ottocrat

John, thank you, that little explanation has already helped me more than several months of experimentation on my own.

 

"Just playing" is all well and good but unless I know what I'm doing then it's rather hit and miss and I can't reproduce good results on demand.

 

I think I had misunderstood TTL-BL. I'm going to stick to 'plain' TTL in future for all but fill flash.

In the year since I bought my D70 I really feel that my photography

has progressed, but one area where I'm still not happy is flash

photography. I bought the SB-600 back in January this year but to be

honest I haven't really got the hang of it. I don't find the manual

very enlightening. Can anyone recommend (or link to) a good guide to

using a speedlight, written for the beginner, discussing exposure and

how to configure both speedlight and the camera body? I usually have

the SB600 set to TTL-BL using aperture priority on the body. I'm

finding that most of my shots using flash are underexposed, but it's

unpredictable.

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Not a great photo but a great place to walk!<div></div>

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I think Steve Jobs' defensiveness on this point in a recent interview demonstrates that they fear that Intel OSX will find its way onto non-Apple hardware. Personally I think it's inevitable, on the other hand it will always be restricted to a relatively few hardcore hacker types. OSX is not about to be licensed to Dell, that's for sure.<br>

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Incidentally, there was a typo in your link - <a href="http://daringfireball.net/">fixed</a>.

Heheh, what was that about great minds? ;)

Not wishing to wade into any platform wars, but <a href="http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1872175,00.asp">this recent column</a> by John Dvorak is rather telling. Now think what you like about Dvorak (actually I can't think of anything I like about Dvorak) but if he's moaning about the total <i>dominance</i> of the Mac in media circles then I think it's fair to say that, yes, it's still a major player in pro photo circles.

Personally I love my 105 micro on my D70, it's my favourite lens by far. I find it spot on for flowers, maybe slightly short for the creepy crawlies but easily adequate.<br>

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<a href="http://homepage.mac.com/chris.kendall/.Pictures/Photo%20Album%20Pictures/2005-08-20%2018.36.42%20-0700/Image-A536834D11E211DA.jpg">Dandelion seed head shot with 105mm f2.8 Micro Nikkor on a D70</a>

Thanks everyone for this extremely useful discussion. I see the arguments though I can't

help feeling that an open source solution is going to be preferable in the longer term, simply

because with or without Adobe there's always going to be someone making a conversion tool

for DNGs. With NEF and possible encryption, I'm a bit nervous that those files wouldn't be

recoverable in a Nikon-less world. But I take the point that, at present, perhaps the jury's

still out and maybe I should still wait a while.

 

Space-wise, *sigh* yes it always boils down to more storage doesn't it? 1.5tb under my desk

and I still don't seem to have enough.

I'd like to convert my NEFs to DNG, for two reasons: (a) future-proofing, (b) to save space.

The DNG files are slightly smaller than my NEFs and cumulatively that should save me a lot of

space. Obviously with (b) in mind I would not be embedding the original raws and I would be

deleting the original NEFs after conversion. Before I cross this digital Rubicon is there

something I should know? Is there information in the NEF that won't be carried over to the

RAW? Or is the smaller file size down to compression alone?

Thanks for this really useful feedback.

On the basis of those pictures, in my opinion, NO.

That looks fine to me, I have to be honest. There's a bit of noise, what ISO were you using? The sharpness though looks well within expectations.

Sorry obviously I hadn't read your last post. A 100% crop from a photo taken with the 50mm/1.8 would help clarify things.

Is this your first DSLR? It may be that you have unrealistic expectations. Could you post a crop of one of your photos at 100%? That would help others see whether you are indeed suffering from abnormal blurriness or whether it is normal. Also, can you access another lens? See what the results are like with a very sharp lens - you could invest in the very reasonable but ultra-sharp Nikkor 50mm 1.8 prime, for example.

 

But the fact is that raw images from DSLRs are intentionally 'soft'-ish and you really do need to be shooting NEF and post-processing to maximise sharpness - the in-camera custom settings don't make a huge difference.

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(...except where the theme is explicitly political of course)

Incidentally, it would be so nice if people would leave politics out

of these No Words threads.<div></div>

If the reason you chose the D70s is the kit lens, then you've kind of answered your own question. :)

 

I can't compare the two but the 18-70 kit really is as good as everyone says, I can't believe the Sigma will compare. You'd be far better off imho getting the Nikon kit zoom and then investing in a telezoom to cover the 70-200 plus range. You'll be wanting to go up from 125mm in any case, and you'll have less trouble finding/affording 70-xxx than 125-xxx.

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Not an original view but the way it was built to be seen.<div></div>

Can I just echo what a previous poster suggested about checking the case of the file suffix? I

was having exactly the same problem until I renamed the files from .bin to .BIN