An interesting new Nikon camera has just been released the D3100. It’s a 14.2 Megapixel CMOS sensor with Full HD video capabilities at 24 fps.
What’s more: It has full-time autofocus with monaural sound. Nice!
Like it’s predecessor, the Nikon D3000, it is an entry-level camera, pretty light and compact in size.
Nikon’s EXPEED 2 processor allows you to get up to ISO 12,800. But don’t ask me how noisy that would be…

Find out more here.

Macro Photography is such a thing. It opens up a whole new world to you. Seeing the fine details of the eye of a praying mantis, or the fragile canals of a maple leaf. It’s all there – right in front of you.
We tend to ignore this perspective mostly – but I encourage you to go flat on your belly in a garden or in a park and observe life up close. You will see so many new possibilities opening up to you.
Here is a macro photographer I always admired and I followed his work for years. His name is Ronnie Gaubert – a Louisiana based photographer.

Personally I shoot with a Tamron 90mm macro lens. It is one of the sharpest lenses I have ever used and I even use it for portrait work sometimes.I also bought a Nikon pn-11, which is an extension ring that you can put between the lens and the camera. This allows you to focus a lot closer and thus get into the zone of larger magnification than 1:1. In fact with the pn-11 you can get as much as 2:1.

The below shot was one of those 2:1 macros, which really shows you the detail you can get from this setup.
In case you do not recognize what it is (another artistic trick that you can use in macro photography), it’s the surface of a strawberry!

Thanks to Brent Pearson who put this video together.

A bit of background information about this shoot. We were almost a dozen photographers crammed camera to camera (with tripods intermingled) in a small side room of a large derelict train shed here in Sydney. It is quite interesting to walk around and admire all the graffiti. Here is a shot I took about a year ago at the same place:

Anyway our makeup artist-turned-model Mandy was showing a lot of talent for modelling and she was happy to pose for us.

Brent came up with the idea of a girl wandering home after a horrible party just to find herself not being able to walk anymore and taking a rest at this very place, high heels off, clothes and hair messed up, smeared make-up…you get the picture.

The lighting was simple, yet tricky. We had a large softbox at the top and right of the frame. Triggered with two hot-shoe flahes via pocket wizards (we had 10 of them thanks to Oat from hangingpixels.com). Btw. be sure to check out his lighting workshops, they are fantastic.

The walls were light-painted with torches after Mandy had packed up. My resulting image is a combination of 9 exposures, pretty much one for every part of the image as well as a base image with Mandy in it.

The floor has been lit with very low, horizontal torch light, which gives it the grunchy feel and makes the dust look more prominent.
It’s been lots of fun to shoot with so many skilled and experienced portrait and fashion photographers… even though my passion remains landscapes

My first one was a $30 tripod, which was slowly but surely creeping and I got blurrier shots than had I handheld the camera.
I decided the next time I would get something to last for a lifetime. And thus I bought a Gitzo tripod.

They are by far the best tripods out there, carbon-fibre made and pretty light.

Although if you want to use a ballhead, which pretty much is a must if you use a sturdy tripod, the weight reduction is quickly made up by the heavy iron ballheads

I will talk about ballheads another time. Today is purely about tripods.

I bought the one you can see on the left. The Gitzo Traveller 2540.
It is a steep investment, but it is the last tripod you will need in your whole life.
You will more than make up for it by never having to replace your tripod again. Eventually it will save you more money in the long run, so do it like me and buy once, not every 2 years.

There are different version and it is a little bit up to you which one to get, I for example prefer the ones that have 3 joints over the ones with 2, because you can collapse them a little bit more, which is valuable if you want to fit it in your luggage. However it is a trade off, because it adds time to set it up.

I usually have to take off the ballhead to make it fit in my luggage but that is ok. The 2 joint version adds a few inches and would have been hard to get into my suitcase, I calculated before purchase. This is an important factor if you ever think about taking your tripod with you overseas.

Here in Paris I see lots of ppl running around with a tripod during the day – in bright daylight. Some ppl swear by shooting every single shot on their tripods. However if you shoot during daylight, you really don’t need it and you will probably regret it. Only take a tripod when you need it, that is my advice. But if you need it, make sure you ALWAYS have it with you. Otherwise just use an R-Strap and enjoy the flexibility you have without having to lug a tripod when you can shoot handheld (i.e. above about 1/60 sec – even slower when you have calm hands).

Have you ever been in one of those situations when all the elements just come together, you know you will get an amazing shot in the next few seconds, but what the… wrong lens. Stress comes up, quickly trying to change lenses, or even worse – not having brought the right lens.
And there the moment passes, and you were only able to watch – having the mental picture, but nothing to permanently save this little piece of memory.
I have been in that situation – a lot of times. This is when I decided to buy a 18-200.
Now don’t get me wrong – I love sharp lenses. My Zeiss 35mm is one of the sharpest lenses ever built and I thoroughly enjoy the results.
However for travel photography there are a lot of additional issues you have to fight with – weight restrictions on aircrafts are a big problem. Also I do not want to take my whole kit to a country where it may attract more attention than I like. You need to make compromises, retaining max. flexibility. The 18-200 gives me exactly this flexibility. That’s why I love it.
Now many will say: Hang on Kajo, the 18-200 does not give you the sharpest images.
Well that’s true, but I will come home with more keepers from my holiday than any eager lens-changer.
Bottom line, I will miss less of those great opportunities – 18mm is wide enough for a landscape shot (although admittedly, I sometimes have to shoot a 2 shot pano to get to my beloved 10-12mm range) and 200mm is more than enough to isolate objects, with nice bokeh et al (aperture is f/5.6 at 200mm, but 200mm creates such a compression of 3rd dimension that backgrounds are reasonably out of focus anyway).
Also if you shoot the lens at it’s sweet spot, that is around f/8-f/11, I doubt you will see sharpness differences between it and the higher quality glass in the Nikon lineup.

Let me show you two example shots taken just a few minutes apart from one another – with this lens.
It shows you some decent shots, one at the wide end (18mm) and one at the telephoto end (170mm):

Invalide Canons

Golden Angels

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