Giveaway

I gave my sister the d40 for Christmas. I've kept silent about ordering the d7000 for awhile because it was intended to be a surprise (which it was, more or less). I gave her the 55–200 as well as the kit lens, anticipating that I'll get an 85mm prime sometime to hit that range. I don't know which of them I'll get.

As soon as it comes in (I've been waiting since 4 November!), I'll post impressions, reviews, and, of course, pictures.

The inaugural photography outing with a group of friends will take place 22 January; hopefully it'll arrive by then.

Perspective

Thom Hogan (page at right) put together a string of posts he calls "you week." The page itself is fairly long, but his commentary is well worth reading. He gave an assignment: take a fixed lens, set your camera to manual focus/exposure, and go shoot. He comments on a few reactions:

• You discovered that your pictures looked different. Using only one focal length tends to make you move in order to frame your shot. Moving to frame changes your perspective. When you start changing perspective between shots you get pictures that leave differing impressions of foreground and background relationships. Heard about the 3D craze going around Hollywood? Well, you just discovered 2D. All good. You need more practice, though. Take two primes of different focal length and start exploring moving in relationship to your subject.

This is a really interesting comment, because it demonstrates so clearly what makes primes an interesting tool: perspective. Perspective is influenced by both the focal length and distance to the subject. Framing the subject in the same space using two different focal lengths requires moving back and forth—and it represents things much differently.

White Balance and Lighting

White balance and lighting are pretty critical elements of good color composition. I'm hardly an expert at this, and all of my lighting experience has been with natural lighting—no flash systems or anything more complex than an SB-400.

This past weekend, I was able to get some pictures of my parents' firebushes. I was really just killing time, not planning anything...but it worked out fortuitously.

I've wanted to post a bit about lighting, but time and experience are both factors here.

The bushes look a bit like this:

24mm, 1/100s @ f/4, ISO 400

This is actually the "pretty" version of the bushes, taken at the end of the set. With somewhat poorer lighting and bad composition, we get something eternally uglier:

Nikon d7000

As anyone who follows Nikon knows, the d7000 dropped today. Amazon is offering pre-orders, and I plan on grabbing one as soon as I'm comfortable with my bank account balance.

There are some decent reviews online, but the main one of interest is the one at dPreview. It's hands on and has lots of good news.

Issues of interest to me:

• Hi ISO performance (100–6400)
• 100% viewfinder coverage
• AI lens metering
• AF-D lens compatibility (duh)
• Dual SD card slots
• Magnesium alloy weather-sealed case

There are a couple other interesting points, but I suspect it'll be a great upgrade, and the final one before I do anything with a full-frame camera. When I get my hands on one, I'll try to put up a review.

White Balance

White balance is really critical, and I wish I had known this a long time ago. When I bought my camera to go to Kenya, I knew even less about photography than I know today—hard to believe, but true. It turns out that the weather was mainly overcast, and this led to pretty drab photos that I wanted to touch up later. As it happens, automatic color adjustments in most software programs are not really all that great: they overcompensate based on slavish adherence to the color or value curves in the image histogram (this doesn't really need to mean anything to you at the moment, but it does give me an idea for another posting sometime). This is okay when colors are normally distributed in the image, but usually they aren't—that's why we want to fix them in the first place.

The drabness of an image is often the result of improper white balancing. A warmer white balance leads to more saturated photos with deeper reds. In shady conditions, this is usually needed to counteract the bluer tones in the scene. Ken Rockwell (linked right) has a good article on white balance that's worth a quick read, and others exist on the web, too.

This is a bit of an article on my experience.

Black and White

There are a lot of variables in photography—maybe that's one of the reasons I enjoy it. The complexity of picture taking helps ensure that photographing the same subject several times never really returns the same result.

I'm mainly a colors person; I enjoy color and in proper combinations I find it compelling and striking. That said, I'm also a fan of geometry (the only math I ever did very well in, and incidentally the best graphics course I took in my CS degree). I realized recently that there are two primary reasons that intro photo courses don't use color.

Before and After

Composition remains one of my worst skills. I usually shoot very instinctively, and unfortunately my instincts are not all that great.

Often I'll shoot out the car—it's no-look shooting, don't worry; I tape the lens at infinity and don't consult the viewfinder—using the 24mm. It's fast enough, and the wider field of view gives a few more options for cropping. Moreover, the exposure is completely manual, which adds a bit of randomness—it's not adjusting to changing lighting conditions. The exposure is sometimes pretty interesting.

I am usually too lazy to edit photos, but I made an exception in this case.

My Gear

Probably the easiest thing to write about, since it's more technical than technique, if you take my meaning, is equipment.

Photography

In 2007, I bought my first SLR—a Nikon D40. I had basically decided to take a trip to Africa that summer, and it seemed like a good plan to get a camera for the experience.

This, in short, is how I came to be interested in photography. By trade, I'm a computer programmer, and I am a fairly experienced martial artist (I'll be a 4th Dan in Tang Soo Do in a month's time following this writing). Art has never much been my forte, although I am an occasional writer and generally accounted as fairly articulate.