I happened to see these guys on a tree next to my building this morning.
Photography
Seeing Red
A common problem with many Nikon cameras, including the D90, is the tendency to over-expose and blow out reds. It’s especially obvious when shooting brightly colored flowers, like these.
Thanks to some good advice in Flickr’s Nikon D90 Club, I’ve been able to improve it a bit. Here I set it for spot metering using a red area and set it to underexpose -2.0EV. I would probably get even better results if I shot RAW.
If you look at the RGB histogram of the first image, you’ll see that the red channel is clipped.
Adjusting the exposure has a much bigger effect on the red channel.
Fort Lauderdale photo walk
Today’s photo walk was lots of fun, despite the unbearably hot weather. We had a great group of more than 50 people. The group met in front of Starbucks on Las Olas and walked east.
In addition to the regular photos, I took a few sets of bracketed shots for HDR processing. This is one of my favorites.
I used an Eye-Fi Pro card in my D90, which geotagged all of my photos. When I got home, I simply left the camera powered on and let it upload the photos wirelessly to my computer and SmugMug.
See my full set of photos here.
Photowalk this Saturday
I’m going to the Second Annual Wordwide Photo Walk this Saturday morning. The group meets at 9:00 AM in front of the Starbucks at 350 E. Las Olas Blvd in downtown Ft. Lauderdale.
Topaz Photoshop plugins now work in Aperture
I bought Topaz Labs plugin bundle at Macworld Expo and I’ve been very impressed with its capabilities. Today they introduced Topaz Fusion Express, an add-on which lets you use their Photoshop plugins in Aperture. When you install the plugins, it will appear in the ‘edit with…’ menu and will open an editing window where you can use the plugin exactly as you do in Photoshop.
The plugins include Adjust, which can produce some really amazing effects; simplify, which lets you create painting, sketching, and line drawing effects from your photos; Clean, which smoothes, adjusts texture, and enhances edges; and DeNoise & DeJPEG which remove noise and compression artifacts.
Here’s an example of the color blast effect in Topaz Adjust.
 Before |
 After |
Unfortunately, installing it overwrote my old Topaz plugins and wiped out the license keys. When I re-entered the keys, they were no longer recognized. I’m waiting for Topaz support to resolve this. Update: Topaz just sent me updated keys.
Uploading iPhone 3GS Videos to Flickr
If you’ve attempted to upload any video from an iPhone 3GS to Flickr, you’ve probably seen Flickr’s “Unable to process this video” screen no matter how you uploaded it. The iPhone’s MOV files aren’t supported by Flickr due to the codec it uses. A very simple solution is to export it as AVI from QuickTime Pro or any other media converter. You can then upload the exported AVI movies to Flickr.
iPhone 3G S, Part II
After using the new iPhone 3G S for most of the day, I’m very impressed with the dramatic speed improvement as well as the much better camera. I probably won’t be carrying a point & shoot camera in addition to my D90 any more when I travel.
The new tap to focus feature makes it easy to get sharp in-focus shots. Video recording is just as easy: a slider at the bottom of the screen switches between still pictures & video mode.
Videos appear in the camera roll along with still pictures, and you can upload a video to YouTube by tapping the action button.
I’ve posted a more detailed look here.
Eye-Fi Pro and Nikon D90: A perfect match
I received my production model Eye-Fi Pro card today, after beta testing it for a few months.
Unlike earlier Eye-Fi cards, the Eye-Fi Pro supports RAW files as well as JPEGs and movies, which is great for anyone using a DSLR who likes to shoot RAW. Since it’ a 4GB card, it will hold 256 RAW files from my Nikon D90 or 1000 JPEGs. The Eye-Fi Pro also lets you set up an ad-hoc network with your computer for peer-to-peer connections without a router or access point when you lack a WiFi network.
As a bonus, it also geotags your images, avoiding the need for a GPS attachment for your camera.
See my full set of unboxing photos here.
The Nikon D90 is one of the camera models with built-in Eye-Fi support. It recognizes an Eye-Fi card and sets its power management accordingly, to avoid shutting off while an upload is in progress. It also adds an item to the setup menu which allows you to enable or disable Eye-Fi wireless uploading.
Using this card has changed my photography workflow. Instead of shooting pictures, then removing the card and using a card reader to import them into Aperture, I just let it send the pictures wirelessly to a folder on my MacBook Pro, where I can then import them into Aperture.
When I import the photos into Aperture, I prefer to keep them in their original location, rather than copy them into the Aperture library, which saves some disk space by avoiding redundant copies. iPhoto also offers the same option when importing from local files rather than a camera or memory card.