Masque

The theme for this year's Christmas party at the office where I work has been chosen as masquerade. Though initially dismissive of the idea as 'fancy dress from the neck up', I subsequently fell in love with these gorgeous objects and it took forever for me to decide on this one to wear on the night. It looks better in the wrapping than it does on my but I'm not really sure that the fault for this lies with the mask.

Prescient

Five days after I pointed out that the UK price of the D600 is too high, it drops by 18% on Amazon. Coincidence?

Yes.

But still, it's not even been released yet and they already dropped it by that much. Still, it needed doing.

D600 launch

So after much rumour, speculation and leaks, Nikon finally announced it's new entry-level full-frame (FX) model, the D600. As mentioned in previous posts, this is a camera I was looking at getting based on leaked and rumoured specs as the next logical stop up from my DX format D7000. I must say, the final release did have a pretty big sting, for those of us in the UK at least: the price. Remember that this is meant to be the "lets make full-frame affordable for the consumer market" model. Now in the US, it's $2100 which I would be more than happy to pay for what this camera is. I mean, I'd jump at that. But in the UK, it's £1975 or USD$3200. 50% more! And I'm taking Amazon.com vs. Amazon.co.uk so it's about as much of a like-for-like comparison as you can get.

This is how bad it is- it's cheaper for me to purchase a return flight ticket to New York and buy the camera while I'm there than it is for me to buy one from Amazon.co.uk. And I don't mean pennies cheaper; I did the briefest of searches for flights and found that I'd still save over £230 on the cost of the camera. Madness.

This is made more ridiculous by the fact that the D800 is 'only' £2204. Less than £250(12%) more for a camera two tiers above the D600. Surely Nikon have got to do something to sort this pricing out but I can't see myself making a purchase before they do.

Manchester Pride 2012

A week late in the update but it was the annual gay Pride parade in my home city of Manchester last weekend and, given that I live only about 100 metres from the gay village where the parade winds up, it's a great photo op.

I headed over a little before it was due to start to try and get a good spot to shoot from. I was damn lucky, managing to haul myself up onto the window ledge of a local business and shoot over the crowd. The downside being that the crowd filled in underneath me so I couldn't get down and was trapped on said window ledge for 90 minutes. I did manage to get some good photos, though so it was worth doing. Definitely going to try and secure the same spot next year. It was bit of a challenging shoot, though- the direction of the Sun frequently meant that the parade itself was in shadow and the crowd behind was in direct sunlight meaning it's tricky to get a balance in the final shot- up the exposure to make the subject clear at the risk of creating a distracting blaze of overexposure in the crowd behind? I'm pleased with a number of photos nonetheless.



The complete set of photos from the day can be found here.