Archive for the 'Camera Stuff' Category

About cameras, equipment, and postprocessing techniques

Lightroom “GPS Proximity Search” Plugin

I'm releasing today a plugin for Adobe Lightroom 2.0 or later that allows you to perform a proximity search based on the locations geoencoded into your images. This adds to my stable of Lightroom plugins listed on my Lightroom Goodies page, and is the second that's not a vanilla "export to..." plugin (the other being my Metadata Wrangler).

I started writing this the other day after wanting to illustrate my Perfect Weather for a Snooze on a Park Bench post, but couldn't find among the 30,000 images in my library some of the Anthony-swinging pictures that I knew I had. [...]


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Backing Up My Photos With Lightroom and Zenfolio

By far the most popular goodies for Adobe Lightroom that I've published are my export plugins, for Zenfolio, SmugMug, Flickr, Picasa Web, and Facebook. I don't use any of these services to host my own photos (I generally publish what I want here on my blog and in my photostreams), but I do use a unique aspect of Zenfolio – their hierarchical gallery system – as a cheap and convenient way to back up my photos. It also allows my wife convenient access to all my photos without her having to learn Lightroom.

As I describe on My Photo and [...]


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D700 at Dusk: Bike Ride, Etc.

My lingering cold finally unlingered enough today that I could venture out for a bit: Anthony for a bike ride, and me to give my new Nikon D700 a spin. Other than the 20-minute night-time outing that resulted in the Impossible Photography post and its followup, I hadn't been outside with the D700 since the day I got it (the day I returned to Kyoto from summer travels).

I grabbed my biggest zoom (Nikkor 70-200 f/2.8 VR and a 1.7× Extender), and put the camera into "Auto ISO" mode such that it'll kick up the sensitivity as needed to keep [...]


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Memory Lane: My First Macro Attempts

I got a lot of fun camera toys on my Summer 2007 trip to my folks' place in Ohio (tripod, monopod, GPS unit, Katz Eye, high-resolution tablet), but the first thing I played with was a $5 item that allowed me to mount my Sigma 30mm f/1.4 on the camera backwards, thereby yielding an unwieldy but powerful (yet cheap) macro setup.

I later wrote about the basics of reverse-lens macro photography, including the challenges, but when I first got the adapter ring that allowed me to give it a try myself, I didn't have much more than the raw enthusiasm [...]


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Camera Tutorial: How to Ruin Your Shots (Before You Even Take Them!)

Here's an effective way to ruin almost all your shots for the day, before you even start: neglect to notice a big hunk of grunge on your sensor, thereby causing a big black splotch on most of your photos.

As part of the rigorous testing I do for my readership, I embarked on a thorough test of this technique, while on vacation no less, one of the first days I was at my folks' place in Ohio this summer. It was a wonderful summer day, and a walk around outside had great potential for lots of ruined shots, and I [...]


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