PigPog

We went to London last weekend, and I didn’t get any shots like these.

That said, I didn’t have a Eurocopter and gyro-stabilized mounts.

The shots I did get are in this Flickr photoset. Worth a look for the squirrel alone, since the more insane excesses of the party haven’t been made public.

I had a go at signing up for ShutterStock. They require you to submit a “government issued” ID as part of the sign-up process, which seemed a bit excessive. I took a snap of my driving license, and submitted that. It wasn’t great, but was quite readable.

They’ve just rejected it, claiming they couldn’t read the name. I’ve had another look at the file, and the name is perfectly readable. They now insist on a passport.

I don’t have a passport. They just rejected the only form of government-issued ID I have, so I guess I’m not signing up for ShutterStock.

I spent a while last weekend playing with strobes, using a chair as a model. It was useful, but doesn’t give too much idea what will work with a real person.

Today, I persuaded Sam to do some modeling for me, which was probably more fun for me than for her. I took a whole bunch of photos, all with the same background and zoom on the camera, but all with different lighting setups. Between each shot, I drew (or modified) a diagram of what the setup was for that shot, and photographed that. I was left with a load of photos, all in pairs, so I could match up the photo with the lights and settings that made it.

I found some deeply unflattering ways to set up a couple of little strobes – one at each side for two upward-pointing nose-shadows is an especially bad look!

Diffuse light is better, but a strobe on one side coupled with the on-camera flash at a low setting worked really quite nicely too.

Anyway, if you’re starting out with lighting, it’s a great way of trying out a load of ideas in a reasonably short time. Make sure you have your diagrams either kept or photographed, so you can match them up later, and you can see what worked and what didn’t.

After all the mentions on Strobist, I finally got around to picking up some ball bungees, from fretland on eBay (UK). Quite cheap, free postage, and gives me a few more options for attaching flashes all over the place.

I’m sure there must be plenty of other uses for these little things, too, with a bit of imagination.

Any strobists in the UK will probably be wanting to pick up the latest Practical Photography magazine – their main feature is about strobes and strobists, including a chat with David Hobby.

While Sam is at work, I’ve been spending my time using her chair as a model, experimenting with my Nikon SB-800 and SB-600. I’ve learned a few things I didn’t know before:

• The Gorillapod makes a good flash holder, turning a chair, or the side of the sofa, into a light stand.
• Switching the camera to manual, leaving the aperture as it was, and pushing the shutter up to 1/200th kills the ambient from a light bulb quite effectively, and CLS seems to handle the exposure ok still.
• I can use two groups of strobes, and still control the built-in flash for some front fill.
• Switching all strobes to manual is quite easy – I had no trouble guessing output levels, then correcting within a couple of shots. The fact that it can all be done from the camera in a single menu makes it quick.

When I got my new camera gear, I’d included a Nikon SB-600 flash. It worked well off-camera, and I really enjoyed using it. As soon as I did, though, I ran into situations where a second flash would be useful.

If the SB-600 worked out well, I’d always intended to add a second, bigger, light. The day came today. The SB-800 seems to be disappearing, replaced by the SB-900. The 900 is bigger, more expensive, and more powerful. A bit more than I need, though, I think. When Jessops in Taunton had an SB-800 at a reasonable price today, I grabbed it.

Even with the extra battery clipped on for faster charges, it fits into my camera bag nicely. Along with the SB-600, it makes a great kit. Stick the 600 where less work is needed, and both can recover quite quickly between shots.

Overall, a nice addition to the kit, and should make a certain assignment in January a bit easier.

Once we sold our house, and had a bit of money to spare, I wanted to upgrade my camera kit.  I had a Nikon D40, with the kit 18-55 lens, along with a 55-200 VR lens.  Together, they could handle most things, but there were a few problems:

• I often missed shots because I had the wrong lens on the camera.  Things that move often do so, or fly away, before you’ve had time to change lenses.  Also, if I had the wrong lens on the camera for a shot, I’d often just not take the shot rather than stop in the street swapping lenses around.
• Although I was generally impressed with the D40 for the low price, it’s not especially speedy, especially with RAW files.
• 6 megapixels.  Plenty for most things I want to do, but doesn’t leave a lot of spare for cropping.
• Lighting is very limited with the built-in flash.  I could add an off-camera flash to the D40, but only by adding a controller, or an SB-800 to act as a controller alongside another flash.  Both options are expensive.

I also had a Canon G9, and had taken to carrying and using it more often than the D40, but it was far too slow to use for everything.

My solution was this kit:

• Nikon D90
• Nikon 18-200 VR lens
• Nikon SB-600 flash

So far, it’s done everything I’d hoped and more.  I don’t carry the G9 now, but Sam uses it.  The old Ixus she was using has found a new home.

The Camera

The camera itself is much more of a step-up from the D40 than I’d expected.  It’s quite a bit faster in taking pictures, but seems to make a really big difference in focusing speed, too.  It’s the first camera I’ve used where I get the best results by just letting it look after the focusing all on its own, even letting it choose the focus points to use.  It just gets shots the D40 couldn’t get.

The image quality is great, as you’d expect.  The performance at higher ISO is much better.  RAW files that Aperture wouldn’t open were a problem, but Apple fixed that one in an update.  Handling is very good, and it feels nicely solid.  The metering seems accurate, so I just leave it to get on with it.

The Lens

No more losing shots because I have the wrong lens on the camera – now I only have one lens.  There are obviously image quality trade-offs to get so much zoom range in a single lens, but nothing that’s been too noticeable to me so far.  Being able to go from moderately wide to moderately telephoto in a second is very liberating.  I love being able to grab the camera and take a photo without having to worry about whether I have to take it apart and change lenses first.

The Flash

I’ve never used anything but on-camera built-in flash before.  I’ve been reading Strobist for a while, though, and it starts to get to you.  The SB-600 seemed a better deal than the SB-800, especially as Jessops did it for £50 less when bought with the D90.  I’ve not done enough experimenting with it to give much opinion yet, but I’m impressed so far.

Once everything is set up in the first place, taking a shot with off-camera lighting is very easy:

• Pull camera and flash from my bag.
• Switch on the flash, and attach its little ‘foot’ if it needs to stand upright.
• Point the flash where I want it.
• Switch on the camera, and press the button to pop up the built-in flash (it uses this to talk to the SB-600).
• Take pictures.

The camera and flash between them look after everything else.

The Kit

It’s a neat kit.  In total, about the same size as the D40 kit with two lenses, but can do much more.  It’s probably a bit heavier.  It all fits in a nice small Lowepro shoulder bag, so I carry it everywhere.  I’m tempted to add another flash – maybe an SB-800 next, so I can do two-flash setups – but I’m not in a great hurry for that.  Maybe in time for the trip to London that I seem to have been persuaded to go on.

This post is part of a series of posts about switching to a Mac – here are links to all the posts:

• Switching to Mac Part 1: The Decision
• Switching to Mac Part 2: The Retail Experience
• Switching to Mac Part 3: The Unboxing
• Switching to Mac Part 4: In Use
• Switching to Mac Part 5: Finding a Photo Editor

I’ve used Windows PCs for a lot of years now – since the days of Windows 3.0. My first PC ran MS-DOS 4.01. The last time I bought a new computer, I considered the idea of getting a Mac, but ended up with a Tablet PC instead. That little tablet has done me quite nicely since, although I never really used it as a tablet any more. It was starting to show the strain, though, when processing RAW files from new 12-megapixel cameras.

We’d decided a while ago that when we sold our house, we’d both be buying new computers. I considered a Mac again then, but decided to spend the money on a new camera kit instead.

I started speccing up a new PC, and it started to get quite pricey to get the sort of machine I wanted. Still cheaper than a decent Mac, but not as cheap as I’d been hoping. On a wander around PC World, I came face-to-face with the 24″ iMac screen. Wow. Big, bright, clear. I started to consider spending the extra to get a Mac again.

• I’d tried out Adobe Lightroom, and liked it, but it didn’t really fit well for me. I wanted everything in one catalog, so I could search all my photos. That seemed a pretty basic thing to want to do, and Picasa could manage it just fine. Lightroom seemed to start having serious performance issues with a big catalog, though. My photos folder comes to just over 30,000 files. Aperture may be better, but I had no way of trying it out without having a Mac.
• I started doing a bit of searching around online to see what people thought was best for a photographer to use. Some people didn’t think it made a lot of difference, but a lot through a Mac was much better. There don’t seem to be many people who think Windows is actually better for photography.
• Big screens are expensive, especially if you want quality. I could find a PC much cheaper, but adding a good quality 24″ screen soon pushed the price way up.
• I’d changed phones recently, and was now using a Nokia. Before that, I used Windows Mobile, which was a bit limited when syncing with a Mac.
• They’re way prettier than almost any PC. When looking at PCs, I was considering a Sony Vaio, mainly because it looked so nice. If I was willing to pay extra for Sony’s design, Apple’s design was certainly worth a bit.

The one thing that was stopping me was the thought that if it turned out I really didn’t get on with MacOS, it would be a very expensive mistake. Then, I woke up at around 04:00 in the morning thinking “Bootcamp and Parallels! Idiot!”. Of course, if I didn’t get on with MacOS, I could buy a copy of Windows Vista, and use the Mac as a PC. OK, I’d have over-payed somewhat for a very pretty PC, but I’d still have a good quick PC with a great screen.

So, off we went to the Apple store in Exeter to hand over a whole lot of money. But that’s for Part 2.

I’ve experimented with a few different gallery plugins for WordPress, so we could host our photos over here, rather than just keeping them all on Flickr.  None of them quite did what I wanted, but I’ve just found NextGEN Gallery, and I’m quite impressed so far. It’s not the simplest to get set up, but there are lots of options, and it gives you a nice simple way of adding photos from your galleries into any post.

I usually upload photos to Flickr, then insert them into posts here to tell the ‘story’ of the day, event, etc., and I still wanted to be able to do that – most other galleries made that difficult. Most others also meant uploading photos one at a time. That’s not too bad if I’ve been out and taken three or four shots, but a bit of a pain if I have ten or so. For events like the Race for Life or the Slimming World Regional Finals, it would have been unusable. I’ve uploaded the Slimming World event photos to NextGEN, and adding 191 photos was quite easy. The upload stalled twice, but each time, just clicking the ‘upload’ button again continued from where it got stuck.

I’ll probably be tweaking and playing for a while yet, but feel free to have a look around the gallery – probably nothing you haven’t seen before if you visit much, just in a different format.

Oh, and it’s also running the random slideshow at the top-right corner of every page.