Adobe has posted a release candidate of Lightroom 2.1 for those Lightroom 2.0 owners who wish to try it. The update has no new functionality (except support for some new cameras), but does include a host of bug fixes and speedup improvements (all listed on the page I linked to). If you're being bit by one of the bugs, you'll probably want to upgrade.

The "release candidate" status means that Adobe believes it's ready for use, but it's not an update that's pushed to everyone automatically; you have to download it manually. After the Lightroom 1.4 booboos, Adobe is stepping [...]
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 – two weeks later – getting many thousands of views a day).

A lot of people have commented that they had no idea that a camera shutter was so complex, and for the most part, that's okay because, for the most part, photographers really don't need [...]
View full post »

I haven't done much since returning to Japan a week ago. Tired from the trip... overwhelmed with work (that I don't even get paid for)... and spending an inordinate time at the doctor for some acute back problems. It's been a long week.

But I was feeling okay last night, so after Mass in downtown Kyoto, I thought I'd give my new Nikon D700's legendary low-light performance a spin, combining it with the fastest lens that I could get my hands on (that is, one that lets in the most light), the same Nikkor 50mm f/1.2 that I borrowed from [...]

(The white line on the left side of the blue "exposure" band, below the big "@", is when the camera's flash fired for the exposure.)

Marianne Oelund recently posted a sequence of images of a Nikon D3 shutter in action, over on the Digital Photography Review Nikon D3 forum. With her permission, I have turned that sequence into a mini web movie application, such that you can animate the frames by sliding your mouse back and forth across the image.

I thought she had created the images with a high-speed camera, but it turns out that, lacking a high-speed camera, [...]

Prior to last week's visit to Vancouver and Whistler, I'd been enjoying the dynamic clouds during my trip to Ohio for the summer. (I posted some sorta' pretty cloud pictures here, here, and here.)

I'm back in Ohio now for another week or so, but the weather has been cold and drizzly, so I'm not getting any of the wonderful cloudscapes we had before. Still, I have plenty of pictures from before the Canada trip. The ones on this post are from a 10-minute walk with the camera down by the lake, one afternoon three weeks ago...

I love [...]