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Urban Disguise – first impression after heavy use

Sunday, August 9th, 2009

Just returned from a short vacation.  It was a personal thing, but also a chance to try out the Urban Disguise as a travel case.  I’ll write up more once I get a chance to recover, but for right now take this as a general overview:

Major Pros:

Small, easy to pack, lightweight, carries a fair amount, tons of pockets.

Cons:

Doesn’t carry as much as I’d like, tight fit for a lot of equipment, bulging when overloaded can be a prob.

Overall:

I’m afraid I’m still looking for that miracle bag that does everything.  This one won’t be sold out – I’ll keep it in my arsenal, but probably as a carry-on for travel & a daily around-down bag for short shoots.  For longer-term shoots?  Not quite good enough…

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Had my hands on a Speed Graphic

Monday, July 27th, 2009

well, for a few minutes at least.  The one I had my hands on was one of the older (70’s?  60’s?) models, the type that had originally been used by the press. It was great: bellows (with holes, unfortunately), all manual switches & dials, 4×5 film size, even a plate on the back for viewing – and true to large-format cameras, you view it upside down.

So, why mention in here?  Just because it’s cool.  I mean, how often to you get your hands on a large-format camera with bellows?

More on the camera (from Wikipedia).

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Urban disguise, a second impression

Thursday, July 23rd, 2009

After a short couple of weeks, I can say that I’m starting to like what the urban disguise offers.  Give me a month though, and you’ll get a better overview.  I have some events coming up that’ll really put it through the paces.

This short in, I just want to say: it does very well at storing everything you need, like a “go bag.”  Right now, I can grab it & go, assured that I have the minimum of what I need to get things done.

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Urban disguise, first impressions

Wednesday, July 8th, 2009

So after a few days, my first impressions of the Think Tank Urban Disguise 40.  I love it.

Part of that is the pack-rat in me.  There are a ton of pockets – you can’t open a flap without getting an extra zipper.  It’s extremely well designed for daily walkabout use, and you can pack a crap-load of stuff in it.  For landscape an wildlife photography, I’ve packed it with my Nikon d200, the old-style (meaning huge & bulky) Nikon 80-200mm lens (note on this: Nikon Rumors claims it has been discontinued – the price has fallen far!), a Nikon 105mm lens, my lovely Nikon 50mm f/1.4 (not the ASM, and I highly recommend you grab it!), along with my Nikon 18-200mm and my Sigma 10-20mm.

But that’s not all – it also carries my blackrapid strap, filters, memory cards, extra batteries, pens, paper, space for a few magazines…

I’ll update again in a couple of months, but it looks like an excellent carry-around bag.  The type that works well for urban photography, travel, and maybe even car camping.

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Searching for a new bag

Friday, June 19th, 2009

It really is my bag, baby!  Or rather, that’s my excuse for not lugging all of my photo equipment around with me.  The problem is, I’m starting to get tired of that excuse.  More importantly, I’m starting to feel the pain of not having my equipment with me when I need it.  I’ve narrowed my search down to two choices:

I’m leaning towards the urban disguise right now.  Any thoughts?

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Finally, decent weather

Monday, May 4th, 2009
Kids playing in the water

Playing in the water

Unless you have lived up here for a while, this may be hard to understand: we’re finally getting temperatures in the 60’s!  Now, to most of the world, that’s nothing that impressive.  For us, however, this is something: we’ve just wrapped up an eight-month winter (seriously, it starts in mid/late September and ends in late April/early May).  Before that long, cold winter, we had one of the worst summers on record.

Normally, we get a sunny May and June (occasionaly cloudiness & maybe some rain), partially sunny July, and a partially rainy August.  Then it gets nice again in September, but it’s cold – around mid September things will occasionaly start to freeze, and by October it’s pretty regular.

Last summer, however: no such luck.  We had some sun in early May – when it’s still cold.  From that point on, it was mostly overcast through July, and then rain and cloudy conditions from there to September.  We didn’t have a summer.

Now we’re finally getting one.  I just hope it stays.

Click on the image for a larger view.  This was a shot I took today at Goose Lake.  It’s May 3rd and already warm enough that people are getting in the lake.  Just last Friday there was still ice on that lake, even now it’s cold.  But refreshing

photo details: -1/3 EV, ISO 50, Sunny WB, manual mode on the sd500

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When White Balance is Wrong

Tuesday, April 28th, 2009
A mid-winter scene. Note the yellows.

A mid-winter scene. Note the yellows.

Stepping back to last week’s white balance post, Let me show you something that was wrong.  During the winter, most of my small-camera photography is indoor.  As such, ISO is always set high/fast, and white balance is usually left on Tungsten (the light bulb icon).

So I walk out of a building (at 8:30 in the morning, no less), and this is what I see.  It’s cold, maybe -5 F, and I don’t want to mess around too much.  ISO was already at 400, as it usually is in the winter.  Flash was off, EV was at 0.  This is the exact exposure as it appeared that morning.

However, note the yellows.  I could fix that (easily) in post-production, or I could claim that it’s part of my artistic vision.  It’s neither, however.  No, this was the effect of taking a pic when White Balance was set to daylight.  The big light there?  It’s not at daylight colors.  Thus everything went yellow.

Still, not really a problem.  I have a feeling this would work extremely well in black & white…

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CHDK on the sd500

Sunday, April 26th, 2009

Sunset shot on Maui, shutter speed at 1/100,000

Sunset shot on Maui, shutter speed at 1/100,000 (click for larger pic)

CHDK.  If you haven’t heard of it, it’s a pretty neat thing.  Go ahead, read about it on the link above.  I’ll wait.

Back?  OK, great.  so the summary: the CHDK project allows programmers with more time than I have to hack in to the camera’s firmware and setup your own environment.  for example, you can override the shutter speed, like I did in the photo to the right.  That’s a late-afternoon shot, directly at the sun from a beach in Maui.

The main reason I use CHD is so that I can get RAW images out of the sd500.  The JPG versions are excellent, but RAW give me some flexibility.

For example, in this pic: the photo directly out of the camera is definately on the dark side.  A little bit of the details have been lost in shadows.  To resurrect?  Well, with RAW, I can nudge up the exposure, lighten the midtones, and bring back down the shadows.  The result: more detail, still keeping the dark overall feeling.

This pic makes me think of old pinhole shots, the kind that required an incredible amount of light to make a photo.

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Hand over the Camera

Sunday, April 26th, 2009

Continuing this thread, what about when you hand the camera to another?  My daughter saw me playing with my camera at a stoplight & asked for it.  I know full well that she’ll drop it, push buttons, but will also try to take a photo or three.

So, before handing off the photo, I set ISO to 200 since she’s a shaky shooter.  Whaddaya want at four years?  White balance to daylight, EV stuck at -1/3.  Gets us the shot below.

This one did take some post-processing.  If you notice, there’s a wide, wide range of exposures here.  Had to play a bit before I could resurrect it.

At a stop light on the way to day care, actually.

At a stop light on the way to day care, actually.

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After work, another example

Saturday, April 25th, 2009

You’ve seen the beach, now the other extreme: winter in Alaska.  This photo was taken after work, in early January.  It’s pretty unremarkable – a failure, by my standards. No detail in the moon, the sky overly noisy…  But the colors are rich, and the warmth of the lights reflects (lightly) off the snow.

To pull this one off: ISO set to 400, white balance to daylight, EV still -1/3.  The camera set shutter speed at 1/20.  If I hadn’t been shivering, I might have worked that to my preference.

January Afternoon Moon - 4:45pm.

January Afternoon Moon - 4:45pm on 1/9/2009.

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