In the comments of a recent post about GPS receivers, it was suggested that the GPS receiver in the iPhone was useful for keeping tracklogs. I had bad experiences with iPhone location services when I tested in 2009, but perhaps my test wasn't good, or perhaps the old iPhone 3 wasn't good, so I thought [...]
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Now that Nikon has announced its next flagship pro SLR, the Nikon D4, with much flowery prose but few hard details, discussion and debate and speculation and flames and praise have filled camera circles. This post is long, but here's the two-sentence summary for the "tl;dr" crowd: As with most any technology release (hardware or [...]
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Nikon announced their new flagship SLR, the Nikon D4, to much anticipation made long unfulfilled by last year's tragedies (Japan earthquake, Thailand flooding). I would, of course, love one, but with a price in Japan close to US$8,000 and Santa not scheduled for another 11.5 months, it looks doubtful. Anyway, I'm in the process of [...]
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function show1880(p, b, px, bx) { document.getElementById(p ).style.visibility = "visible"; document.getElementById(px).style.visibility = "hidden"; document.getElementById(b ).style.borderColor = "red"; document.getElementById(bx).style.borderColor = "gray"; } mouseover button to see that version show1880("t1880_00", "t1880_02", "t1880_01", "t1880_03"); Since writing "A Few Polarization-Filter Examples" several years ago, I've been meaning to do a post on a polarization filter's effects when shooting fall [...]
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Having finally obtained a manual for the lens I got last week, I've learned a few things. One, it seems that it actually has a built-in slide-out lens hood in addition to the big detachable hood I'd been using. You're supposed to deploy both. Also, for some reason, it says that proper focus can't be [...]
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So, as evidenced by "Street Photography (Sort of) In Roppongi Hills" and its followups (parts two and three), I got a new lens last week. Some have asked to see a photo of me with it, so it's fortuitous that Kyoto friend Stéphane Barbery (he of the oft-different artistic sense and some killer Festival of [...]
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DEC 2011 UPDATE: the "v3" camera profiles mentioned below have now been supersceeded by "v4" profiles mentioned here, available with Lr3.6. If you shoot with a Nikon D3, D700, or D300, and use Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop, you'll want to know about the "Camera v3" beta camera-calibration profiles described in this Adobe-forum thread. (The actual [...]
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This post is about the aftermarket GGS Glass LCD Screen Protector, and about the store I bought mine from. First about the protector itself... Nikon cameras come with a cheap thick plastic LCD screen protector that easily scratches, scuffs, and just looks ugly. When it scuffs enough, it becomes cloudy and makes it worse than [...]
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The lens on the left is a new AF-S Nikkor 50mm f/1.4G lens, and on the right is a circa-1969 Nikkor-S Auto 50mm f/1.4. The modern version has autofocus and a built-in CPU that communicates details about settings to the camera body, but is also made of plastic rather than the steel of the original, [...]
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A couple of months ago I wrote about a new (for me) lens, a Cosina Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 that I introduced in this post. It was my intention to eventually write up a nice post all about it, with samples that I actually took time to take carefully, but free time is just not something [...]
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Well, it's not "Three Generations" quite in the same way as this shot or this one, but you get the idea. As you can tell by my lean posting schedule of late, I'm buried with work on my Lightroom plugins, hoping Lr3 doesn't come out before I'm ready. But I had the opportunity to use [...]
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I got back today the lens I sent to Sigma a week ago. They replied that they couldn't reproduce any of the problems I reported (which doesn't surprise me, because it was so intermittent and unpredictable) but sent me a new one as a replacement. We'll see how it goes... hopefully this one won't freak [...]
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So, I've written a lot lately about my new lens, a Sigma "Bigma" 50-500mm OS, including: Sigma's new "Bigma" 50-500mm Super-tele Zoom (now with OS) Sigma's new "Bigma" 50-500mm Super-tele Zoom, Part II So, Just How Bigma is the Sigma? My New Sigma "Bigma", Day 2 I Laugh at Your Puny 500mm Lens: Sigma Bigma [...]
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The photo immediately above is the Mt. Daimonji “大" visible from much of Kyoto. For comparison, this next shot was taken from about the same place, at 24 mm (as opposed to the 1,000mm of the picture above), from my Discovering Kyoto's Mt. Yoshida post a year ago... Yesterday I offered some samples of Sigma's [...]
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I've been busy busy busy with Lightroom plugin stuff and so haven't gotten much time to play with my new Sigma "Bigma" 50-500mm superzoom, but I wanted to post a few samples taken with the Sigma APO Teleconverter 2x EX DG attached, turning the Bigma into a 100-1,000mm f/9-f/13 zoom. These aren't from a proper [...]
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The second day I had my new Sigma "Bigma" 50-500mm OS super-zoom lens, I took a short stroll around town in the morning. The first thing I found were these pretty pink blossoms, and I thought to try multiple apertures to see the bokeh. I like it a lot. I'm less sure how I like [...]
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This continues from Part I and Part II on my new lens. A friend came over and I used his camera either to take some pictures, or to model the lens. I'm no good at product photography (I tried it once a few years ago, and failed miserably), but I've tried spicing these up a [...]
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This is a continuation of yesterday's post about Sigma's updated "Bigma" 50-500mm Super-tele Zoom, mostly to show more samples. Clicking through on the thumbnails brings up full-resolution versions. I horribly missed focus on this one, as I have on many of these. The depth of focus is pretty thin at 500mm, so I was sometimes [...]
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As I mentioned yesterday, I got a new camera. What I neglected to mention is that it also came with a big mass of industrial beauty called the "Sigma Bigma", the Sigma 50mm-500mm F4.5-6.3 OS HSM zoom lens. (The "OS" stands for optical stabilization, one of the new features Sigma added in this recent update [...]
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It was my birthday yesterday, and knowing my taste for high-end photography equipment, Fumie got a new camera for me. It's about the size of an egg, and delivers about the same in photographic quality. I love it. It's a Leadworks "Mini Digital Camera", sporting a 0.3MP (640×480) sensor and an internal memory that can [...]
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