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.

Wishin' an' hopin'

I'm eagerly awaiting next month's Photokina exhibition for all the expected Nikon announcements. Particularly the cheap full frame model. I've also worked out that I want one of the Nikon x-300mm lenses (they do four: 18, 28, 55 & 70) but which one I get will depend on whether I pick up this full frame camera or not and whether they announce successors to any of those models. I'm also really hoping that'll it'll do at least 5-stage auto-exposure bracketing (not mentioned on the specs known so far) or I'm not entirely sure I can justify the purchase.

Fruition

I don't believe I actually mentioned it on this blog but, quite a while ago now, I received my fist payment to license one of my images. Well the project finally went live. It's part of a commemorative collection of Olympic stamps featuring photos from places on the Olympic torch route. Here's the photo in question:



It's actually one of my older photos, taken on my D3000. I'd probably have cleaned it up more these days but it clearly someone felt that it was good enough. Also I'm cheap! :D

Lessons learned

Take a look at the above shot. Those flecks dominating the top right corner of the frame are sadly not a feature of the instagram-style filter I sadly had to use to make the shot even remotely work. Yes, I had crap on my lens. Normally this wouldn't be too much of a problem because at typical exposure, there's enough light coming through the lens to eradicate it but for a HDR shot, the underexposed frames are already limiting the light coming into the lens so the specks show up more. The HDR software then picks up on these details out and exacerbates the effect.

Obviously the solution is very simple- one of those inespensive lens pens/cleaners. Hama do one for all of £7 on Amazon which I've picked up since (and can recommend) but sadly it doesn't help those photos I took at the time.

Uneventful

Not much happening on the photography front for me.

I've been very interested in the leaked photos and rumoured specs for the Nikon D600. 'Affordable' 24mp full frame? If it'll do five stage AEB, I'm pretty much determined to pick one up, but that's not been mentioned in the specs yet.

I've also booked a big trip for New Year- I'm off to Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand so that should yield some really good photo opportunities. I'm still not sure what, if anything, I want to do in terms of lenses but I think that my Tokina 11-16 should suffice. It's done pretty well so far.

Österreichische Nationalbibliothek

These are some more of the photos from my recent Austria trip- HDR shots of the state hall from Austria's national library in Vienna. A blogger working for Vienna university library was kind enough to feature them on the university library blog. I didn't have my tripod with me (nor do I particularly have a reason to think I would have been allowed to use it if I had) but the HDR has come out crisply regardless. Some loss of sharpness in the foreground of some shots so I still need to refine my technique but I think I'm improving my HDR overall.

I can't help wonder if there isn't some duplication in the shots, though. Do I really need all six? What do you think?

Österreichische Nationalbibliothek

It's been quite a while since I updated and at least part of the reason for that is that I've been travelling again, this time to Ireland, Austria and Slovakia. I've got some of the best photos I've ever taken from that trip so I think that over the next few updates I'll be sharing some of those with you. The above is from the long room of the Austrian National Library, perhaps the most beautiful and moving building I've ever stood in, which is especially remarkable given that it is not a religious building.