Photography Tips

Originally, my eye was caught by the contrails of an Airbus A320 passing overhead but when the hawk decided they wanted to come round and play...well, who am I to refuse? All of these were shot on the D810 with the 300mm f/4 lens. The tricky bit of these shots is keeping the bird that is randomly flying round visible in the viewfinder and getting the autofocus to lock on properly. In situations like this…

The time of great change is finally upon us with the arrival of a new laptop to replace the nearly six year-old current laptop that is finally starting to show its age. Laptops by their nature tend to be evil with all of the hardware crammed into an itty bitty space and this new one actually embraces it. The naming scheme of laptops in this house is always for evil characters and thus the name…

Here's yet another gallery featuring the 105mm f/2.8 Micro-Nikkor lens, this time playing with a lizard that is holding onto a branch of one of the Japanese Maples in front of the house. I love how the lens really shows you the details of the scales that is breathtakingly sharp! :)

Today I did my first real wedding photo shoot at the Cape Fear Botanical Gardens...the same place I had scouted a week ago with my sister Meghann. The wedding was for her boss Robyne at the Gilbert Theatre and it was a wonderful ceremony to experience. Mind you, I was nervous as it was my first wedding shoot and I can assure you I invoking Alan Shepard's prayer more than a few times down I-40…

October's special treat comes from the world of astronomy with the planets Venus, Jupiter, and Mars in a lovely conjunction (Mars is pretty hard to see compared to the other two but the iPhone 6 Plus still did a pretty decent job of getting it). Of course, the D7000 or D810 with the 50mm f/1.4 or the 70-200mm f/2.8 probably would have done better but then I DID have a kid I had to collect…

This is the other roll of slide film I shot at Ocean Isle Beach using Provia 100. You can see that it is much less saturated with color and as a faster speed film is much better in retaining contrast details even when shooting in the evening. Provia 100 is my go-to general purpose slide film and it was what I was using when I was wandering round the mountains in the spring. In darker…

The slides I shot at Ocean Isle Beach came back from AgX Imaging in Sault Saint Marie in Michigan and I couldn't be happier with them! As long as Mike keeps processing E6 slide film, I'll keep sending my rolls of film to him because you can see that the processed frames are very nicely done even with me really pushing the limits of the film shooting until it was almost dark. The really cool…

The camera so loves the colours of fall and they were particularly vibrant whilst waiting for Nicholas to finish his school day! The trees having a nice diagonal alignment certainly didn't hurt... :)

After all of the hustle and bustle of unpacking for a couple of weeks of holiday at the beach house we've hired, it's time to take advantage of a "super moon" where the moon is at its closest point in its orbit to Earth. The moon was quite large in the sky thanks to atmospheric lensing so I decided to take advantage of the opportunity to play around with it a bit. The shots that…

Today's fun involves giving a bit of love and attention to my workhorse lens...the 70-200mm f/2.8 ED VR telephoto lens. This lens has accounted for over half of the pictures I've snapped through my various Nikon bodies through the years because it not only has really nice reach on the telephoto end of the range but also that big f/2.8 aperture throughout the entire focal-length range means I can shoot in near darkness without a…