Derwent Valley

I went hiking in the Upper Derwent Valley with a friend on Saturday. It's the first time I've been hiking in quite a while. Since I took up photography, in fact. I rarely have an opportunity to shoot rural landscapes so I relished the chance and got some decent photos, quite possibly some of my best, despite still suffering from lens artifacts. I'll do the usual of trying to clean up the source images before pushing it through the HDR process again and I'm going to invest in a proper camera cleaning kit (or just pay a professional to do it for me).

HDR and freckling

A colleague who is similarly photographic suggested we go out of an evening to take some HDR shots. I think she knows I do quite a bit of HDR and was keen to see what it was about. I got some good results but my I'm struggling with freckling in some many shots taken later in the evening. The HDR process exacerbates the problem but I can see the marks on the source images. I've cleaned the lens and am certain it's spotless, I've even cleaned my mirror but the freckling still occurs. So it could be my sensor or failing that, I'm left with the terrible prospect that it's dirt inside the lens itself. Whatever the cause, it needs to be sorted before I go away for new year. I'll try to test the theory by taking a shot that freckles on my wide-angle lens, replacing the lens and seeing if it still occurs. If it does, it's the mirror or sensor in the camera body, if not, it's the lens. At least that'll give me a better idea of where I stand.

Unless of course it's both lenses.

Zombie

One night last week I attended 2.8 Hours Later, a 'zombie chase game' through the streets of my home city. Essentially, you report to an abandoned mill (something we have in abundance) and are sent off in teams at 80 second intervals with a map and a grid reference to get to next. There will be a scenario with actors at the grid reference the outcome of which will include your next destination and there are zombies en route/at said destination. The zombies got me right before the end and thus I was made up as a zombie for the party at the end. The resultant drinking assisted me zombie impersonation for this portrait I took when I got home (taken on my wide-angle lens, no less) but assisted my photography skills less. Nonethless, it's a decent self portrait, augmented with a vignette in GIMP. The event repeated every night until Sunday but unfortunately I was atypically busy and so didn't get to lurk and take photos of others playing the game. Here's hoping they repeat it next year.

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.