ottocrat

It's not a portrait, it's a candid. If you're worried about how your subjects might react, were

they to know they had been photographed, maybe you shouldn't be shooting candids? :)

 

Personally I think the picture is great and I'd have no qualms.

It would help if you could tell us a bit more about the software you're using, also which OS.

Almost the most essential piece of equipment I have in my travel bag is a <a href="http://

www.autdirect.co.uk/acatalog/PCableRB-298x.jpg">figure-of-eight connector lead</a> with

the right plug for whichever country I'm visiting. This doubles up as connector and extension

lead for my Nikon charger, my camcorder charger, my powerbook power supply, my NiMH

battery charger, etc etc. Thank God most things are multi-voltage these days. When you're

in the UK just pop into a Maplins on any High Street and pick up a spare.

Personally at those prices I don't know why people are selling. Seeing as there's no chance of getting a reasonable price for my MF equipment at the moment, I'm keeping it. I may not be using it much, but there's no point in throwing it away.

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Boxed D50s are on sale here in Ottawa, Ontario, over the counter, and have been for a couple of weeks. At least, Galaxy Camera had a bunch of them the week before last.

I assume the question refers to the dedicated iPod Photo and whether NEFs show up there. I can't answer the question as I do the same thing as the other respondents, use my old 3G iPod and the Belkin widget to transfer files. I've been thinking about upgrading to the iPod Photo though as I'd quite like to carry my iPhoto library around with me, along with my music. Not sure if 60 gigs will be enough though... :/

 

Anyway, has anyone used the iPod Photo with NEFs?

Oops! Er, yeah... *cough* Sorry!

I get the 'Err' when I've either not attached the lens properly, or when I've accidentally flipped

the aperture ring lock (on a lens which has one, obviously, so not the 18-70). I don't know if

either of these is what's happening in your case. I certainly don't get the mirror staying up.

With the odd flash picture, are you sure you had the correct flash mode selected in the

camera?

Surely even a basic consumer inkjet at home would do a better job than Wal Mart?? I print black and white shots out on my Canon i455 at home and get them framed locally, I'm always delighted with the results.

 

Do you have a dedicated photo shop nearby? Put the file on a CD-RW or a CF card and take it to them, as long as you've done your job properly in Photoshop (certainly looks that way from your picture) they should do it justice, and inexpensively too.

I'd love to get that 12-24mm DX lens, can't justify it though. It's an expensive lens. But for

portraits, have you considered one of the two 50mm AF primes? The 1.8 is really very cheap

indeed and is fantastic quality, and it makes a great portrait lens on a digital body. The

magnification on a digital sensor does not translate into a loss of quality, so I don't see there

are grounds for concern that you won't "get the performance you're paying for" - but a

135mm lens on a digital body gives you the equivalent of around 200mm, very long for a

portrait lens.

Sorry, I was assuming he meant the v2.0 D70 firmware!

If it was set to 'auto' and you were using it indoors then it's almost certainly one of two things: (a) it couldn't get a focus lock, (b) it was too dark. Try to recreate the conditions and play around, make a note of what it says in the viewfinder. See if the little 'focus lock' spot is flashing or steady.

Oh, and you might have to rename the downloaded binary's extension on your computer from .bin to .BIN - my D70 only recognised the file with the capitalised suffix.

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OSX isn't going away. Next year's 'Leopard' upgrade will be OS 10.5, and I'd be truly amazed if it was the last in the 'big cat' family of OSX upgrades. If you choose to remain with the Mac then I would certainly move to OSX as quickly as possible - and I'd also echo those who say that you don't need to pay the premium required for bleeding edge top-of-the-range workstations. OSX on a fast G4 processor will do a stellar job for your digital darkroom, especially if you load it up with RAM - at least 768mb and preferably more.

Well His Steveness was running OSX on a P4 3.6ghz machine at the keynote the other day, and they've been compiling OSX to run on x86 for a number of years now, so most certainly it's a switch to x86 and away from PPC. What isn't clear to me is where we now stand with respect to 64-bit processing. Having invested so much PR capital in talking up 64 bit I'd be taken aback if the switch to Intel were a switch to a 32-bit processor. However the dev kits already shipping with x86 Intel processors are presumably 32-bit, despite being in a Powermac housing.

I've had three Dells in the past (still have one of them) and I've always been happy with the way they're built and with Dell support. They're not very pretty, certainly not compared to Apple hardware, but this may not be an issue for you. For me the big advantage of the Mac over my Dell is software reliability and stability, and of course security. I've migrated entirely over to the Mac now for my daily computer needs and the Dell is in a cupboard as a media server.

What I did, in the same position as you earlier this year, was buy a Mac Mini on the understanding that I would upgrade to a PowerMac a year or two down the line and relegate the Mini to media server duties. The saving let me invest in a really nice screen. Naturally, after yesterday's bombshell, I'm hugely relieved that I didn't go for the dual G5 straight away. The Mac Mini is a very nice little machine that works very well for all my current needs.

OSX core "falling behind" Linux??? Errr no.

 

At the moment, all we can offer regarding inter-operability between the Windows and Mac world when they are both running on x86 is conjecture. If they keep to their existing business model, which I think is virtually certain, you will not find OSX running on anything other than Apple hardware. You may find some genius haxx0r able to get a version running on a non-Apple PC by fiddling with the BIOS and getting around the DRM but you won't be seeing Dell offering an OSX product.

 

On the other hand, I think it's highly likely that you'll be able to install and run Windows on a partition or another drive on your Mac. And even if you can't, Windows emulation on a Mac is suddenly going to be a far more realistic and practical prospect than it is at present using Virtual PC.

 

Another huge plus will be the ease with which developers will be able to port across software from Windows to Mac. This will be interesting to gamers, for example, who are badly served on the Mac platform - of less interest though to photographers who already have a great selection of apps available to them on OSX.

 

For me, the biggest question mark relates to those expensive software packages we've bought in the last couple of years for the Mac. From later this year, new software will have been compiled to run under both x86 and PowerPC architectures, but those apps you've just bought are written for PowerPC only, and to run on a future x86 Mac they will have to be emulated or rewritten. Apple say there will be a transparent seamless emulator called Rosetta built into the OS which will let you use existing software, but there are quite a few exceptions (including any software that uses Altivec for example) so expect plenty of apps to stop working next time you upgrade your Mac. And will publishers offer free upgrades to existing software so that it'll run under x86? I doubt it.

 

All in all I think this was probably something Apple had to do but I really don't think they wanted to do it, and it's a big gamble.

Yes. Why not shoot a picture and see?

Genius! Best tip of the month!

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Yup, the straightforward and easy answer is to ditch the CD that came with your D70 and

immediately download Nikon View from the Nikon site. When you install Nikon View it'll

install the plug-in you need to view NEFs in Photoshop.