Southeast Asia trip #1

It's been a while since I posted and at least part of the reason for this is that I spent the first part of the year touring around a large slice of Southeast Asia.

I took a huge number of photos of course (around 3000) so it's taking forever to process them. One thing I've found myself doing is taking nothing but HDR cityscape and architectural study. These do tend to be some of my stronger pieces but I do need to be mindful that I don't miss opportunities to capture other subjects better suited to different techniques.

Anyway, even the HDR ones are proving tricky, possibly because I still need to better understand my HDR software but I'll continue to plug away at it. In the meantime, here's one that's come out successfully- the view of Ho Chi Minh city (Saigon) from the bar at the Sheraton hotel. And happy New Year, everyone!


Unfortunately I had to take the shot freehand- no tripod available, which would have made it crisper but it came out well, considering.

Contrasting views

Not a huge amount to say by way of photographic updates but I've had a couple of nice sunsets viewable from my apartment so here they are captured in HDR. The first one has an off-the-shelf filter applied beyond the HDR process whereas the second is straight-up HDR with only the usual brightness/contrast/sharpness tweaks.

Halloween 2012

I was invited to a Halloween party held by a colleague this year and this allows me to indulge my love of fancy dress that appears to have developed in adulthood.

I had an idea for a two-tone approach of a black and white based around a suit, white facepaint and contacts. This did mean that I had to remove all of my hair, however, since it didn't comply with the colour scheme.

Quite pleased with the end result since there were a lot of unknowns (never used contacts, glued on prosthetics or shaved my head before) but the whole outfit only cost me £7 since I just had to buy the glue and the contacts, the rest of the outfit being recycled from previous work events.

D600 revisited

I've continued to follow the D600 after its ridiculously pricy UK launch and, at time of writing, it's come down in price 21% on Amazon to a much more reasonable £1540. This puts it much more within my price range for what I'd be prepared to pay for a camera at this level, i.e. entry-level full-frame, but there was one more disappointment when we had the release announcement which is that it only does three-stage Auto Exposure Bracketing (AEB). For those you who aren't aware, AEB makes HDR photography (which I do a lot of) very easy- I switch it on, hold down my shutter release and my camera will take three photos at varying levels of exposure for my HDR software to combine.

...and that's my point, this is what I do with my current camera, a D7000, and the D600 doesn't give me any more exposures. The D800 will let you do up to seven so I was hoping for at least five from a camera that costs twice as much as my 'humble' D7000.

Or so I thought, but then reading about how the D600's sensor already has a superior dynamic range and so each of those three exposures is still delivering more from an HDR perspective. Just how much more is a bit more difficult to quantify.

I also realised that, in order to get the benefit of the new camera, I'd also have to replace all my DX (cropped) format lenses so I'd be looking at at least a £3000 spend in total.

Maybe not something I'll be doing too soon, then...

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.