Woo-hoo, as the rumor mill has been buzzing about for the last two weeks, Nikon officially announced the “D700” professional SLR today, just 10 months after announcing the D3 and D300 followups to the D200 that I have.
Last year, I got to play with the D3 & D300 before they went on sale, and despite lusting after “shiny & new” and the benefits over my D200, I decided to not upgrade.
This time might be different.
I didn't believe the rumors first started, not least of which because the name – D700 – makes absolutely no sense in light of Nikon's normal camera-naming scheme. But the [...]
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The photo below, of pizza at a cafe, appeared on my previous post. It was taken with a polarizing filter on the lens adjusted to block glare from the window in the background. Mouseover the “Without Polarizer” button below for the same scene two seconds later, without the filter...

With Polarizer  ·  Without Polarizer mouseover button to see that [...]
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High-dynamic-range – HDR – is an image-processing technique that's been gaining popularity over the last few years. HDR can be used to create some amazing, impactful, stunning images. For some eye-popping examples, see this page, which is just one page of many that are linked from this HDR roundup.
I haven't created anything amazing with HDR, but I utilized HDR in whipping this image together, just for this post...
(IMAGE: HDR Example) boring, but illustrative
HDR attempts to overcome a limitation of current camera technology... a limitation that disallows a camera from picking up fine detail in the dark shadows and bright highlights of a scene at the [...]
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(IMAGE: A new way to caption in my Lightroom plugins)
Photo metadata has evolved a mix of seemingly comparable ways to label a photo. Lightroom allows you to enter a “Title”, a “Caption”, and a “Headline”, among others, so which should you use when you upload your images to an online photo-hosting service? That depends, of course, on how what fields you've entered into Lightroom, what you've entered into them, and your goal for the label.
My plugins for Adobe Lightroom that allow you to export photos to online photo-hosting services (for:  Zenfolio  ·  SmugMug  ·  Flickr  ·  Picasa Web ) allow for a simple selection from among the [...]
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Timelapse Panning Video one hour compressed down to 12 seconds  ·  no sound by Sean McCormack ( larger high-def version is here )
At right is a short timelapse video (12 seconds, no sound) that Lightroom expert Sean McCormack made from the collection of 300 images he ended up with after setting his camera up on a tripod and having it take a shot every 10 seconds for 50 minutes.
To see the high-resolution version, go here and look for the “four arrows” icon at the lower-right of the video. Click that to put the video into full-screen mode. Then, click the “scaling is on” [...]
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Adobe has re-released the troubled Lightroom 1.4 now as a (hopefully) untroubled Lightroom 1.4.1. Links are here.
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, f/10, ISO 200 — full exif & map — nearby photos (IMAGE: Main Gate of the Heian Shrine, at Dusk) With Cherry Blossoms
As I mentioned earlier today, full bloom has finally hit Kyoto.
Having recently read photographer Rick Lee's blog post When is dusk dusky enough? about how actually shooting a “night” shot at dusk can make use of a bit of remaining skylight to balance the harsh artificial lights, it reminded me of the lessons from Strobist's classic How to Photograph Christmas Lights, and made me want to try it with the cherry-blossom lightup that's going on in my area during the evenings this week.

(IMAGE: Adobe Lightroom 2.0 beta) Screenshot showing some new features in action (in this case, selective-area desaturation and a post-crop vignette)
I like to post right away when there's a new release of Adobe Lightroom, but alas, I've been on vacation for the last few days, and I was at the car-rental return at the Amami Ooshima Island airport when Lightroom 2.0 beta was released earlier this afternoon.
The 2.0 beta has a lot of exciting new features you can read about elsewhere (links below), but the ones I'm most excited about are localized corrections (you can “paint” exposure, saturation, tint, etc.) and multi-monitor / multi-window support. [...]
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Update April 11th, 2008 Lightroom 1.4.1 has now been released to address the problems discussed below. Download links are here.
Yikes, it seems that 1.4 has a bug: the “time taken” is set to midnight in copies of the file that are exported. The Lightroom database and the original files maintain the correct time, but when you export a copy (e.g. to upload somewhere), the time is reset to midnight.
This is most unfortunate. I don't know whether I can work around it in the plugins. Until this is resolved, I'd recommend staying with 1.3 unless the benifits of 1.4 are worth it for you.
Drat.
For [...]
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(IMAGE: Conditions of Entry)
When I went to the Heian Shrine yesterday morning during the brief spell of amazing snowfall, it was with the intention to enter their gardens to take pictures, as I did during a snowfall two years ago. Most of my pictures from the Heian Shrine, such as yesterday's, or of the intense burn, or the Setsubun events, are from the large areas of the Shrine that are open to the public without cost. There are other areas, including a large and beautiful garden that costs 600 yen (about US $6) to enter.
Unfortunately, it wasn't yet open when I was there so I [...]
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(IMAGE: Sigma APO 200-500mm F2.8 EX DG)
11 months after being announced, Sigma's 200-500mm f/2.8, 35-pound monster is finally available for purchase. When it was announced almost a year ago, I naïvely speculated that it might run $6,000, so it was a shock when I found it at a retailer in Japan for about 2.6 million yen (US $25,000). I haven't seen it in a US retailer yet, but I doubt it'll be substantially less.
I wouldn't have gotten one at $6,000, but at $25,000, all I can say is “wow”, and note that my birthday is coming up....
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(IMAGE: Long Escalators at the Kansai International Airport) two years ago, just after getting my Nikon D200
I'm occasionally asked about my photo and blog-writing workflow, and having just been asked twice in as many days, I thought I'd just go ahead and post about it.
Unlike this post, most of my non-technical posts have a lot of photos, either to tell a story (like this) or to just share pretty photos (like this). In either case, I start with the photos.
Photo Workflow
My photo workflow is pretty much the same whether it's a subject I intend to blog about or not... I download the [...]
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I reported a couple of months ago about a Black Frame Syndrome affecting my D200, whereby the raw image data was fine, but the embedded jpg previews were all black. (A NEF file has two embedded JPGs.)
Because I shoot raw, the only practical effect for me is that I get a black frame when I try to review the images on the camera LCD, but someone shooting in JPG mode would find all their images completely blank. Yikes!
This happened to me for the second time yesterday, but this time I believe I've figured it out.
It turns out that the D200's white balance [...]
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(IMAGE: Me  @  f/1.2) Photo by Zak Braverman
Zak kindly offered to loan me his Nikkor 50mm f/1.2 for a while, so I took a walk down to the Starbucks on Sanjo (eastern Kyoto, Japan) for the pickup.
f/1.2 is an extremely big aperture. I've written about the shallow depth of field you get at large apertures (small “f” numbers), such as on this Sigma 30mm f/1.4 post, but this f/1.2 aperture is a new experience for me. Focusing on anything relatively near with the aperture at f/1.2 results in a paper-thin field that's in focus, but even then, the focus is “soft” due to spherical aberration and perhaps other things [...]
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(IMAGE: Schweeeeet!) A bad photo of my new multiple-monitor goodness
I found myself suddenly lusting for a second monitor, and with visions of a tax writeoff dancing in my head, I opted for the mid-level Eizo FlexScan SX2461W, a 24" widescreen that offers a 1,920 × 1,200 desktop in luscious relatively-wide-gamut color.
(If I'd had visions of hitting the lottery dancing in my head, I'd have gone for the $6,000 Eizo ColorEdge CG221)
I had trouble setting up my XP box for dual monitors until I installed the latest drivers for my ATI graphics card — ATI's new “Catalyst Control Center” made it trivial to set up [...]
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I've just posted new versions of my Lightroom export plugins ( Zenfolio  ·  SmugMug  ·  Flickr  ·  Picasa Web ) that include a new “Run Any Command” piglet. This piglet – for technically-savvy users – allows you to run any command on each exported image before it's uploaded:

The piglet comes with my plugins, but it can also be used with any plugin that uses my piglet plugin-addon infrastructure.
Details on the piglet, along with an example of it applying exiftool to each image, is on the Run-Any-Command Piglet's page.
A few warnings about today's plugin updates: There were a number of behind-the-scenes infrastructure changes in these updates, so there may be some [...]
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The four export plugins for Adobe Lightroom that I've written – for uploading to Zenfolio, SmugMug, Flickr, and Picasa Web – are useful, I hope, and offer lots of options and ways for the user to configure how their images are processed. If I had more time and more skill, though, the plugins could do more. So much more.
For example, Tim Armes' LR/Mogrify Lightroom Export Plugin offers a lot of nice features that I wish my plugins offered, including: the ability to add watermark overlays (both text and images) the ability to add borders around images the ability to apply output sharpening [...]
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Alexander Kiel's has developed some insight into the “FormatMessageW failed” error that plagues some Windows users of Lightroom export plugins, including my export plugins for Zenfolio, SmugMug, Flickr, and Picasa Web. From his reports, the problem seems to be related to IE7 and slow internet connections.
He poses a potential solution, so those running into this error are encouraged to see his writeup on the subject.
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(IMAGE: My Sensor Dust Reference Page)
In a recent post about silly extreme macro photography, I commented that some of the small-aperture f/22 shots weren't good for much except illustrating that I need to clean my image sensor. Just as a small light source like a flashlight casts a sharper shadow than, say, a large light source like a picture window, a small aperture lens setting highlights any dust on the camera's sensor by allowing it to cast a sharper shadow on the sensor's photosites, yielding noticeable spots in the resulting picture. Some of my silly macro shots had blotchy dust spots on them.
I clean my D200 [...]
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When viewing a geoencoded photo – one where the location's latitude and longitude are encoded in the metadata – in Lightroom, its coordinates are displayed in the metadata panel as shown below:
GPS Coordinates in Lightroom's Metadata Viewer
(Well, it shows up if you're using a metadata-panel view that includes the coordinates among the items to be shown, such as “all”, but you can also use my Lightroom Metadata Viewer Preset Builder to build a customized metadata-panel view.)

Clicking on the little arrow to the right of the coordinates brings up your web browser, with the location showing in Google Maps. In the case of the [...]
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