POV Camera Rig

WOW this is something that woudl be awesome to have but I can't see using much. The resulting photos are amazing.

Flash for Small Digital Cameras

This is a great idea for people who want to take better photos at parties or events. Bouncing the flash of a wall is hard with most digital cameras (i use a napkin but it's never easy). Sow you can just carry around this small wireless flash and make your photos look kick ass.

Total Number of Shutter Releases for Camera

I had no idea Nikon kept track of the total number of shutter releases on their cameras. After checking my EXIF data for a photo.

Total Number of Shutter Releases for Camera: 29152

I had in my head I'd taken 50,000 so I was talking myself up.

I guess that's why my shutter on my D70 shat itself. It's going to cost $400 to fix and clean which is 25% of the camera cost. But if I don't get it fixed it might shit itself for good. Also $400 is worth piece of mind and not having to clean the dirt of every photo.

This data is only visible when I use the DXO program to process my photos so it must be deep in the EXIF.

Porn for photographers

The sweet sound of 10 fps on the new Canon EOS-1D Mark III

Big Ass Lens

Check out this Sigma 200-500 Lens!! It'd make Arnie look insignificant.

Monster Pod and other Cmaera Goodies for Xmas

The perfect xmas present for anyone with a digital camera. The MONSTER POD.

Sadly it looks like this might be too small for a DSLR :(

It's meant to stick to trees as well. Although I can't see any photos to validate this claim. I've ordered one and will try out on Ervi's small digi camera. It will go well with my Bean Bag tripod Ive got.

Those with a DSLR might want to try the Gorilla Pod Doesnt look as cool but still worth checking out.

Here's a site I found that has a list of other wierd and wonderful camera mounts. I personaly like hte style of this chest mounted tripod. Snazzy

And I still havent got around to buying a Lowe Pro 200AW sling bag. These look fantastic. Maybe before I travel again I'll have to invest again.

HDR Photos

Image taken from Pingmag.

I thought for some reason HDR photos required a HDR camera. What a dumb ass!! Now I'm going this weekend with the tripod to take some HDR shots!!!

Check out this great set of HDR photos taken of Japan.

Photo Jojo

I found this great blog with Tips and DIY stuff for digital photography called PhotoJojo. Very interesting no matter what level you are. Well maybe some snooty professional photography wont enjoy but weveryone else can.

SlingShot 100 AW

Ok I've gone a little digital camera crazy but I'm pretty excited about this new camera Lowe Pro 100 AW Sling bag (I sound like a women)

I have 3 camera bags now and they all have their place. A big backpack one that carries everything, a shoulder bag for my camera and a big nappy bag one that holds a few lenses and the camera. This one shoudl take the place of all 3 hopefully.

But this new Lowe Pro bag looks great. It's like a sling bag that easily flips around and opens on the side for easy access. Then bamn its back on your back.

it's even got an all weater cover (see below) Very handy for my numerous treks in the jungle.

I just need to decide on weather to get the 100AW or the 200AW. Hopefully I can find one of these in the city to test out.

8GB Compact Flash!

WOW. If I didnt have my PDX70 personal storage device I'd get one of these.

Sony Alpha 100 Digital SLR

Sony steps upto the plate with their Alpha 100 a 10MP DSLR. With the D70s and the Canon 350D dominating this market Sony have a lot to catch up to.

I like the addition of the anti dust CCD and the Steady shot (both missing form the beforementioned DSLR's) See the full rundown on Sony's site. It seems that Minolta and Sony have teamed up with Minoltas digital camera team being absorbed by Sony. Probably a good move. This means Minolta lenses will work with this new Sony camera.

Nikon have already announced a 10.2 MP sucessor to the D70s so let's see what deatures they add to that as the mega pixels really matter less and we get into these big sizes. FOr me 6 MP is enough. I want stuff like Anti Dust sensors and built in Shake reduction rather than just a slightly bigger photo.

So i'll be very interested on how this new player goes. When I mean new I mean to the DSLR market.

Shooting RAW

Having owned my Nikon D70 for one year (just reached 15,000 photos) I just realised I haven't even used the RAW shooting mode. The main reason being was I was happy with the results from the camera and only tinkered with photos slightly. This week I decided to shoot in RAW as I have more time to fiddle with each photo as it's holiday time.

What this means is each photo I take is now 4-5MB instead of 2 and each photo will need to be post processed in another program. This is very time consuming. The other problem is now choice. I can import my photos using Photoshop, Bibble, DxO or Nikon Capture. (Mac users can also use Aperture) The problem here lies is each program processes the images differently. While I praised DxO earlier about it enhancing my photos with RAW files it actually destroys a lot of the detail in them.

The best program (I haven't tested Nikon Capture yet) is Photoshop CS2. You have the most control over the image and can create a jpeg without processing the image at all if wanted. DxO no matter what I tried always tried to remove some noise resulting in lost detail. But unless you view the image at 100% you don't notice too much.

Below is an huge image I created to show the difference each program puts on an image. All setting can be tweaked and again I preferred Photoshop's settings and ease of use. I also liked the colour cast PS created.

What ended up happening with me was I imported each image into all 3 programs to see what the end result is. The shitty part is each program gave good results on different images.

DxO always removed detail from images but for macro photos or when you didn't care about the tiny background textures DxO made really punchy images. DxO was the only one without any really good zoom function so you never really saw what effect your sharpening had on the image until you processed it. (LAME) If I had to choose what program I'd go with Photoshop but I liked having all 3 to test.

Bibble always proceed very flat but authentic photos. You could then tweak the curves if you wanted something more punchy. But this would be best if the photo you shot was already great and needed little tweaking. Bibble also got a few more extra pixels from my photos? I got photos 3028x2002 above the normal 3008x2000. I'm not sure why Bibble was the only program to grad those extra pixels from my photo.

PS CS2 was the easiest for me to use but didn't always produce the image I liked.

PS doesn't have lens distortion but you can get free plugins. DxO does and I think Bibble has a plugin for this.

I haven't done any tripod tests with JPEG to RAW shooting modes but I can definetly notice the amount of control you have on a RAW image. I'm still trying to figure out if it's worth all the time and effort. If I had to shoot something for a work project or large print I'd definitely go RAW but for most of my photos I'm thinking JPEG is the way to go. Or i'll be up to 4am every night tweaking EV values and sharpening photos.

What sucks was that there was no clear winner for the programs. Luckily I own iView which made quick work of RAW thumbnails. I'll test Nikon Capture (i accidently downloaded the update not the app) and see how that fares.

DxO

I had a quick play around with the DxO Optice Pro 3.5 app for enhancing images. I was blow away at how easy and quick it was to use. I usually pump my curves pretty high on many images to give a more saturated feel but with DxO i can do that and more while reducing noise and lens barrel distortion.

While some of the alterations are subtle the qualuty of the final image always looks better than tweaking with photoshop. This is with a standard JPEG, I don't shoot RAW but I will for a week to see the difference. This should provide even better results.

The best part is you can easily batch the alterations and have it rename files for you. That and having complete control over the chnages or setting everything on Auto.

Here's an image i spent a few minutes working on in photoshop compared with the one DxO did in seconds. The DxO version is much nicer. Although the vignetting I kinda like this could have been left in.

Here's another image that would have required a fair amount of masking and for me wasn't worth it for this image. But DxO makes short work of it. What you can't see in these tiny gif versions is that the sharpening and noise reduction really enhance the image when viewing at 100% and i suspect when printing.

I still like the look when you increase the contrast via the curves and over saturate the images luckily this can be done in DxO aswell. It's Mac and PC and for $150 USD covers most DSLR's and lens.