Paul Lester Photo

The beast is back! After a long hiatus, the D300 is finally back in my hands and on my tripod. I’ve not used this camera in nearly a year. It started flaking out last year, around April and finally gave up in June. It wasn’t until mid-November that I sent it back to Nikon. Then, it was on hold, awaiting parts for nearly a month, but it finally arrived yesterday. This, in itself, was a surprise. I just happened to check the site, expecting to see On Hold, but instead saw Shipped. I was very surprised. Even more so when I clicked on the tracking number and saw that it was in Charlotte and out for delivery!

It arrived around 1:00 PM. I fired it up, had a few shots to see that everything was peachy, and set about reseting the menus the way that I like them: Auto focus assist – off, sounds – off, all that nonsense.

Today, I had a number of meetings, the final one ended at around 2:30. I decided to head to the park for about 30 minutes and take a few shots … righhhhhhhhhhtttt! I got to the park at around 3:00 and easily slipped into the zone, so to speak. I took a few shots by the river, after I figured out how to work the camera again. It was funny to watch after getting used to other cameras, not using this one for so long, and then coming back. Comedy at its finest!

I walked up and down the trails, looking here and there. At one point I startled either a hawk or an owl, I didn’t get to quite see what it was, but it sure didn’t like that I was so close. I would have to guess owl. I’ve almost walked into an owl before. I usually don’t see hawks perched that low, but you never know. The woods were so quiet, save for the distant fun-filled yells of some younger girls with extremely high pitched voices. Man, they could yell! Eventually, they stopped and all was quiet save for the wonderful background noises of the woods.

It had been a long while, more than a year, since I had mounted the camera on a tripod, walked along the woods, took my time, and just enjoyed what I was doing. As you can probably guess, I went over my 30 minutes, just a tad … well, by an hour and fifteen minutes. Hmmmm. 4:45? I suppose I ought to be getting back home now.

What a good time that was. I’ve got more such outings planned. Who knows? Maybe I’ll see that hawk or owl again. I’m sure it’s out there.

During this weekend’s retreat, I took some time to download Lightroom 4 Beta. I was most interested in the new book module, so that’s where I focused my attention.

Thinking back, I participated in 2 of the 4 SOFOBOMOs and I enjoyed my participation; however, I most say that sometimes, making a book was quite annoying. I had to deal with Scribus, the open source book making software, learn of its idiosyncrasies, of which it had many. Further, there was the choosing of the files, exporting them to the right sizes, making adjusts, etc. If I wanted to change photo layout, or perhaps make adjustments to the photos, that was an ordeal, for me. After I finished the book, if I ever wanted to reproduce it again, or change it, I’d have to make sure to put it somewhere, the Scribus files as well as the photos, that I could find them again. Sometimes, I’m not the most organized fellow. I wished, during those times, that there was a way to do all of that together.

When I opened LR4 and clicked over to the book module, it was pretty intuitive. I played with it for a bit, then when I thought I understood it, I began to make a book. I decided to make my 2004 photos book. Adobe has partnered with Blurb and you can make your Blurb book right there in LR4 and it will price it for you as you add or remove photos. A very nice feature. Or, if you want to make a PDF, you can export your book as PDF and print it yourself.
Click image to view book

Everything is integrated now. You simply make a collection, click on the Book module, choose your collection, and your photos appear at the bottom in the filmstrip. Simple. You choose the type of book that you want:

Small Square
Standard Landscape
Standard Portait
Large Landscape
Large Square

Then, you can click Auto Flow and LR4 will distribute your pictures throughout the book, based on the particular style book that you have picked, or you can add pages manually, drag and drop your photos wherever you want. You can mix and match from the different page styles as well. There seems to be quite a few choices. Easy. There are predefined templates like: Clean, Wedding, Portfolio, etc, each having multiple layouts such as single photo, double, triple, with or without text, etc.

The best part, for me at least, is that now that your photos are in place, you can go back to your collection at any time and make adjustments to the photos and those adjustments will appear in the book. Further, when you have the book, it saves it in the collection, right next to the photos! Yes!

There are also built in warnings that let you know if a photo doesn’t have enough pixels to print well. I got one such warning: This photo will not print well. At the current size, it will print at 188 PPI, minimum suggested is 200 PPI.

I was able to assemble my book in about 30 minutes. Though it is not finished yet, it was an easy task.

One complaint that I’ve seen online was that you cannot export the book as a collection of JPEG files. This would allow you to send them to any printer; however, from what the folks were saying, most printers will not accept PDFs; therefore, you are stuck with Blurb is you want to make a book or find someone to print your PDF, or print it yourself.

It’s not a perfect solution, but it is certainly a fantastic step forward in making your own book a lot easier. No, it doesn’t have all of the bells and whistles that Scribus or InDesign has; however, it has enough to make a nice book.

For the PDF export, I would love if it would allow me to select the default opening mode, two up continuous, for the book, but I’ve not found a place. Also, the cover gets saved to a separate file.

Motion snapshot
Finally! The clouds broke and I could get the camera out into some natural light! I know that it would be considered a gadget, but I wanted to try the movie snapshot. The camera takes a 2 second, slow motion shot of whatever you are pointing at and then adds a single shot at the end. No, nothing earth shattering, but I wanted to try it. So, included in this post are two such motion snapshots. Music is included; however, in order to get it, you have to use Nikon’s software, ViewNX2, which I do not have. It is, however, easily changed by bringing it into iMovie, or some other movie making/editing software and adding your own track. Optionally, to make much longer (short) movies, you could put the camera into 30 fps mode, or even 60 and take a number of bursts, making your own slow motion movie!

On to more serious matters. In using a camera on the street, you want to be stealthy so that you can capture the moment. Noisy cameras call attention. Big cameras call attention. Photographers looking like they are trying to be stealthy, call attention. However, smaller cameras seem to insignificant. In order to capture moments, street photographers generally employ such things as zone focusing. When I’m using the Leica, I use it all the time. Focus at near infinity, set the lens on f/11 with an appropriate shutter speed, react! That’s about it.

I wanted to see how this camera would fare with street shooting:

Auto-focus:
In a word: fast! This camera doesn’t hesitate. A tried quite a few quick draw moves, near and far. What I mean by quick draw is that I had the camera at my waist, raised it quickly, pointing at what I wanted to shoot, and pressed the shutter. It responded immediately and, the best part, none of the images that I took were out of focus, no matter if they were near, or far, taken at 10 mm or 30 mm, all were sharp. It didn’t miss! I realize that with such a small sensor that part of this could be the large amount of DOF that the camera has, inherently, but I was shooting wide open (f/3.5) and still, no misses. Impressive! So, I would say that it most certainly passed the street test!

Tonight, it goes on the tripod for some shots of downtown Charlotte at night. I have to send it back on Thursday evening, so I can’t let moss grow under my feet, ya know!

Spear-it

I’ve heard that there’s a first time for everything. Well, add another one of those items to my list, please.

Saturday, after the Peaceful Dragon Chinese New Year’s festival, I came home, removed the card from the camera (Nikon V1), started Lightroom, placed SD card into the reader, and took a quick bathroom break. When I came back, I was surprised to see that all the files had loaded. I thought: Wow! That was quick. The files must have been very small to have loaded nearly 1300 files in that short of a time. Well, I was shooting JPEG. Anyway, I proceed to work with the files, exporting some to place on my Facebook page for all to see.

After I finished selecting the images that I wanted to export, and exporting them, I decided to pull the card out, reformat it, and get ready for the evening’s activities. I have Lightroom set to auto-eject after the import, so I just pulled the card out.

I saw a message that indicated that I pulled the card without properly ejecting it. Odd. Oh well, I’ve seen that before, rarely, and no harm, no foul. So, without thinking, I put the card back into the camera, formatted it, and placed it into the bag.

A little while later, I saw another picture that I wanted to play with. So, I double clicked it and get a message from LR saying that it couldn’t find the original. Huh? As I clicked on more and more of them and get the same message, I had a sinking feeling. Crap! I should have heeded that message. I had nothing but previews. The files behind were missing and I had already formatted the card.

Fortunately, I know a thing about disks and knew that the data was still there, only the directory was ‘reset’, all that I would need is a program to recover the images. I took the card out of the camera and set it to the side. I went to Google and did a search for SD card file recovery and found a program, Stellar Phoenix Photo Recovery, read some reviews that were quite positive, ordered a copy for $39, and recovered every one of my files.

I will admit that I was pretty tired and didn’t follow my own procedure for downloading and use of cards. I have 4 SD cards and use them in round-robin fashion. Take one out, copy the files, place it in back of all the others, take the one from the front, put it into the camera, format, and use. That way, the most recent one is always 3 behind and I’ve never lost any files nor had the need for such a program … but, as they say, you learn something new everyday and I learned to follow my process. It was a cheap lesson, but one that I probably won’t forget!

Note: This photo was a nice find. I remember Natalia coming out running and yelling with her spear, as part of the show. I wanted to get a shot of her, but didn’t want to be right in front of her. I was slightly off to the side and trying to pan. At first, I thought that I had blown this shot, but the more that I looked at it, the more that I liked it.