When I set out to make a t-shirt about the changing of the guard in #730reportland, I never figured it would be controversial. I’ve had more comments about it on twitter than any other t-shirt.
People have criticised me for who I have left off and the order they people were put in. The order is random by the way, just the way I looked peoples names up and nothing more.
Names put to me include ( in no particular order ) Me ( and no I didn’t nominate myself), Barrie Cassidy, Monica Attard, B1 and B2, Big Ted, @firstdogonmoon, David Speers, Chris Lilley, Johnathan Holmes, Laurie Oakes, Mark Colvin, Steve Cannane and Eleanor Hall, just to name a few.
If I sell a couple more… and get some more names… I might be forced to make a senate ballot paper.
So go buy the t-shirt, hoodie or long sleeve… and leave a comment.
• 96% (horizontal and vertical) frame coverage
• Built-in diopter adjustment (-2 to +1m-1)
Continuous shooting rate
• Approx. 6 fps max
• Approx. 4.5 fps max
Max Shutter Speed
• 1/8000 second
• 1/4000 sec
Modes
• Portrait, Landscape, Child, Sports, Close up, Night portrait, Night landscape, Party/indoor, Beach/snow, Sunset, Dusk/dawn, Pet portrait, Candlelight, Blossom, Autumn colors, Food, Silhouette, High key, Low key, U1 (user settings 1), U2 (user settings 2)
• Portrait, Landscape, Close-up, Sports, Night portrait
Pixel Density
• 4.6 MP/cm²
• 3.3 MP/cm²
Video Format
• MOV, H.264 (Stereo with external mike), 20 Min Max length
• AVI M-JPEG ( Mono), 5 Min Max length
Memory format
• SD/SDHC/SDXC (dual slots)
• SD/SDHC
Dimensions
132 x 105 x 77mm
(5.2 x 4.1 x 3.0in)
148 x 111 x 74 mm
(5.8 x 4.3 x 2.8in)
Weight (inc battery)
780 g (1.7 lb.)
704 g (1.5 lb.)
header
(Source of Table: DP Review and Nikon- if I have missed out something let me know.)
As you can see this camera leaves the D90 in the dust. Low light and fast photography have all been ramped up incredibly. And for a RRP or around the $1200 USD mark it gives the non professional shooter a great camera with many Pro and Semi Pro features at what I think is a great price.
A few other thoughts….
The extra mega pixels can ensure larger printers ( although the prints I have got from my D90 at A3 are stunning), but it also gives you a bit more crop room. You can cut that little bit more of the edges of your image that don’t quite line up and still get the same print size. Further (somewhat reduced by the D7000 having a virtual horizon) is that you can rotate your images to straighten them as well and still get a full size print.
The extra 4% in the view finder may not seem much, yet having a 100% Viewfinder means that nothing unexpected will creep into the side of your image. I’ve got used to always checking on my D90 that I’ve got the whole shot and nothing extra, but having the 100% Viewfinder is something that just makes your life in post processing much easier.
I’d love to get my hand on the camera just for the Shutter Speed as well. 1/8000th of a second will freeze just about anything. Perfect for insects in flight, water in motion e.t.c. The extra 2 FPS on the body is also fantastic as well, letting you burn through action.
The other great feature is the “weather-resistant” body. There have been times I’ve had to stop shooting with just a few drops of rain on the D90, the D7000 lets you get a bit more extreme with your shooting, without having to worry about dust and a few drops of rain.
The Video feature has been dramatically expanded as well. One thing is I am glad that Nikon have moved to H264 .mov files. This has become the standard for video these days and opens up a lot more options for cleaning editing as well over the motion jpeg format. ( But this is something for others to comment on. I’ve never really used the video feature on my D90, and I’d suspect that the same would be true for the D7000.
Overall, whilst the D90 maybe around for awhile yet, I’d have to say just on the specs and the initial reviews your better of getting the D7000.
Note sure on Australian released date… but US date is October… so should be sometime next month.
I’m a window seat kind of guy. Flying doesn’t bother me at all. I can watch a plane crash doco and get on my flight straight away no probs. Most of the time the Taxi ride to and from the airport is of more concern to me than any flight. But the trick with being a window seat person is to know which window seat.
That not only includes front or back of the plane, close to the wing or not, but also where is the sun. The time of the day of the flight and the location of the sun define where I will sit on most flights. As a rule I try for the sun side of the aircraft if flying early morning or evening. Why, because that is where the light is. Sunrise gives you the standard sunset, but also the low angled light on farm dams and other small water courses.
And Sunset. Sunset from an aircraft it just magical. But you need to be aware of the plane you are flying on, are you close to the wing, so that it will in every shot, or far enough forward or back you can choose. Sometimes a hint of wing is great in a shot, helps to act as a framing device and places the shot in context.
Most of the time I fly, I have my Sigma 18-20mm lens on. With only a UV filter. Forget taking a polarising filter on the aircraft, it will only show up the layers in the windows of the aircraft and as a general rule ruin most of your shots.
This shot was one of a few hundred I took on the flight, playing with the fading light, the reflections on the window, and tweaking the shutter speed to the slowest that I could hand hold on a moving plane, whilst holding the camera about 2mm from the window. Close enough to not get reflections from the cabin, and not to close as touch the vibrating window.
As for post production there was just a slight tidy and noise reduction in Lightroom3 and because Lightroom3 has lens corrections, I fixed the corner lens curves as well.
( and yes the shot was not taken at 10,000 meters, it was just over 11,000 but artistic licence in titles is allowed )
And there are photos that need just colour to tell a story. I’d like to think this is one of them.
Of course when someone left a comment saying my shot reminded them of a Murray Fredericks photo, I was of course thrilled.
And the EXIF data.
Camera
Nikon D90
Exposure
0.02 sec (1/50)
Aperture
f/6.3
Focal Length
200 mm
ISO Speed
1600
Exposure Program
Manual
GPS Latitude
36 deg 48′ 13.45″ S
GPS Longitude
146 deg 51′ 19.35″ E
GPSAltitude Ref
Above Sea Level
GPSAltitude
11421 m
And of course you can buy this as a print from Redbubble as well.
If you follow me on twitter… you know I sign off most days with “me = exit”.
And I’ve been thinking for a while it would make a great t-shirt. Now that Redbubble do back prints, it works even better. It most situations the last thing that people see is the back of your shirt.
Remember if you buy anything of mine from Redbubble it does go into my Camera gear fund
Click the image to buy the t-shirt (from $30 AUD )
This is actually an older shot of mine, but one that I have come back to. It’s been entered into a comp, and looking at it some more thought it would do well to have a bit of an explanation behind it.
Firstly, this is from last year in fact from the first weekend I had my Tokina 11-16mm lens. So being the first weekend with a new lens it was going to be the lens that would be on the camera. Now the lens isn’t on the camera by default but is always in my bag. Because it is great for getting these low angle shots especially in dull conditions.
One thing about this shot, is that it was on manual settings. And only luck meant I got the shot. I do try and always put the camera back on Auto:No Flash after taking photos, so that I can just grab a shot. Luckily for me, the previous settings for shots taken 10 min before hand worked. When ever I carry my camera I try to have in my hand so I can get the improve shot. This is one of those. I had turned to see the kids coming passed me on their bikes and fired off about 10 shots as they went passed. The camera was at waist height and they would have been totally unaware of me taking the photos. This helps when taking shots to get a natural look and feel especially from your subjects. When using a wide angle lens try shooting from the hip as it were.
So this shot has a bit of a dutch angle, which works and autofocus grabbed part of the bike which was also very lucky.
The other big advantage of this shot is that all the subjects in the shot are completely anonymous which then gets rid of a lot of hassles about getting rights for publication or even entering the shot into a competition.
So here is the EXIF and I hope you like the shot. Remember you can shoot from the hip and still get a great shot.
Poor Andrew Bolt… he really has been kept in the dark. You’d think that someone in the last nearly two years would have told him that there was a fake twitter account. Surely. But no, no one did. This also shows that people like Bolt and even those around him in News Limited have no idea about brand management either. People like Bolt are a brand unto themselves.
Of course I try very hard to avoid anything he says on the grounds that I might need to have my gall bladder removed, I am still well aware of him and his views.
The @andrewbolt account was started on February 11, 2009 or 538 days ago and he is only just writing about it now!
And yet 12 months after this post was written he has only just found out, or at least has only just started complaining. Of course like most right wing commentariat he is demanding justice and claiming this is the worst crime in history.
From his own blog:
“This is only a small instance, but as I’ve so often noted among Leftist activists from the French Revolution to the Internet revolution , many have a curious belief that their moral cause entitles them to act as barbarians. It’s this loss of conscience in the collective that makes them such a menace.”
“For at least a year, it’s been guilty of identity theft and defamation. And I would expect that the employer of this person might have something to say about that,” he said.” Source : Source: News Ltd
From his own blog
“I’ve been given names, and at some stage may use them. Parody is perfectly fine, but identity theft is low.”
Seriously WTF. Either he knows who it is or he doesn’t. I suspect he doesn’t, that is why he is using these bully boy techniques which work very well in old media, not so well in these new and rapidly changing social platforms. And of course the readers of his blog coming running to his defence with 183 comments, most of which seem to blame the ABC for reasons that totally escape me.
So when twitter discovers that Andrew Bolt has finally discovered that there is a fake twitter account, he encounters the Streisand effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect)
The interesting thing about Google spell checking, is that in some respects it is almost to good. Remember back in the day hunting through a dictionary to try and find a word. Trying to remember desperately if it had silent letters or a ph instead of an f.
As long as you can spell well enough for google… what else do you need.
“i cun spall wull enug for goggle”… and google does give you… Did you mean: i can spell well enough for google
( and yes the results count is correct for when I made the t-shirt)
Click on the image to buy your own copy of this t-shirt and support my camera addiction.
I should have titled this… how to take photos in places your not allowed to. See the whole City Loop system is under the control of private enterprise and like every other railway station you are not allowed to take photos of trains from the platform in Melbourne. You can apply to get a permit to do some of the stations, but the underground is very frown upon. <rant>See terrorists only use high res DSLR’s to take photos… never do they just use a camera phone or a hidden camera. So if you have a DSLR you are obviously a terrorist. </rant>
This was taken at Melbourne Central one evening heading home after a few drinks. If you are going to shoot in places like this, never have a tripod that will get attention drawn to you very quickly. But it is possible to get a shot like this (1.3 seconds exposure) hand held if you brace the camera, and always hold your breath, for that extra bit of stabilising. In this case it was resting against the wall.
I shot this with my Tokina 11-16mm lens to get the whole tunnel in the wide shot. This helped to get the sense of claustrophobia that is in the tunnel as well.
The next thing is to wait for the right moment. You can feel a train coming a minute before hand and I managed to squeeze of a few shots just to get my levels about right before the train came. The start of this exposure can be seen just before the Caulfield Loop sign (click through to see the bigger version). During the exposure the first carriage of the train moved completely out of shot. This gave me the lines of movement that go right to the edge of the frame.
This is one of those one shot wonders. To get these lines that I have you can only do on the first shot from the headlights of the train. That is why you should always try and get your levels right before hand for the background, remembering to compensate for the light that the moving object will create as well.
Turns out this is currently my most favoured and commented on shot both on Fickr and Redbubble. Hope you enjoy it as well
Point 18: This permit is NOT valid for photography at the City Loop Stations (Parliament, Flagstaff and Melbourne
Central). Photography is NOT permitted at these stations.
This shot has been very popular on both Flickr and Redbubble so I thought it would be a good one to do a quick post on.
This shot is really about serendipity. Sometimes you plan a shot and mother nature well just gets in the way. Over a huge chunk of the world we were treated to a partial lunar eclipse on Saturday the 26th of June 2010. Now I knew this was coming and I knew even with my 300mm lens I’d be able to get a decent shot. What I did count on was the weather. With the eclipse due from 8:30pm that night I watched the sky and the radar to see a thick band of showers move in from 5pm. Sure we need the rain in Melbourne, what I didn’t need was the cloud cover.
But in true spirit I didn’t give up. I kept going outside every 10min to check the cloud cover… nope still 100%, and damned cold. Back inside… repeat. Then as we neared the maximum coverage of the eclipse the cloud broke just. I had about 5min of sky where I could see the moon. Of course the cloud kept obscuring the sky and the view was not 100%, but those lack of ideal conditions made the shot IMHO.
Lots of people got a nice clear shot of the moon around the world, but I was lucky to get a shot with real atmosphere. And for once I was glad the weather was not perfect. Also you will notice that the shot is not at the full 300mm. This was so I could get the star in the shot as well, which lent a bit more interest to the shot.
So remember even if it is cold, miserable and you think you are going to miss the photo you had planned, stick with it, you might just get a better shot.
This is going to be kind of a short one… and one I hope will surprise a few people…
This shot is from my recent sojourn to Tasmania. We had a few days in Hobart and decided to do something different, and something that wouldn’t cost a fortune (of course if more of you brought my prints…. but aside). So the plan became do a day trip down to Geeveston down in the Huon Valley. We have toured Tasmania extensively but still hadn’t made it down that part of the island and there is a very affordable public bus that goes down there, $40 for a whole day excursion for two people is damned cheap in my books.
So the bus leaves town at 8:30am and we head down the coast. (Can you see where I am getting at….) It is a beautiful sunny/foggy morning in Tasmania and what do I do… I grab a window seat, tweak the polarising filter to cut out some glare, dial the camera to Sports Mode and start shooting. Yes this shot was done at 80kph! out a bus window. It was one of 4 that I took as we rounded a bend where the sun was not shining on the bus so there were no reflections and that Cat said “Now” to. She called out the gaps in the trees so I could keep shooting and not waste shots on trees and powerlines. So there you go… you can shoot fast if the location and the camera settings are right.
Camera:
Nikon D90
Exposure:
0.001 sec (1/1250)
Aperture:
f/4.5
Focal Length:
18 mm
ISO Speed:
400
Exposure Bias:
0 EV
Flash:
Auto, Did not fire
Date and Time (Digitized):
2010:05:21 09:37:30
Subject Distance:
4.73 m
Focal Length In35mm Format:
27 mm
GPS Latitude:
43 deg 8′ 52.56″ S
GPS Longitude:
146 deg 58′ 40.13″ E
GPSAltitude Ref:
Above Sea Level
GPSAltitude:
6.25757575757576 m
GPSDate Time:
2010:05:20 23:37:30Z
And yes this image is on RedBubble for purchase as well
I have a real job, but the opinions expressed here are my own and do not reflect the views of my past present or future employers (not that I am unhappy with my current position, but then not to say that if a job offer came along in say Hawaii as Magnum P'I's side kick I wouldn't take it.)
Oh you get the idea. This is my personal blog.
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