I was looking for the English Nikon D70 manual (all I can seem to find is the Spanish version) and found that this FAQ pointed me to a PDF of the manual downloadable from Nikon Singapore.
Category: photography
About taking pictures
Adam Tow: Mac, mobile and photography
I met Adam Tow only once, briefly at the Apple Store Palo Alto opening in 2001. He was on the roof next door taking photos of it.
From what little I know about him, he has three obsessions: Macs, mobile devices and photography. That gives him a special star in my book. So it should come as no surprise that he announced Annoture which allows round-tripping between Aperture and iView Media Pro.Continue reading
Pringles white balance
“ExpoDisc White Balance Filter†by ExpoImaging
Carl Weese has an article today about using the ExpoDisc for digital white balance with some interesting history: it was used in 35mm film photography, before it found new life in digital.
ExpoDiscs are basically neutral translucent white filters or caps that allow you to take a white balance or exposure meter reading of the incident light, a couple are slightly cool colored which will shift your your photo to a more pleasing warmer color for skin tones. Sounds fancy, huh? They cost $60-$180.
Aperture
“Pounc-erture” by tychay
I couldn’t resist the call of the Jobs and went and purchased Aperture!
I did a computation at work today and decided that Aperture must have hit the shelves today and a quick call to Apple Store proved me correct. Apple Store Palo Alto had already run out, but there were a number of copies available at the Mini Apple Store in Stanford Mall. (Yes, living in the Bay Area does have its advantages…)
I never purchased at a Mini Apple Store before. They don’t even have a cash register there, just a hole in the wall with a bunch of drawers. They actually took my credit card using a Symbol PDA and e-mailed me my receipt (because they had my name and dotMac account on record in the central computer).
Since we were in Palo Alto, I had to make the required stop for Caitlin for dinner at Patxi’s. We opened the box there while waiting 40 minutes for our pizza to cook. Someone from the 14-person long table came up to Caitlin, who was reading the box, and said, “Excuse me, I want to thank you—half the Apple Aperture team is sitting over there.” We turned around and got an ovation as their first real-live customer.
I should carry my camera around more often.
Mike Johnston returns…
Mike Johnston, former writer of the weekly opinion column Sunday Morning Photographer, has launched a blog to talk about photography.
Check it out: The Online Photographer.
Cat eyes (and flash)
“First picture of Pounce” by tychay
( Olympus C-2500L ) ƒ3.1, 1/60sec, iso 100, 18.6mm (56mm), built-in flash
( Olympus C-2500L ) ƒ3.1, 1/60sec, iso 100, 18.6mm (56mm), built-in flash
Anyone who has taken a flash photo of their cat is aware of the cloudy yellow/green reflection in their eyes. Such was a topic of discussion on Flickr Technique.
The reason for this is that cat eyes have a reflective coating in the back of their eyes called the tapetum. Nocturnal animals have this so that light passes twice through the transparent rods/cones of their eyes creating a second opportunity to absorb the photos and resulting in better night vision—at the price of some acuity of vision because of the folded optical path. Light comes from two distances and cats are far-sighted anyways.
Pretty neat piece of evolutionary engineering.Continue reading about red eye in photography after the jump.
Apple Aperture “Now Shippingâ€
Caitlin noticed this today:
I’m so excited about the release of this product that I started a Flickr group just for the hell of it which is strange for someone who is going to have to live a little vicariously—I’m probably skipping this release and buying the 2.0 like I did with Apple Keynote.
Nikon posts record profits (again)
I read on PhotographyBlog that Nikon posted record profits from February to September 2005. The D70’s sequel the D70s and the surprising D50.
I know this sounds like cheerleading, but remember that half of my decision to purchase a D70 was based on which companies would be around after the expected fallout from the impending dSLR smackdown.
APS-C vs 35mm
Petteri Sulonen has written an article about deciding between dSLR sensor sizes, which is related to my previous entry. He is switching from Canon EOS 20D (1.6x APS) to EOS 5D (full frame) and writes:
My gut feeling when looking at what’s available now and what it needs to do is that the successor to 35 mm film is, indeed, digital APS-C. Full-frame is a little too hot (most lenses at most apertures and most focal lengths can’t quite keep up with the demands of the format, and the chips are difficult and expensive to produce, at least at the current state of the art), while 4/3 is a little too cold (Olympus has been forced to come out with monster f/2.0 zooms to provide even rudimentary available-light capacity, given the comparatively poor high-ISO performance of at least the current 4/3 sensors), while APS-C is just right — the sensors sharp enough and fast enough for almost any purpose, without putting too burdensome demands on the lenses.
I agree with him whole-heartedly. It is not that I wouldn’t jump at a 35mm sensor if I could afford it, it is that I don’t because I can’t.
D50 or D70?
Nikon D50 from NikonLinks
Since Dru is considering a D50, here is what I wrote a long time ago about the D50.
I read that the D50 is supposed to be more colorful than the the D70. At the time I thought this could be because the default color space is sRGB-IIIa in the D50 and sRGB-III in the D70. This can be set in the custom menu. I set mine to AdobeRGB with the caveat that I have to use sRGB when uploading to the web. In any case, I was wrong. It turned out that Nikon has improved the anti-aliasing filter in front of the CCD. This makes the camera less noisy: according to Popular Photography, the D50 is less noisy than the D70s and the Digital Rebel! One penalty of the new filter is that you can’t do infrared photography with the D50, but since I don’t do IR photography, that’s a non-issue.
Nikon removes the “sub command dial” from the D50? Is that a deal killer? They still have a command dial and an alt key to turn it into a sub command dial—very Canon-like, in my opinion. Maybe if you do bracketing exposures, eyeball depth-of-field, or use gradient ND filters, the D50 seems like too big a compromise. But it takes the same shots as a D70 or a D100 (actually, it performs a little better) and costs less. I can’t say which is best for you.
What would I miss if I had purchased a D50 today instead of a D70 then
Continue reading