at ISO 1600, shows very little noise.

D90 @ ISO 1600

Taken at ISO 2000, shows some noticeable noise but still looks good.

D90 @ ISO 2000

Taken at ISO 4000, shows quite a bit of noise but doesn’t look too bad. Passable at smaller sizes.

D90 @ ISO 4000

First look at the Nikon D90

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The Nikon D90 officially became available today. My local Best Buy got in only 3 and I managed to get the first one this morning.

The D90 is quite a bit larger & heavier than the D40x, but it’s still comfortable to carry.

D90 Unboxing

D90 vs. D40x

Unlike the D40x, the D90 has an LCD screen on the top, where you can see most of the settings without having to turn on the display. The D90 has dedicated buttons for most settings such as white balance, ISO, AF mode, etc, so you don’t have to access the menus too often.

Unlike the D40x, the D90 has an internal AF motor, so autofocus will work on non AF-S lenses, such as my 50mm/f1.8. That alone is almost worth the price for me. I found the lens contacts to be a bit tricky, though. I had to jiggle the lens slightly from the fully locked position until I felt the AF screw snap into place before AF would work.

I didn’t get to try all of the features yet, but I’m very pleased with what I’ve seen so far. Using auto mode, it take beautiful, sharp photos. Recording video is very easy. No dedicated video mode is needed. Simply switch to live view (using the Lv button to the right of the screen) and press the OK button to start recording. Press the OK button again to stop recording. Movies are saved as AVI files with a default size of 640×428.

Keep reading for unboxing photos, sample images and a sample video.

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Aperture tip: track photos uploaded to Flickr

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I don’t know if this is documented anywhere, but I found that it’s possible to create a smart album to track photos that have been uploaded to Flickr using the FlickrExport plugin.

Smart Settings: Uploaded to Flickr (Photowalk 2)
Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

FlickrExport adds a metadata tag with the Flickr URL when it uploads a photo. When you create a smart album, one criteria you can use is ‘other metadata’, which you can select from the ‘+’ popup in the top right of the window. One of the metadata options will be ‘Flickr URL’. Choosing Flickr URL is not empty will select all photos which have been uploaded to Flickr. Alternately, ‘is empty’ will select photos which haven’t been uploaded. Combining these options with star ratings make it easy to choose photos to upload when you have a lot of them.

Using that trick I managed to finish going through the rest of my photowalk photos and uploaded many more today.

Beach Access

PhotoWalk was a success

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We had a great time at the photowalk today and the weather cooperated. I took over 700 photos (many of them in continuous shooting mode), so I still have a lot more to process.

I uploaded a few that I really like, with a lot more coming later. This one is my favorite so far. I like doing these kind of shots in continuous mode. The ocean was pretty calm, but I did see these two surfers. Every time he got into the water, I started shooting and managed to capture a few great moments like this one.

Wipeout!

Picture of the day

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I’ve been watching these baby birds grow up. They’re getting pretty big now.

Baby Birds

I used my 55-200mm VR lens for this shot, which I took from the ground in front of my building. I still use the 18-55mm lens which came with the D40x most of the time, since it can focus much closer than the 55-200mm and has a more useful focal range. I would probably use the 50mm prime a lot more if it could do auto focus on my camera.

When to use manual focus

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I still have difficulty using manual focus, thanks to my glasses and less than perfect eyesight. For anyone who doesn’t have perfect vision, it can be difficult to see if the subject is perfectly in focus, especially when using a large aperture with a narrow depth of field.

However, there are some instances where you have to use manual focus. With my D40X, any non AF-S lens, which lacks the internal AF motor, can only do manual focus (although the focus indicator will light up when it thinks the subject is in focus). I have a love/hate relationship with my 50mm/f1.8 lens for that reason – it’s the sharpest lens I own with the largest aperture that can produce a wonderfully narrow depth of field, yet I still find the manual focus difficult to use.

For certain subjects, like this spider web I photographed this morning, auto focus won’t work, since it will try to focus on a higher contrast object behind the spider web rather than the web itself. I took about 10 shots to get 3 that were perfectly in focus.

Spiderweb

For this one I cheated a bit by spraying the web with a fine mist of water to make it stand out more.

Watermark

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The Watermark plugin is fully working. I’m now working on the documentation and I hope to release it in a day or so.

Baby Bird

Here’s my first official copyright marked picture, which I took today. This baby bird is nesting outside my neighbor’s window.