I did a couple of experiments with old lenses on the new FX sensor. First of all most of them has gotten into a much “apartment” friendlier range. 50mm acts as one, not as 75mm on DX. So is 105mm macro. I’ve noticed it focusing much faster on the new camera as well.

Wide angle though is really something. It really is a DX only lens, hence the black circle. However 10mm on FX sensor is weirdly impressive. Talk about wide.

All the distortion also creates interesting effects. Here is a mega-cat for you. The camera actually has a DX mode which produces close to 6 mega-pixel images, same as D70 did. Or you can crop the circle out manually, which I prefer to do.

And this one is a great shot. Too bad it’s not sharp. Shublik got extremely close to the camera to “distort” so much, but since it’s not a macro lens it doesn’t focus at such close distances.

Well, I finally bit the bullet and pulled the trigger on D700¹. Sounds painful, I know. But I’m happy that it finally happened. I’ve been saving up² and waiting for this since the end of August.

I’ve done a LOT of reading and was convinced that my old trusty D70 was needed to be replaced and that Nikon D700 was my dream camera. There are multiple raving reviews all over the net. The camera has an amazing ISO performance and one of the best AF systems. A lot of that is contributed to by it’s full frame sensor³.

There are multiple other distinctions which are covered in numerous reviews, so I’m not going to go through the list. ISO and 51 AF points (as opposed to 5) were among the main reasons for me.

Initially I decided to wait for the next iteration of the camera. And then several weeks ago I saw a whole different perspective on the issue. The price has came down from $3,000 to $2,399. I think its safe to assume that the new one will be introduced at the same price point. Is there any new future that I would pay $600 more for? I can’t think of anything.

Video? Nice, but it would be 1 week of play for me and never would be used again. A second CF slot? Again, nice, but not $600 nice. Improved sensor from D3s? Again, nice, but not $600 nice. And resolution bump for sacrificed ISO performance? Would be a downer for me. I was happy with 6 mega-pixels, I sure will be happy with 12.

Either way the upgrade for me is huge and most of it is positive. The only negative is that the new combo is noticeably heavier and bigger then the old setup, but I’m more than happy to live with this trade off for all the benefits.

I also did buy a new “main” lens. The jump from DX to FX have rendered a pair of my lenses somewhat useless. Beside that my D70 kit lens was never anything to write home about. The new lens is one of the top Nikon lenses — Nikon AF-S Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8G ED. According to reviews the lens is extremely sharp in all of its extremes and has very little distortion of any kind. After all, the body is going to only perform as nice as the glass attached to it.

In short, I’m very happy and very excited. Have a lot of learn about the new body, get rid of some of the habits that formed over the years with D70 and then have fun.

And here is our mandatory snow storm photo. The storm is not nearly as bad as everyone predicted it would be, but I like the change of scenery. Not more than twice a year though, please.

I’m working from home and everyone from office is too. Alena’s working from home as well. My mom is working from home. Shublik is definitely working from home. I think the schools are closed today also.

I managed to take a few photos of Shublik’s eyes today. Normally it’s a hard task since he just does NOT sit still for a second, and today wasn’t any different.

My trick was to use a lens with a focal length of 105mm at f/2.8 and a flash. This way I could stand far away and the amount of light allowed me to freeze his movement — very short exposures. The macro lens has performed well, I think.

I still had to discard most of the photos, but these 3 are the best of the series. Hope you like them too, as I’ve become very biased with things related to this little monster.

Tilt-shift photography is a way of making a photograph appear like that of a miniature achieved with a use of a special tilt-shift lens. It basically results in a very narrow focus spot and the rest of the photograph has a very shallow depth of field.

However tilt-shift lenses are extremely expensive — prices start from over a $1,000. Luckily the effect can be faked for the most part through post processing.

I stumbled upon this tilt-shift stuff a while back and I find it interesting enough to share. I tried faking an effect on one of my pictures through a free online tool and it is pretty damn effective in making the photo appear to be that of a miniature.

P.S. These images bring up great memories from our last road trip. That lonely teal car in the parking lot is our rental Chrysler Pacifica. We were the only people on the trail.

Эти выходные прошли довольно-таки спокойно. В суббoту я наконец-то отправила посылки моим домашним, Тане и Кузе (провела незабываемые 1.5 часа на почте), мы стирали (6 машинок загрузили!), отвезли гору вещей в химчистку (Дане придётся в среду их оттуда забирать), Данька постригся и обрил бороду.

Во второй половине дня мы встретились с Даниным университетским знакомым — Даниилом, который любезно предоставил нам свою камеру для тестирования нашей вспышки (мы пытались понять, глючит наша камера или наша вспышка, но так до конца и не поняли). Вечером мы с Даниилом и Сашей прокатились в Brooklyn Heights, где немного пофотографировались и поели в каком-то итальянском местечке (еда мне не очень понравилась если честно). Вобщем, день прошёл не зря!

А сегодня вообще был суперленивый день. Мы очень долго дрыхли, смотрели телек, потом я болтала с Гурей, у которой, кстати, уже просто огромный пузик! Еще мы сьезили в Best Buy и купили два фильма — American History X и The Dark Night. Оба фильма мы смотрели, и оба сочли достойными покупки.

Завтра буду интервьюировать одного кандидата на место Эрики, которую уволили 2 недели назад за плохую работу. Первый раз в жизни я окажусь в этой роли. Думаю, будет интересный опыт. Галя хочет нанять определённого человека (парня, который уже работал в компании, но уволился чтобы учиться на Masters), так что не знаю понравится ли ей кто либо из тех, кого отобрали для интервью.

Но вообще, если честно, во мне просмотр резюме, которые пришли на обьявление о рабочем месте, вызвал тревожны чувства. Огромное количество людей ищет работу. Столько людей с опытом работы 5-10 лет откликнулись на обьявление, что стало как-то неуютно (этих людей мы стразу откинули как кандидатов со слишком хорошей квалификацией, но и без опыта работы мы на интервью никого не пригласили).

Еще я на прошлой неделе мучалaсь над книгой “Одиночество в сети” Вишневского. Ну что могу сказать — начал за здравие, а вот закочил так точно за упокой. Читать после страницы 100-й стало откровенно скучно, и мне до сих пор надо домучать эпилог. Не рекомендую тратить время и деньги на это “произведение”.

Photo library is a feature that I have been meaning to add to the blog for quite some time now. It required a bit of a format change the would be labor intensive, so I never got around to doing it. Until now that is.

The purpose of this is for me to have a way to publish some of my best (in my opinion) photographs. Majority of them have already been posted on this blog, but there will be new ones as well.

I’ll start with 2 previously seen HDRs of mine. Move your mouse over the image itself once you’re on the photo page to navigate the library.

Stumbled upon a couple of really old shots of mine (way back from 2005) that show a dramatic difference between the image that came out from the camera and the final version.

Granted the final image is not all that stellar, yet the difference is striking. And then again, it’s not often that 2 shots differ so much, but it shows what a little tweaking in Photoshop can do. Adjust the levels, increase the contrast, some sharpening. There’s nothing more to it.

A friend recently asked me my opinion on Sigma telephoto lens that I happen to own. The truth is that I use it quite rarely simply because of it’s sheer size and weight — I simply can’t haul it with me everywhere I wish. As a result whenever we travel I chose to carry some of the smaller optics that I own and this telephoto lens spends most of its time at home.

Mini-review of the lens and a teleconverter that I bought for it follows:

• Sigma Zoom Telephoto 70-200mm f/2.8 EX DG APO HSM
• Sigma 2x EX DG APO Autofocus Teleconverter

The lens has a constant aperture of f/2.8. With 2x teleconverter attached it loses 2 stops of light, but gains double the zoom.

Below is a series of shots taken out of my window. Camera must be mounted on a sturdy tripod and I prefer to use a remote to trigger the shutter if one hopes to achieve any kind of sharpness. Images have been slightly altered in Photoshop, but should provide a good idea of the quality that can be obtained with this optical combo.

Shot taken at 70mm, f/8 with lens attached to Nikon D70 camera.

Same setup as above at 200mm, f/8.

Lens and teleconverter on Nikon D70 at 400mm, f/8.

It may be quite evident by now that somebody on this side of keyboard has developed a minor watch obsession over the course of the last month. This is yet another one of those posts.

While doing my watch research before the New Year one particular watch caught my eye — Seiko SKX781K, or as it is better known — the “Orange Monster”. This is a rather heavy, solidly built diving watch from Seiko.

The reason that we ended up buying it is the fact that I stumbled upon a great deal on exactly this watch on woot.com¹. A watch with a list price of over $400 was shipped to us for $138 with no tax or shipping fees. Granted it can be found for quite a bit less than $400 online, but this particular deal is impossible to beat.

The watch has very few features compared to Casio Pathfinder, but I find it quite a bit more attractive from the aesthetic point of view. It is water proof for up to 200m, has a unidirectional rotating bezel and day and date display. It’s an automatic watch, which means it winds itself from the wrist motion when being worn. And the last but not least is the fact that Seiko used a very generous amount of phosphorous paint. I did not expect the glow to be as bright as it actually is.

Overall I like the solid feel, built and the look of this timepiece a lot. I’m looking forward to wearing it as soon as I get the bracelet sized for my wrist. I also hope to test it for its main purpose on our next vacation. Seiko research says that orange is the best visible color under water.

If you excuse me now, I need to take a bath.

The New Year celebration flew by in an instance, as everything else seems to do. First thing we know we’re eating dinner and then hour by hour goes by and it’s time to count down the last ten seconds of the year.

At midnight exactly we pop the bottle of champaign open, shoot some firecrackers and poppers and then toast the new year. After a small desert my favorite parts starts — gift giving and receiving. We had a mountain of gifts under our Christmas tree.

We all got a lot of stuff. Alena got a perfume that she wanted — Shiseido Zen and a pair of sports wrist watches for mountain climbing and such. I got Casio Pathfinder 1500, the one with titanium bracelet. The watch has a lot of functions — compass, altimeter, barometer, temperature sensor beside other things.

My parents and Lina got us a whole bunch of Star Trek seasons of Voyager and The Next Generations. Now we a full set of each.

Linka also got us some towels with custom embroidered names. And my aunt got as some very colorful serving dishes. Good holiday with a lot of fun New Year is. My favorite. Too bad it is over so quickly.

Today I’ve done some more experimenting with the lightbox. Again — not perfect, but again — interesting.

The setup is pretty simple. Color paper on the background, black marble for the bottom and simple paper as a reflector inside.

And after some more experimenting I came up with this B&W photo. Better reflections on the dial, but I think I like the color on the first one.

With all the watch excitement lately I needed to come up with a good way to share with the readers of the blog. For that you obviously need good pictures. And to take good pictures of watches you obviously need a lightbox of some kind.

I used a simple guide posted on Strobist to build one without spending a lot of money. Borrowed a cardboard box from work, Alena bought some tracing paper and that’s pretty much it.

I need to replace one of the lamps with a regular bulb with a lamp with a tungsten bulb to get rid of the yellow light. And I guess a 2nd flash would do wonders too. But overall not bad of a result at all for a first try with this cheap structure.

Our second day started out very early. After eating the breakfast at our hotel and driving through the downtown we left El Paso and set out to the east, towards the Carlsbad Caverns National Park through Guadalupe Mountains National Parks. These were our two main objectives for the day.

As soon as we left the city we were greeted by an always familiar yet different southwestern landscape that I’ve come to love so much over the past years. Huge flats, tall distant mountains, what might seem to be scarce vegetation of unusual to us composition — cacti and yuccas, and the never ending road. Road that I might say is always great no matter how distant of a place it runs through.

Our first find was a big white field that was absolutely flat. Finally, the salt flats that I’ve heard so much about. I guess the water evaporated not so long ago, or it was raining recently. The salt was not rock hard, but soft and slightly soggy. I imagine during the summer it feels more like concrete.

In Gaudalupe Mountains NP we got a whole bunch of new stamps for our passports (4 official and one bonus). The park consists completely of hiking trails. We took a rather short one going through different plants with plaques attached to most of them. But we didn’t spend much time here as we didn’t want to be late to our next park.

We got to Carlsbad Caverns NP at about 1:30pm. The natural entrance to the caverns closes at 2pm and the elevator down closes at 3:30. After talking to the park rangers we decided that we’ll take the elevator right away, since the natural entrance adds an hour to the hike and you don’t really get to the interesting part until you reach the point where elevator would put us anyhow.

The elevator took us 750 feet down (that’s more than half of Empire State Building). I’ve never been in any cave or cavern before so for me this was a new experience. First of all the whole thing is HUGE. The farther we went the more space opened up. There were bleak lights installed behind some rocks, but you had to watch carefully where you were going because it was still pretty dark.

The formations of different stalactites, stalagmites, columns and other things I do not know the names for were magnificent. Underground lakes and springs, the constant sound of water drops. My dad was the “luckiest” of us all with respect to water drops landing on his head. At one point he started worrying about growing a stalagmite.

I managed to take a good number of pictures and most of them came out well thanks to my micro-tripod and a remote control combo. The only thing that is hard to capture is the size of the whole thing. On some photos you will notice the trail itself with guardrails around it. Those were from 1 to 1.5 meters in height and should give you some sense of scale.

After that we drove through a tiny town of Carlsbad itself to our final destination of the day — another tiny town in New Mexico — Artesia. We ended up having our 2nd anniversary dinner right in the hotel Chinese Buffet. But it’s not the food that matters, but the company, and the day itself was great.