Lowepro Slingshot camera bag

Since I love this camera bag so much, I thought I'd write about it and spread the love (to my massive readership of like 4 people).

I use the Lowepro Slingshot 200 AW (the AW is for All Weather).



As its name alludes, it's a sling-style bag that only has one strap. If you're wearing it and need to get to your camera, you just rotate the bag from it's position on your back to right in front of you, just like in the third photo above. You unzip a flap that gives you easy access to your camera. It also opens up all the way like in the second photo for full access. I take this bag everywhere with me, and it performed flawlessly on a pretty rigorous 3 week trip through Italy. It also has a small pocket at the bottom where the nylon cover sits out of the way when you're not using it, but when it starts to rain, you can pull it out and cover the entire bag in just a few seconds to keep the moisture out.

I "de-badged" mine so that it has no mention of Lowepro on it anymore, just to make it look more generic and so it doesn't scream "I'm a camera bag, come steal me!".

My only small nit with the bag is that the seam on the nylon cover is starting to come apart where the stitching is, which started before I had hardly even used it.

I bought mine from Amazon. The Lowepro 200 works the best for me, but they sell it in 3 sizes (100, 200, 300).

Colorsplash flash by Lomography

For only $35, you can buy this flash and add some really wild color to your images. Here are some examples from a fellow flickr user in the flickr d200 users group.

From Lomography's site:

A patented colorwheel system puts several colored flash filters at your finger tips for instant selection; with additional filters included to exchange within the wheel. Using a variety of techniques, the Colorsplash Flash will vigorously slap a burst of color onto your glowing long exposures, deer-caught-in-headlights instant shots, or bright high-contrast daytime images. Play with different perspectives, color tones, exposure times, and light situations for an endless variety of gorgeous outcomes.

Also, they can be bought on eBay for slightly cheaper.

Apparently the Colorsplash works with the standard hot shoe on most cameras.

46 useful photoshop shortcuts, in two parts

From digital-photography-school.com:

• 18 Exceptionally Useful Photoshop Shortcuts
• 28 More Exceptionally Useful Photoshop Shortcuts

Also, don't forget to read through the comments at the bottom of these posts for even more user-submitted tips & tricks.

Battery caddy

These battery holders seem like an effective way to carry backup batteries for flashes or what have you. If you're someone who shoots weddings these could save you some precious seconds if you need to do a quick-change.

http://www.personalbatterycaddy.com/html/SlimLine.htm

Quoted from personalbatterycaddy.com (empasis mine):

• Six different versions hold 4-9V, 4-AA, 6-AAA, 4-C, 4-D, or 4-CR123 batteries.
• Store your batteries in a compact, easy to find caddy.
• Originally designed for pilots, but also great for camping, boating, travel or at home.
• Dispenses batteries with one hand for safety and convenience.
• Terminal protection at both ends regardless of how the battery is inserted.
• Made of high quality engineered plastic.

Best time of day for photography?

sunrisesunset.com will let you create monthly calendars for most major cities that show times for sunrise, sunset, moonrise, moonset, and twilight (civil, nautical, and astronomical).

http://sunrisesunset.com/

Here's an example for San Francisco in September.

photo textures from Jesh de Rox

Jesh de Rox sells a texture package that allows you to change the way your photos look by applying textures to your photos in post-processing. His home page contains a flash slideshow of before/after shots that are pretty incredible. Some of the examples go from looking like a pretty typical wedding photo to looking like a painting that I could see myself hanging on my wall.

From his site:

"you are purchasing 35 high-res Texture image files used in Jesh de Rox's award winning experiential post processing style, as well as the license to use them for personal and commercial photographs and/or art pieces."

Really cool stuff. I'm not very proficient with Photoshop myself at this point, but it does mention that the texture set comes with a short instructional video to help get you started, although they suggest taking one of their workshops to get the full experience.

http://finearttextures.com/

How to get a D200 into 'Bulb' mode

I imagine this wasn't hard to do for most D200 owners. Apparently, I'm not like most D200 owners. It took me a while to figure out how to get the damn thing into Bulb mode.

Here's what to do:

Hold down your Mode button and turn the rear thumb dial (on the right side-top of the back of the camera) until you see the letter M appear in the top lcd display. Let both buttons go. Now you're in Manual mode. Next, and this is the part that took me a while to figure out, you'll need to turn the same rear thumb dial to the left until you see BULB appear in the lcd. This may take a while, depending on how your camera was set before trying this. Don't lose hope... it's in there, you just may need to turn it like 20-30 clicks. The thing is, you probably noticed that if you just start turning the dial, nothing happens. Before your turns actually start doing anything, you have to first activate the auto-focus by either tapping the shutter button halfway or by hitting the "AF-ON" button right to the left of the rear thumb dial. Once you've done one of these, you can start turning the thumb dial and make your way to BULB.

If you're wondering why you would even want to use BULB mode, I use this mode to do long exposure shots at night. It allows me to hold the shutter open for as long as I want, and get cool light-trail effects, which can be seen in the shot below.

Moon Patrol

I've found that it's kind of tricky to get good shots of the moon. Here are a collection of opinions on the best ways to tackle it:

http://www.flickr.com/groups/d200/discuss/72157594363011032/?search=moon

Here's one flickr member's advice:

"Remember that even though you're shooting while in the dark, the moon is directly illuminated by the sun. Therefore, the sunny-16 rule is not a bad place to start (e.g., ISO 100, f/16 @ 1/100). The metering tips above are good if you have the focal length to spotmeter it." -- flickr member MJM

Also, here is PopPhoto's advice:

"Moony 11, 8, and 5.6 rules
There are many different rules that work well when shooting the moon. One favorite for a proper exposure of a full moon is f/11 at one over the ISO setting. For pictures of a half moon, use the same shutter speed at f/8, and for a quarter moon, use the same shutter speed at f/5.6."

Quoted from http://www.popphoto.com/article.asp?section_id=4&article_id=1175&page_number=1

Rent your own photo booth

Portable photo booths you can rent for your party/event/wedding/etc. It's a surefire hit -- who doesn't like photo booths?

A couple highlights from their site:

How's it work?
Just press the big, red button and the booth shoots 4 photos, approximately 5 seconds apart. Pictures are displayed on screens after they are taken, so poses can be adjusted, smiles aligned. Seconds later, the pictures are printed and available outside the booth. Following your event, these same photos can be delivered to you on CD and available online.

Crowd Pleaser.
As photos are taken, they’re displayed on screens inside and outside the booth. Crowds will form to cheer on the booth's patrons...a sure-fire way to get the party started!

http://www.redcheese.com/services.html

50mm 1.4 shallow depth of field example

Following the last post about the 50mm 1.4 bokeh examples, I thought I'd show this example of how fun (and also sort of dangerous) an aperture of 1.4 can be. The depth of field is so shallow, that as you can see below one battery is in perfect focus and the other one that is sitting less than an inch in front of it is out of focus. It really allows you to hone in on the subject you want to emphasize, in a pretty dramatic way.

Earlier I said "also sort of dangerous", and by that I just mean that it's often hard to tell in the viewfinder or lcd what parts of the image are in focus and which aren't. So if you're taking a photo of a person's face at 1.4, you can easily end up with shots where the person's eyes are out of focus and their nose is in focus. Probably not the desired effect. You just have to be more careful and precise about where you focus.

Nikon 50mm 1.4 bokeh tests

This is by no means any kind of comprehensive analysis of this lens, as all I did was take the same static photo at every possible aperture.

But it's useful nonetheless to get a sense of the quality of the Bokeh as you go from the smallest end to wide open. You can read about Bokeh in detail at Wikipedia, but basically it refers to the out-of-focus area of the photo, and more specifically, the aesthetic quality of that area. It's one of those things that can be subjective, but some words you might might hear when describing good quality bokeh are "creamy", "buttery", or "soft edges". Typically bad bokeh means that the elements in the out-of-focus area have sharp edges and don't blend smoothly together (i'm oversimplifying). Also notice the difference in depth of field from photo to photo. F/16 has the most depth of field (this is the smallest aperture this lens supports) and when you get down to 1.4, not even the entire apple is in focus.


F/16


F/14


F/13


F/11


F/10


F/9


F/8


F/7.1


F/6.3


F/5.6


F/5


F/4.5


F/4


F/3.5


F/3.2


F/2.8


F/2.5


F/2.2


F/2


F/1.8


F/1.6


F/1.4 -- There it is... wide open at 1.4. The creamiest of the creamy.

You sure you wanna delete that?

Ran across this cool site: http://www.deletedimages.com/

"DeletedImages.com brings unsharp, moved, blurry and unfocused pictures back to life. So before you delete you images on your camera. Have another look and start sharing what you would have deleted with the rest of the world."

Everybody has images that they just delete without giving it a second thought. They're bad, you know they're bad, and there's no point in having them hogging up disk space.

But there's something interesting about seeing photos that other people decided to delete, even if it's for the same reasons that you might delete yours. It's hard to explain, but check it out for yourself.

intro

Writing an intro for a blog that has no readership seems a bit silly, but should this someday end up being seen by a larger audience I figure it can't really hurt to describe this blog's reason for being.

As an amateur photographer in the early experimentation phase, I find myself keeping a big collection of random tidbits, notes, and links that I've come across. It's not very well organized and since I'm outgrowing my "dump everything into one file" system, I've decided to see if a blog will suit my goals better -- to document and share the digital photography information, tips, techniques, and good resources that I've found since I began playing with my Nikon D200 DSLR. ...And maybe also to share an occasional photo.

I'm hoping that with the help of some thoughtful tagging, I'll be able to have a reasonably organized collection of information.

As for the name photohacker, it's... a bit of an overstatement. If you're reading this, don't take the name too seriously -- I certainly don't. Most of the other names I tried were taken (and I tried *a lot* of them), and ultimately I just decided that photohacker sounds kind of cool. It's growing on me already.