Traditional Self Portrait with new Nikon D7000

Traditional Self Portrait with new Nikon D7000, originally uploaded by fingertrouble.

Traditionally every camera I get the first shot is me with the camera. No idea why, just is ;-)

Yes new camera - the long walk on Tuesday reminded me how heavy it was and how really a 7 year old digital camera (the original D70 - bought in San Francisco, September 2004) is ancient in dog, human, and chip years....so hail the D7000! Hail the 10-24mm wideangle! Hail the 35mm prime! Hail Caesar! err...

( And a rather more silly one... )

Really I am posting far too many pics of me here...it's not intentional, but certainly when I get a new camera the easiest and most available model is...me. I'm not some narcissist nor comment fishng whore, I usually shrink from posting pics with me in it (check my past journal, there's about probably 10 in 5 years) cos these shots take 10s or 100s to get something I don't want to puke looking at...

(although I have to admit the nice comments I got on FB about my topless shot from straight blokes bolstering my confidence was nice...why do gay men never do that? I suppose not to be misconstrued, I guess. Anyway twas very sweet and made my week.)

Traditional Self Portrait with new Nikon D7000

Traditional Self Portrait with new Nikon D7000, originally uploaded by fingertrouble.

Traditionally every camera I get the first shot is me with the camera. No idea why, just is ;-)

Yes new camera - the long walk on Tuesday reminded me how heavy it was and how really a 7 year old digital camera (the original D70 - bought in San Francisco, September 2004) is ancient in dog, human, and chip years....so hail the D7000! Hail the 10-24mm wideangle! Hail the 35mm prime! Hail Caesar! err...

( And a rather more silly one... )

Really I am posting far too many pics of me here...it's not intentional, but certainly when I get a new camera the easiest and most available model is...me. I'm not some narcissist nor comment fishng whore, I usually shrink from posting pics with me in it (check my past journal, there's about probably 10 in 5 years) cos these shots take 10s or 100s to get something I don't want to puke looking at...

(although I have to admit the nice comments I got on FB about my topless shot from straight blokes bolstering my confidence was nice...why do gay men never do that? I suppose not to be misconstrued, I guess. Anyway twas very sweet and made my week.)

On Primrose Hill, London is your jewellery box

So I went to Primrose Hill to try out my new toy:











Wanted to get closer to this guy but I'd literally be breathing down his neck if I did - Ken Rockwell was right, really issue with wideangles is getting close enough - I was right next to the tree and lamp - interestingly stopping all the silly joggers from doing their showoff stretchers. I took great delight in getting in their way. Slowly...



More over at my Flickr.

On Primrose Hill, London is your jewellery box

So I went to Primrose Hill to try out my new toy:











Wanted to get closer to this guy but I'd literally be breathing down his neck if I did - Ken Rockwell was right, really issue with wideangles is getting close enough - I was right next to the tree and lamp - interestingly stopping all the silly joggers from doing their showoff stretchers. I took great delight in getting in their way. Slowly...



More over at my Flickr.

Self portrait *sigh* with low light experiment

And here's an experiment with prime lenses (a prime lens is a lens that only has one number, one focal 'length' - in this case 35mm). Prime lenses are not only sharp, they don't lose as much light as telephotos or zooms (those big lenses that photographers tend to use, I have a 18-200mm VR that usually doesn't leave my camera it's so useful - but really heavy, unlike a prime which is light. Because of the smaller sensor 35mm will come around 52mm - which about the view angle of the human eyes. So looks very natural.

Here I'm shooting at 6400 ISO as the last of the light goes in my room. At that ISO it's noisy, but amazingly noise free for 6400 - also the JPGs are noiseless cos the camera has Noise Reduction, but this is from the NEF Raw file:



I couldn't get the pose *exactly* right doing it myself, I was trying to do a portrait breaking the 'rules' where the face is actually right at the edge of the frame, and the bookcase and wardrobe divide the space - kind of a mix of 1 and 2. Last one probably works best, I like dark spaces...also that right-to-the-edge of the frame thing is my artschool training of wanting to break the thirds rule and see how much I can unbalance the composition before it breaks. I do that a lot.

I love the shallow depth of field you can get with this, nature of the smaller sensors is they tend to have large depth of field which makes selective focusing difficult, but with a prime with smaller apertures (1.8 this goes down to) it's less of an issue. I was tempted to go to a full frame sensor for that reason, but the cameras are a lot bigger and heavier and actually less good (yes the 'pro' D3 isn't as sharp as the D7000 - those big cameras are looking a bit creaky now, hence rumours of a D4).



If you know nothing about cameras the last few paragraphs would mean nothing to you - but I'm not even going to try and explain depth of field, partly because the physics makes my head spin and I've forgotten half of it...

Self portrait *sigh* with low light experiment

And here's an experiment with prime lenses (a prime lens is a lens that only has one number, one focal 'length' - in this case 35mm). Prime lenses are not only sharp, they don't lose as much light as telephotos or zooms (those big lenses that photographers tend to use, I have a 18-200mm VR that usually doesn't leave my camera it's so useful - but really heavy, unlike a prime which is light. Because of the smaller sensor 35mm will come around 52mm - which about the view angle of the human eyes. So looks very natural.

Here I'm shooting at 6400 ISO as the last of the light goes in my room. At that ISO it's noisy, but amazingly noise free for 6400 - also the JPGs are noiseless cos the camera has Noise Reduction, but this is from the NEF Raw file:



I couldn't get the pose *exactly* right doing it myself, I was trying to do a portrait breaking the 'rules' where the face is actually right at the edge of the frame, and the bookcase and wardrobe divide the space - kind of a mix of 1 and 2. Last one probably works best, I like dark spaces...also that right-to-the-edge of the frame thing is my artschool training of wanting to break the thirds rule and see how much I can unbalance the composition before it breaks. I do that a lot.

I love the shallow depth of field you can get with this, nature of the smaller sensors is they tend to have large depth of field which makes selective focusing difficult, but with a prime with smaller apertures (1.8 this goes down to) it's less of an issue. I was tempted to go to a full frame sensor for that reason, but the cameras are a lot bigger and heavier and actually less good (yes the 'pro' D3 isn't as sharp as the D7000 - those big cameras are looking a bit creaky now, hence rumours of a D4).



If you know nothing about cameras the last few paragraphs would mean nothing to you - but I'm not even going to try and explain depth of field, partly because the physics makes my head spin and I've forgotten half of it...