I was washing the windows in the living room this afternoon, and happened to glance out to see a small troupe from yesterday's movie shoot for "Mother Water" 「マザーウォーター」 setting up shop just below my balcony, to get a short scene of the water flowing over a waterfall (the very tiny... two or three inches... [...]
View full post »

When I started to take photography somewhat seriously (circa January 2006 when I got a Nikon D200), a long-time friend who happened to work at Apple extolled the virtues of Apple Aperture, which had just been released. It was, he said, still a bit buggy, but even so was so much better than working with [...]
View full post »

Apple has just released the first major upgrade in a long time to Aperture, its photo-workflow application that fights against Adobe Lightroom for market share in the pro / advanced-amateur photographer market. This is great news if you're into photography, even if, like me, you've never used Aperture. The list of features in Aperture 3.0 [...]
View full post »

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, the participants in the eclectic musical ensemble are all acquaintances of one guy, who thought it'd be nice to get them together. Some of them belong to a camera club together, so advanced amateur photographers were plentiful in attendance, both on stage and in the audience. The central acquaintance, [...]
View full post »

As soon as I switched to a Nikon D700 from a Nikon D200, I started getting corrupt memory cards. I brought the camera to the Nikon Service Center in Osaka, but they said that it's probably the memory card that's the problem. I used only Transcend compact flash cards, which are not on the official [...]
View full post »

I've got a horrible cold at the moment, but my days of misery have been punctuated by news of two glorious events. Yesterday there was news of my niece Felicity's birth, and today there was an email from Katz Eye Optics that they now have a model available for the D700. Woohoo! I couldn't type [...]
View full post »

After getting my Nikon D700 and putting its low-light capabilities to the test (see: "Impossible Photography: No Light, No Tripod, No Hope. D700 and a 50mm f/1.2" and "A Few More D700 f/1.2 Night Shots") I quickly expanded my understanding of the lighting conditions in which I could do handheld photography. In exploring this new [...]
View full post »

Almost two years ago I created and released my autofocus test chart, for testing the autofocus accuracy of a camera/lens combination. Accompanied by a detailed discussion about how to test autofocus, and of issues that might crop up, it has garnered a lot of attention. My daily logs tell me that it's still one of [...]
View full post »

My "Nikon D3 Shutter Release in Super Slow Motion" post from two weeks ago, in which I offered a nice presentation of the ingenious work by Marianne Oelund, garnered quite a lot of attention, quickly becoming the most popular post on my blog (which perhaps doesn't say much, but in any case, it's still – [...]
View full post »

var LC925 = 70; var ReadyToRun = 0; function L925(num) { document.getElementById("L925_" + num).style.color = '#050'; if (--LC925 == 0) { document.getElementById('Loading925').style.display = 'none'; document.getElementById('Inst925').style.display = 'block'; } } function Y925(event) { if (ReadyToRun) Y925Real(event) } ( slide your mouse over the image side to side for animation ) Still Loading: [ ......................................................................] (The white [...]
View full post »

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 [...]
View full post »

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... function show(letter, extra) { document.getElementById(letter + [...]
View full post »

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 [...]
View full post »

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 [...]
View full post »

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 [...]
View full post »

I found myself suddenly lusting for a second monitor (Lightroom 2 supports two monitors), 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 [...]
View full post »

I've been meaning to write about and recommend the 16" FotoSharp Camera Rain Cover I picked up last summer. It's a remarkably simple little cover that scrunches up into a tiny ball in my camera bag when not in use, yet provides rain protection even with my big Nikkor 70-200 VR zoom on my D200. [...]
View full post »

I love my Nikon D200, but yesterday added a new woe to the "Dead Battery Syndrome" I experienced a couple of months ago: "Black Frame Syndrome" Yesterday, Kyoto was a cold and heavily overcast, with sporadic misty rain. Occasionally and all too briefly, the sun would poke out in brilliant fashion to set the foliage [...]
View full post »