[caradoc]

Very nice. Got a tripod? Might try stopping it down one or two, going for a longer exposure to pop it up a bit.

[caradoc]

a friend of mine is doing some interior shots and needs to get a set of lights

I’ve gotten some very nice shots with just a couple of Smith-Victor 45i AC slave strobes.

They screw right into a regular light socket. I’ve been using a couple of Ace Hardware’s “clamp lights” to hold them.

You can run ’em off a sync cord, or they’ll just slave to any flash that goes off. Not good for crowds. Plenty bright for interiors. They’ll run about $25-$30 each. Two of them have been more than enough for most interiors I’ve shot.

[caradoc]

I went to the dog park over the weekend with the kids and got frustrated because every time I had one in a good pose I’d get down on the ground and she’d take that as an invitation to come over and say hi.

I tried that once at the local dog park.

Once.

After I got home and cleaned my lens thoroughly, I swore I’d never get down on “eye level” with any dogs but my own.

Not without a couple of disposable UV filters, anyway… Dog slobber on the optics is, well, kinda icky.

[caradoc]

I seem to be having better luck with a stick, some string, and a little ball of feathers on the end of it. Twitch it a few times to get their attention, and then try to get the shot before they lunge for it…

[caradoc]

I’m going to have to side with Schnee on this one, bigtony99. He’s put a lot of effort into gathering information for you, and serving it up on a plate.

I think he’s entitled to a couple of remarks about that. Personally, I would have posted a Google link so you could look it up.

[caradoc]

Anyone else having the same problem?

Turn it into an exercise.

I went and shot an entire SD card full of dead leaves, and posted a selection of the better shots to Flickr:

Find ways to make the composition interesting. Play with contrast, texture, depth of field. Have fun with that part of it instead of trying to find an interesting subject – invert the problem, pick a random subject, and try to make that interesting.

There’s an article in my most recent copy of PopPhoto about taking a day and shooting at least one picture every five minutes to try to develop your eye for composition for any subject.

I didn’t take a full day – just two hours. But I’m getting better with the D80, day by day.

[caradoc]

i would have no idea what to do with all that hardware.

Well, for one, you don’t have to worry about heating that room during the winter… That’s the primary reason I’ve gone completely to LCD instead of CRT here.

They put out about 1/20th the heat of my former CRTs.

[caradoc]

Elsinore, that’s three different computers on the monitors, and the laptop on the far right is using the monitor to its immediate left as an extended desktop. The center monitor is connected to a Power Mac Dual G5, and the one on the left is another Mac that I use as a console connection to three Sun boxes about three feet from my left elbow.

Yes, I have an old Power Mac 8600/300 with a quad-port serial card in it. It’s also doing some video services for my security camera system.

There’s a spiffy little piece of software called “Synergy” that works like VNC, but doesn’t pipe the video over the network – just the keyboard and mouse, and the video output goes to a monitor attached to that remote box. So, I can use the same trackball and mouse on all of the machines, and just mouse across from one monitor to the next. Saves a lot of cabling for KVM and the like, I don’t get the network overhead associated with VNC, and the video response is MUCH better on a local monitor than over a network.

[caradoc]

Not to mention darkroom supplies!

snipped

Nice shot caradoc! I downloaded the trial version of NX Capture and I love it.

Thanks! I thought it turned out better than usual for a first shot on a brand new (to me) camera.

As for the darkroom supplies, I work from home as a UNIX sysadmin – I already have all of the hardware I really need… just need to work on sharpening my graphics toolset. GIMP doesn’t seem to want to play nice with the RAW/NEF formats, so I’ve been dinking with Capture NX vs. Aperture (I use a Mac as my primary)

It’s taken a long time to get that organized…

[caradoc]

renko, I can understand your joy.

I don’t have room for a darkroom here, nor do I want to work in someone else’s darkroom… and even if I had the room, my wife pointed out months ago that if I went all-digital, I wouldn’t need a darkroom anyway.

[caradoc]

I sold it to get the new camera. I’d only shot about 30-40 rolls in the last three years anyway, since we’ve mostly been using my wife’s Powershot A70.

[caradoc]

I’ll agree with practice and exposure – but for anyone who hasn’t been shooting for a decade or two, you can likely find good classes at the local community college that will focus on different areas of photography.

Examples might include “Introduction to Digital Photography,” “Advanced Digital Photography,” “Computer Photographic Imaging,” “Alternative Photography Processes,” etc.

Many of the community college classes are taught by semi-retired professionals.

Any time you feel you’ve “learned it all,” go back to the course catalog. I can almost guarantee that you’ll see another class that you haven’t taken.

“Photojournalism,” “Commercial Photography,” “Photographing the Human Form,” “Fashion Photography,” “Fundamentals of Photographic Lighting…” The list is pretty much endless because they keep coming up with additional classes as people develop their interests.

Community college classes are pretty cheap, too, unless you want to get into some of those that deal with view cameras or other medium-format film. Then the class itself is pretty cheap, but your cost of materials just went way up.

[caradoc]

Thanks. I hadn’t noticed the 4GB and 8GB Class 2 cards coming as low as they have – probably because everyone’s so focused on the Sandisk Class 6 4GB and 8GB cards, which were quite a bit higher last week.

[caradoc]

I think other Farktographers have posted items here. Other than that, the only place I have bought used equipment is ebay. What do you have?

eBay is out of the question for me. They’re too closely tied to PayPal, and PayPal sucks.

I’ve got these items to sell:

Nikon FM3A, no lens (I’m holding on to several lenses that will work on my replacement…)

Nikon FM10 w/35-70, f3.5-f4.8

Nikon MD12 motor drive

I’ve got boxes and manuals for all.

[Author]

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