Photography Tips

They say "into life some rain must fall". We wholeheartedly agree! It's also a wonderful opportunity to take the 105mm f/2.8 Micro-Nikkor lens out for a spin to capture the individual water droplets on Patience and Fortitude (the two Japanese Maples in front of the house named for the lions guarding the NY Public Library entrance who were originally given their names by Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia as qualities he felt all New Yorkers should embody).…

Here are some more macro shots using the 105mm f/2.8 Micro-Nikkor lens, this time having sun shooting the neighbour's flower garden which also included a bumblebee doing the pollination thing. What makes macro photography so much fun is just how close you can get to your subject to see really small details like specs on the petals of the roses or the hair/fur of the bee.

This gallery started out as an exercise in playing around with the 105mm f/2.8 Micro-Nikkor lens ("micro" in Nikon-speak is actually "macro" for everyone else on the planet!). Between the centipede and the leaves on "Fortitude" (one of the two Japanese Maples out front named for the lions guarding the NY Public Library on 42nd and 5th), there was plenty of macro fun to be had! The rest of the time was playing with the…

Tonight was the night I caught more awesome shots of lightning bolts than I have in the over four years I've been shooting storms from my front porch. Not only was there frequent lightning bolts but the storm ended up regenerating giving another hour of shooting which exhausted the batteries in the D700! The actual technique is simplicity itself...set the camera on the tripod and set it for manual focus to infinity. Dial in an…

It's time to see what the D810 can do with the 36 megapixels on offer with a nice big full moon hanging there in the sky! I had fun playing with the settings to see what effects I liked best for the next time that atmospheric lensing provides us a supermoon. All of these were shot with the 300mm f/4 lens and the 2X teleconverter which on the D810 full-frame (FX) sensor is effectively 600mm…

Unfortunately, by the time I got back out the door with the camera, the hawk was well off in the distance. But it wasn't a huge disappointment…got a few moon and tree shots while I was out there just for the heck of it. :)

This particular storm provided two incentives: Unplug anything of value that uses electricity as the storm was very active!Grab the D300 with the remote trigger that's already on the tripod and go have fun shooting lightning! However, when shooting lightning one should always keep in mind the old adage that there is a reason it is called FISHING and not CATCHING!Out of 507 frames shot, only 29 made it into the gallery and of those…

Imagine that you've got a 3TB hard drive that is the primary backup for a computer system that is now doing quite a bit of photo processing and video production... and you start to see very scary data errors coming from the drive!Imagine also that you've got a 750GB hard drive in the laptop that is completely stuffed and dangerously low on available disk space. And before you say it...yes, there is a lot of…