Mostly Harmless

Today is slow and almost all of our shopping is done. So I am going through my photos this evening and notices something.

I purchased my Nikon D60 in May 2008 and have been using Photoshop Elements since then. My external 1TB WorldBook is where I keep my photos and PSE keeps a tally of all the photos in it’s catalog.

10,272 pictures.  From before May 2008 there were less than 300. Wow. Most of them are disposable and will never be shared but… wow.

I don’t (yet) own a flash so from time to time I use the built in pop-up flash.  This produces harsh light so I picked up the Puffer by Gary Fong.  It’s a diffuser that softens up the flash and I’ve been thinking of getting is for a week or two.

Here is an example just using one of my models.  The top is without the puffer and is too bright.  The puffer softens up the flash; it works better with people.

It’s about $20.  I’ve been careful putting this into the hot shoe but I can see why some people have broken theirs.  The plastic is brittle and feels like it will break easily.  It should have been made out of plastic that is a little more pliable but if I’m careful I should have no problems.

It works but I need to pick up a SB-600 flash.   This is not bad but nothing beats bouncing the flash off of the ceiling.

I got to learn about a useful DSLR feature called auto ISO.

A friend brought in his mint Nikon D90 and let me play with it. He had on the Sigma 17-70mm f/2.8-4.5 HSM macro lens and I was really impressed.  It’s not a D700 but for someone like me it’s really good.  Low noise at high ISO (compared to my D60), good color handling, and it’s fast.

We switched lenses for comparison and I was struck how his D90 took better exposed pictures than my D60.  I took pictures of the same things using both the D90 and the D60. Same lens, but the D90’s pictures handled poorly lit subjects better.

The D90 is a more current model but the difference was (wait for it) night and day.  Getting home I found the answer once I cracked open the manual.  His D90 had auto ISO turned on, while my D60 had it turned off.

Auto ISO on the Nikon D60 works like this: You set the maximum ISO sensitivity and the minimum shutter speed.  The minimum shutter speed is what triggers the auto ISO. Right now my maximum sensitivity is set to ISO 1600 and my minimum shutter speed is 1/15th of a second.  Using a flash turns off auto ISO.  I leave my camera set to ISO 200.

Most of my pictures are taken in P mode.  When the lighting works out that the shutter speed takes longer than 1/15 of a second, the camera will automatically raises the ISO from 200 to whatever works out to get the exposure time back down to 1/15 of a second.

Here’s an example using my son (he was the star student today in his class, way to go!) I set the minimum exposure for auto to 1/8 of a second from my usual 1/15.  I did this because my light is poor right now and at 1/15 I was shooting up to ISO 1400.

Both are at f/3.5 and the D60 was in P mode. The picture on the left is with auto ISO turned off, ISO 200 and exposed at 1/2 second.  The one on the right has auto ISO turned on.  This raised the ISO from 200 to 640 and is exposed at 1/8 of a second.  Even with VR 1/2 of a second suffers from hand shake.

It’s not perfect, and if I were using manual mode I would want to turn off all auto settings. But here it reduced the exposure time from 1/2 a second to the minimum 1/8 of a second.

For what I take pictures of it’s very useful; I almost never use the built in flash and don’t yet own a SB-600. As long as my shutter speed remains at or above 1/15 this will not be used.  Lower than 1/15 and I’ll get better pictures.

Tomorrow I’m going to a 4 year old’s birthday party so I’ll see how this works in practice.

Update: The day after I posted this, I went to the New York Hall of Science with Lily and the kids.  We attended a birthday party for a 4 year old and I borrowed my Dad’s SB-600 flash.

Auto ISO did get engaged with the flash on.  I left my camera set to ISO 200 and when the bounce was not enough to get it over the 1/15 second minimum, the ISO was bumped up.  This is one that I was surprise to see it get a small boost to ISO 280:

I need to look into this some more.  With the flash, the exposure was dialed down to 1/60th of a second. I’m not complaining but I’d like to firm up my understanding.

Overall I took +300 shots and I liked the results. You can see the 40 pictures I posted with a SB-600 and auto ISO turned on Flickr.

Ken Rockwell reviews the Nikon D90 and likes it.  I have the D60 and I’m thinking of trading mine in. It’s faster and I’d be able to use non AF-S lenses…

Lily went to the U.S. Open today with our son, so I took the girl to the American Air Power Museum.  She had fun and I took some good pictures.  I’ve just made this one my desktop image.

It came out much better that I thought it would.  The P-51 Glamorous Gal was not able to take off because of the weather.  That was a shame, seeing it in the air would have been awesome.  The plane was in fantastic condition.

Since the Disney trip, I’ve been playing around with the camera more than ever.  Marking your photos with geographical location info is cool and I’m thinking of getting a GPS fob/software combination.

In my searching I located this discussion on Flickr.  It’s a bookmarklet (that is NOT a word) that lets you easily insert map info on your Flickr pictures.  Unlike Flickr’s map info, this one is based on Google Maps and is loads easier to search location by name.

Here is a link to Flickr map for an Epcot fire works picture I took.  Here is the additional link that the script inserted when I filled out the info.  It’s linked to loc.alize.us and is very cool.

The loc.alize.us website is very Firefox friendly; Internet Explorer 7 chokes on the site.

I take pictures in Nikon’s raw NEF format because I can use Photoshop Element’s raw importer to tweak the exposure, clarity, black level, etc.  But the NEF files are often 9 MB files and I have almost 3,000 of them and that’s just since May.  That came out to 22 GB’s and counting. Even cleaning up the ones I don’t want to keep still leaves me with a mess.

Time to get more storage. Instead of just installing another drive in my system, I wanted to get an external drive.  In the past I was put off on USB hard drive cases, so this time I went looking for a complete out of the box solution.

Costco had a instant manufacturer’s rebate on the 1 TB Western Digital MyBook Home Edition.  We went and picked it up very quickly. It supports USB 2.0 (480 Mb/s max), Firewire (400 Mb/s max), and eSATA (3Gb/s max).

Guess which interface I picked?  But my Dell XPS 700720 does not have a built in eSATA port.  So I went to Bestbuy and picked up a DYNEX eSATA card and a 6 foot long cable (the MyBook only comes with USB and Firewire cables).

After I installed the card and hooked up the drive, I ran “Command Prompt” as Administrator and ran this command:

convert F: /FS:NTFS

The drive ships with a FAT32 file system and I prefer NTFS for Vista.  The mostly empty drive converted quickly and I started to move data to it.

It’s a fast drive when using eSATA.  I went to my Pictures short cut and right clicked the icon. I selected Properties -> Location, clicked Move…, typed in the new location on the MyBook and clicked Apply.

It moved 22 GBs of files onto the drive in no time at all.  Less than 10 minutes.  Using USB or my Firewire port would have taken a lot longer than that.

Right now I’m playing with my Photoshop Elements catalog, but so far I’m satisfied with the new drive.  It’s got a LED bar on the face of it that does the vertical Cylon eye thing.  I may keep that covered up when I’m watching old episodes of Battlestar Galactica just to be safe.

The whole family came back from Disney World Wednesday and here are some of my notes for the pictures I took.

From Thursday the 26th to Wednesday the 2nd I took 1,600+ pictures with my Nikon D60.

What I have been doing since I got back is going through each vacation day and selecting photos for Flickr. So far I completed up to Sunday June 29th and have uploaded some 88 pictures.  You can see the Disney World 2008 set on Flickr here.

The Lowepro Fastpack 200 was a great idea.

It’s a great backpack and easy to use.  It was raining on and off everyday. Being able to quickly take the camera out, shoot the picture, and pack the camera away was fantastic.  The only thing I think I may change is replace the Nikon neck strap with a hand strap.

I need to buy an 18-200mm lens.

Stefan lent me his Nikkor lens and it was great for the trip.  Being able to take pictures close up and zoom out immediately without changing the lens was just way too useful.  I’m thinking of getting the Sigma 18-200mm f/3.5-6.3 DC OS just to be different.

The Sigma 30mm f/1.4 EX DC HSM lens is still my main lens and does not disappoint.

In either Aperture or Program Auto mode it works great.  It covers low light really well and I took a lot of shots with it.

I forgot to switch to the zoom lens once and left the 30mm on during the Animal Kingdom tour.  I found out that Shutter Priority works well too; I took this picture from a really bouncy “safari” tour bus.  For that shot, the camera was set at ISO 400, f/4.5 and shutter speed was 1/2000 of a second.

I saw more Canon cameras than I did Nikons.

I guess Canon markets better in the U.S. I don’t know what the Canon models were but the Nikons I saw were mostly D60s with the 18-55mm kit lens. The camera that all the wandering Disney staff use for taking shots of the guests? A Nikon D70.  The person I spoke to recommended it highly saying that they never have any problems with it.

I did see several D200s and one D300 with a Nikkor 17-35mm AF-S wide angle lens and a Manfrotto mono-pod stand (not that I pay attention to such things).  I tried not to be jealous, but the fact is I would not know what to do with a camera like that.

I am still uploading more pictures to Flickr and I should be done by Monday with the whole set.  I could dump all 1,600+ straight to Flickr but what would be the point?  I prefer to share only the good ones and not show people all the ones that were not in focus.

I’ve been playing around with the D60 and some digital editing.  Nothing much, just minor adjustments and cropping.

Since I’m doing such minor editing I don’t bother purchasing any photo applications like Adobe Photoshop Elements.  The freely available Paint.NET is more than enough for me so far and the more I look at it, the more impressed I get.

Per Stefan’s recommendation I’m shooting photos in RAW. I was using JPEG normal but even I noticed defects in images that I’m taking, so RAW seems to make sense for now.

In order to start using NEF files (Nikon RAW format) I have done the following:

1. Install the Nikon NEF codec.  For my Vista 64 bit system I had installed this one.  The 64 bit one is beta, so check that web site often for updates. Installing the codec is for ease of use.  All it buys me is the ability to see a thumbnail in windows so I can find the file I really want to edit.
2. Install this plugin for Paint.NET.  It lets me import RAW files.  I can’t save them in the same format but TIFF works out well for that.  When you install the plugin on a 64 bit system, make sure it installs in the correct directory.  For faster processing you can get optimized dcraw binaries here at the dcraw web site. Update: Per Benni’s comment, also see the Dave’s dcraw web page here.  Dave is the author of dcraw and has a good FAQ about the program and the portable source code.
3. Install this plugin WordPress Media Flickr.  Okay, not for editing exactly but I use it to link images on Flickr into my blog posting. I had to make a change to my PHP5 installation but no big deal.  I can select my photos easily and if I wanted to I could search other peoples Flickr photos.

Now I can load up images and just work on then pretty easily.  I plan to check out Paint.NET’s forums and work on some goofy edits.

This was one busy weekend.  Friday and Saturday was spent going and coming back from Strasburg, PA.  Sunday we had a family BBQ with friends over.

Today we went to the city and saw the USS Kearsarge.  It’s in port as part of fleet week in the city.  Lily took our son last year Friday before Memorial Day.  This year we had too much going on and had to go today.

Memorial Day is a busy holiday alright and it was a mad house.  All fun and cool, but the ship was packed with people.  You can see the photos I have uploaded to Flickr here.  We went with both kids and my brother Alek.  After I shot over 100 pictures, I lent the camera to Alek and together we shot almost 400 pictures.

The kids are in energizer bunny mode.  They napped on the ride back home and now they are ready to go again.  Me and Lily are just plain out.

Tomorrow is back to work.  After going to Strasburg and walking in the city, I plan to pick up a Lowepro 200 backpack.  Carrying the camera using the stock Nikon bag was a drag.  It’s not meant for walking around with.  A back pack means more comfort and less pain.

I mean, why spend the money on a DSLR kit if you are not going to carry it around and go nuts with it?