Category: Digital Photography

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Are you a sports photographer? If so…

Sadly, of all the thousands of photos I’ve taken over the years, not a single one is of a sporting event. However, if you have a great sports shot or two you might want to enter Scott Kelby’s New Contest:

 

 “Shoot on the Sidelines With Scott & Mike"

 

Scott Kelby is offering a once in a lifetime opportunity to shoot with him and Mike Olivella on the sidelines of the Florida State Seminoles and the Jacksonville State Gamecocks. 

Here’s a short video Scott recorded about the contest.

 

See his site for details on entering. Good luck!

 

 

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Get a little more reach with a teleconverter

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Yesterday, I had a rare moment where I saw deer in my backyard AND they stayed long enough for me to grab my camera and photograph them. Of course the problem is getting close enough without scaring them away. First I tried shooting with my Nikon 18-200mm VR lens, which was still attached to my Nikon D5000 from the photowalk. Shooting from the window (through the screen) didn’t get me close enough and just wasn’t cutting it.

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I also figured if I was going to go outside, I might as well gear up with something better. So I ran and grabbed my Nikon 70-200mm f/2.8 VR lens and my Nikon 1.4x Teleconverter. Although I got this teleconverter as a birthday present last year, this was actually my first time using it.

  

They were still there

Luckily when I returned the deer were still there just relaxing in grass. I approached a little at a time. With my lens all the way out at 200mm, the 1.4x teleconverter effectively gave me a 280mm reach. The closer I got the more nervous they got and eventually decided to move along. 

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The Bottom Line

Although you do lose one f stop with this teleconverter, it’s great for situations just like this one. Now that I’ve had a chance to use it, I plan to use it more often. The Nikon TC-14E 1.4x II Teleconverter for D-AF-S & AF-I lenses only, goes for $469.95 at B&H Photo. You could also go with this 2x teleconverter for $499.95.

 

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I need a lens!

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A few months back I took a trip to Page Arizona and I mentioned the fact that I rented the Nikon 14-24mm Wide Angle lens ($1,600). I also mentioned that I would tell you more about the company I rented it from. Well I’m finally getting around to it. I was reminded about this great service in two ways recently. One way was that it was mentioned on a recent episode of Nikon DTown TV and the other is that I have a family reunion coming up in a couple of weeks.

 

Sometimes renting is better

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Let’s face it. You could go broke buying all the really nice lenses that are out there today. While I have no problem spending money on something that I’ll use and benefit from, there are just some things that I won’t use enough to justify the price of ownership. I have all the lenses I need for my day to day shooting. However, there are those special events that come up once or twice a year that you really need a specialty lens. For example, maybe you’re shooting a sporting event that will only happen once for you because you’re not a regular sports user. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a nice 200-400mm lens or maybe a 200mm f/2.0 lens? Well those lenses cost many thousands of dollars. So instead of buying them and only using them a couple of times a year, why not rent them for much much less?

To buy the Nikon 200-400mm lens would be $6,280. However, to rent it for a week would only cost $250.

To buy the Nikon 200mm f/2.0 lens would be $4,900. However, to rent it for a week would only cost $175.

 

LensPro To Go

These guys were great to work with! I met them personally at the last Photoshop World Conference and tried them out for my last vacation. Not only was the service very trouble free, I got to use the really nice glass that I really wanted to take and for a price that was really reasonable and well within my budget. You order the lens you want directly from their website. They offer insurance which I highly recommend, because it’s one thing to pay for a really nice lens, it’s another to pay for one that’s not even yours because it got damaged! My lens arrived in a really good Pelican case along with the Fedex prepaid airbill to ship it back. 

 

The Bottom Line

If you need a really nice lens but won’t be using it often, LensPro To Go is your answer! Check them out here.

 

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Another Successful Photowalk

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Not sure how all the other cities did, but my Scott Kelby Worldwide Photowalk – Detroit was a big success! We had an absolute perfect day weather wise and a great group of photographers.  We went on a 2 mile walk throughout downtown Detroit snapping shots of some great landmarks and interesting landscapes. I can’t wait to see everyone’s shots.

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I got a couple myself that I liked, but nothing really outstanding. I was too busy enjoying everyone else that was there.

Continue reading “Another Successful Photowalk”

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Lastolite Kickerlite Softbox Review

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The good folks over at Bogen sent me one of the NEW Lastolite Kickerlite Softboxes to check out. My friends over at NAPP were raving about it and my buddy Scott Kelby did his review a few weeks ago. Although I’ve had it for a while now, I just didn’t have the right shoot lined up to try it on. Well that all changed last night. Last night I got to work with one of my favorite models and my goal was to use the Kickerlite during the shoot. Scott let me get a sneak peak at his NEW Digital Photography Book Volume 3 and in it I found a technique that I just had to replicate:

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If you want to learn how to do the exact setup for this shot, grab a copy of Scott’s book.

  Continue reading “Lastolite Kickerlite Softbox Review”

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Let ScanCafe do your scanning for you!

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Believe it or not there was a time that I actually shot with, (gasp) film. Yes, I wasn’t always a digital photographer. Although I was an early adopter and saw the handwriting on the wall when I got my first Apple QuickTake Digital Camera, I did shoot with regular film cameras before then. I did NOT consider myself to be a photographer at that time. I was mostly doing family photos and photographing my travels. I had never used an SLR camera before and most of my equipment was of the point and shoot variety. No, I didn’t really get serious until digital came along. The picture above is from my trip to Egypt back in 1990. Is it a great shot? No not at all (as I cringe at the question), but it’s one of the few that I actually have of me from the trip. Therefore, it’s important to me.

With digital I have the vast majority of my catalog of images stored, well um, digitally. They exist on hard drives and backups of those hard drives. However, what about all those pictures I took before digital? Like many hobby photographers out there I have that "shoe box" of prints and negatives. Of course I also have those binders and binders of photo albums too. Most of this stuff is over 20 years old. There are a lot of good memories there too. 

 

It’s all starting to fade away

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Negatives, Prints and Slides WILL deteriorate over time. My collection is no different. So I figured it was time to start transferring these precious memories into the digital world. For negatives and prints that means scanning! I’ve owned more scanners through the years than I care to think about. I even owned a couple of dedicated slide and negative scanners too. The one thing I’ve learned is that I just don’t have the patience or the time for scanning! I bought a low budget Film Scanner a few years back with good intentions on scanning my negatives and slides. I figured I’d do a few at a time whenever I had time. I started out at a good pace and realized that the results just weren’t what I hoped and that it was a tedious, slow and painful process. In order to get the quality I was looking for, my negatives would need to be cleaned and then corrected after they were scanned. Sorry, but I just don’t have that kind of time or will. So I boxed up the scanner and sold it on eBay. Yes, I gave up! I didn’t think about this project again for several more years.

  Continue reading “Let ScanCafe do your scanning for you!”

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My New Camera Travel Bag

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I have a wide assortment of computer bags, suitcases and camera bags. Different sizes and used for different needs depending on how much gear I want to carry and how long I’m going to be gone. However, I wasn’t really happy with my large camera bag only because it always seemed like I could never fit everything I wanted to carry. If I wanted to carry two camera bodies, then that would mean leaving a lens or speedlight behind. 

  Continue reading “My New Camera Travel Bag”

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Nikon GP-1 GPS for Geotagging – Review

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I finally got a chance to try out my new Nikon GP-1 GPS. You may remember that I got this GPS when I got my Nikon D5000 because my di-GPS Pro isn’t compatible with it. Nikon did a very smart thing by making their GPS compatible with both their higher end DSLRs like the D300, D700, D3 and D3X which all have a 10 pin Remote Terminal as well as their lower end cameras like the D5000 and D90. Both the D5000 and D90 have a special port for a GPS, but it’s not the 10 pin Remote Terminal port and that’s what makes my di-GPS Pro incompatible. The cable on the di-GPS pro is hard wired in and only works with DSLRs with the 10 pin Remote Terminal. The Nikon GP-1  comes with 2 different cables so that you can use it with either connection

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Alternative to Camera Control Pro 2 for Lightroom Tethering

 If you’re a Nikon shooter and you use Adobe Photoshop Lightroom shooting tethered requires middleware. Shooting tethered gives you the ability to attach a (long) USB cable to your camera and then to your computer and with the proper settings have the shots import into Lightroom as you take them. This is especially useful in a studio situation for those times when you want to check the lighting and have a larger image on screen than the LCD on the back of your camera. However, Lightroom doesn’t currently have native support for shooting tethered. You must use a piece of software to bring the images into your computer and dump them into a folder. From there Lightroom can automatically import them. If you’re a Canon shooter the software you need comes with your DSLR. It’s called the Canon EOS Utility. However, if you’re a Nikon user, the only app (lowest cost one) that Nikon provides is called Camera Control Pro 2 (CCP2). CCP2 is a great app. It does a LOT of things. However, quite frankly it’s overkill for this simple task. It has more features than you’re likely to use if all you’re doing is shooting tethered into Lightroom. Sure more features are nice, but those features come at a steep price. CCP2 goes for $152.99. Considering that you can get Lightroom for only $260.99, CCP2 is more than half the price of Lightroom. Although I already own CCP2, I’ve been asked by many of the folks that I do Lightroom presentations for, "is there a cheaper alternative?"

 

How about FREE?

Free is usually good! There are a couple of FREE solutions for shooting tethered into Lightroom. I just did a studio shoot yesterday, and gave Sofortbild is a donationware app. So technically it’s not really FREE as you should donate to the author if you use the app. However, it is provided freely to download and use. 

sofortbild

Sofortbild has all the features I need and it seems a little snappier too. The interface is clean and gives you quite a bit of useful information about your camera settings without getting in your way. You can also control the camera’s shutter release from the Sofortbild app if you wanted to use it as a remote control.

 

The Bottom Line

Like I said, Camera Control Pro 2 is a great app and I don’t have anything against it. It’s just overkill for what I need to do most of the time. You can download Sofortbild for the Mac here. If you’re looking for a Windows solution, check out TetherPro for $49.99. I haven’t used this app, but it does look like it has what you would want at a fraction of the cost of CCP2.

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Nikon D5000 – A different kind of review

 Let me start off by warning you up front. If you’re looking for a review of the Nikon D5000 that concentrates on how good of a still camera it is, you can stop reading now. I already have a great Nikon DSLR for stills. It’s the Nikon D700! I love it. Before that I was using the Nikon D300. Loved that one too. So my interest in the Nikon D5000 has very little to do with how good of a picture it can take. Don’t get me wrong, I will use it for taking pictures too and good picture quality is very important to me. However, the video features are what brought me to the D5000. The D5000 is so small it may become my travel camera too (more on that later).

 

Just yesterday…

I was talking about my experience with eBay and how I was selling my D300. Some of the readers here, Nikon Rumors and on Twitter started trying to read between the lines and find conspiracy where there wasn’t any (Why are both Scott Kelby and Terry White selling their D300’s?  hmmmm) . First off the Nikon D300 served me quite well. I upgraded to it from the D80 and it was night and day. It’s a great DSLR. Never had any problems with it and I’ve taken some stunning shots with it. Although the D300 is great, I wanted even lower noise at higher ISO settings. So when the D700 came out I was sold. It was full frame (still is) and gave me the higher ISO:low noise ratio that I was looking for. Although I could have sold my D300 then (see no conspiracy here about it being a bad camera), I decided to keep it as a backup! That’s how much I liked it. At first I was even using it more than the D300 because I was just more used to it. Slowly as time went by I continued to transition to the D700 until I was using it most of the time. So the D300 was just sitting there. When the D90 came out the only feature that got me the least bit interested was the HD Video capability. However, I wasn’t willing to spend over $1,000 to play. Since I wasn’t ready to part with my D300. I waited. Then the D5000 came out and I got more interested. It seemed to have the same video capabilities as the D90 for less than $750 (Body only).

I tried to do some research regarding the D5000’s video capabilities and I was really coming up short. It seemed like every D5000 review I could find focused about 95% of the review on it’s still capabilities and 5% (if that) on the video capabilities. Even this recent Macworld review only mentions the video features in the Cons section saying that it doesn’t auto focus! Wow, that’s it? They all pretty much said the same things. "It shoots up to 720p video at 24fps, the clips are limited to 5 minutes each and there is no auto focus." Even when I tried to find sample clips, most really weren’t showing off the flexibility of using different lenses. They were mostly shaky videos that complained about the lack of auto focus. So let’s get to the video capabilities of the D5000…

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Continue reading “Nikon D5000 – A different kind of review”