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Could my 2008-07-23 08:01:41 PM be restored? I don’t think it’s really broken, it shows up fine in the scratchpad forum.

Thanks

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That is gorgeous

Thanks! I had to do some selective dodging and burning though, so I can’t enter it unfortunately.

Now I know I need a better camera.Not one of my pictures of flying birds looks even 10 % as good as that “parachuting” hawk.

This was shot with my 300mm f/4. Unfortunately, birds are one of those things that tend to be difficult without serious glass, and even with that lens I **always** wish I had something longer shooting birds, and almost all of the shots with it have been cropped significantly.

There is one way around that I’ve seen used successfully if you have a feeder and an IR remote – set up the camera on a tripod pointing at the feeder and trigger it from like 20-30 feet away…

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Splitting hairs:
The description says “things airborne”, nothing about flying.

Thus, I would assume that a bird that was airborne but not flying would, in fact, be acceptable.

I don’t know how I would get such a picture, though.

“parachuting” hawk:

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No, how are you going to get by with a measly 50 megapixels? You need one of these:
http://www.betterlight.com/superModels.html

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I believe the intent behind the “rule” is that balanced/centered compositions tend to be basically static, and also, generally there isn’t equal weight/interest in the sky and the ground, so whichever is/contains the subject should generally dominate the composition.

If I was formulating the axiom, though, I would say that you should (generally) look at not putting the horizon in the middle third of the image, but in fact it’s quite often useful to go further to the edge of the frame than the 1/3 or 2/3 line.

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Yeah, only “The Suggestion of Thirds” doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.

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The nikon 50mm 1.8 won’t AF on the D40 – that’s one of the reasons I suggested the 60mm Macro. 2 other Nikon options would be the 70-300 VR and the 105mm VR macro.

Sigma makes a 30mm 1.4 HSM lens, and is coming out withe a 50mm 1.4, I think those are the only really fast primes that will AF on the D40

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The 55-200mm VR is actually excellent optically, if you can overlook the plasticky construction, lack of a focus scale, etc., and it is capable of some pretty nice bokeh if you use the long end and open the aperture up a bit:

With the D40 you have to look at older and 3rd party lenses to make sure they don’t use the old style “screwdriver” AF that won’t focus on it. Tamron has started putting it in their newer lenses, and the Sigma HSM lenses will work.

Another lens to look at might be the new AF-S 60/2.8 macro. It’s actually not a great lens for doing real close macro work (you wind up with practically no distance between the lens and subject), but it’s reported to be excellent otherwise.

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There are much more expensive solutions, but I’ve used a very cheap optech rain sleeve in bad conditions a few times and they seem to work OK, but I wouldn’t want to use one in a torrential downpour.

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/469774-REG/Op_Tech_USA_9001132__8_RainSleeve_for_Camera.html

A decent and large microfiber cloth also helps for getting rain of the front of your lens etc.

Try not to put gear away wet if at all possible, as that’s a recipe for fungus in lenses etc.

A waterproof storage case would also be good, something like a pelican, and I’d probably toss a bunch of silica gel packets inside to help with humidity/wet conditions. I sometimes keep mine inside a cheap gym bag that doesn’t scream “expensive equipment”.

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So this theme might end up being subtitled “I’ve got a kid and I’m not afraid to use him/her”? 😉

Either that or “Flower and insect macros”, I expect…

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Just because you don’t have “circles of confusion” and out of focus orbs in your background won’t disqualify your photo.

Ok, I’m going to put a professor hat on briefly, because this term tends to get misused a little bit.

By definition, any part of an image that is out of perfect focus has circles of confusion. Every point that’s out of focus in an image is rendered as a circle, more or less (lens aberrations and the shape of the aperture have an effect on the exact shape). So, what happens in an out of focus area, is that you’re seeing all of the COCs overlapping each other (and any area which appears in focus has COCs that are small enough to be indistinguishable from a point).

You can see a rendering of the COC when you have points in the out of focus region of the image that are substantially brighter than what’s surrounding them, but the COCs are there if highlights are present or not.

I hope that makes sense, now I have to go give this hat back to a real professor… 😉

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Yeah, most HTML doesn’t work in these forums – try converting it to bbcode: http://www.seabreezecomputers.com/html2bbcode/

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Is it okay if part of the meal is on a fork, spoon, stapler, knife, chopstick etc?

I don’t see why that would be a problem

But only if it isn’t funny, right? It does say “no comedy shots”….

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I love my Tokina 12-24, but the 50-135mm length strikes me as really random.

I don’t know, it seems like it would make a pretty 2 lens pair with something like a 17-35mm for a small sensor DSLR. I probably wouldn’t miss having the 50-70mm range myself, but if you do a lot of people shooting you might find yourself missing the shorter end with a 70-200 (think full frame 85mm).

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This is not the greenlight you’re looking for. *Jedi hand wave*

Green? I meant red… no blue…. um penguins?

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