dave wyman

I agree with John. You can certainly afford a short and long lens if you can afford the 18-200mm lens, even the non-Nikon versions.

 

The new 55-200mm lens is also quite sharp, and although not up to the same build quality of the 18-70mm lens, and it would make a terrific telephoto. I have the old AF 75-300mm f/4.5-5.6 Nikkor that's not difficult to find on ebay and is reasonably inexpensive.

Come on, you know you want - but don't need - the D200. You just want permission from your fellow photographers to spend the big bucks on the latest and greatest. ;-)

 

I had a nice tour of the Nikon facilities in California this morning from the tech rep, and I had a hands-on look at the D200. It is a terrific camera - that big viewfinder, the big LCD, the external controls, etc (and it had the 18-200mm lens on it - sweet). So if you can afford to purchase it, go for it. It's clearly a "better" camera than the D70.

 

If you're shooting professionally, then you should have at least two digital camera bodies, anyway. If you'd purchased a second body, you wouldn't be in the pickle of not having a camera while your D70 is in for repair. So get the second camera and have the repairs done to your D70.

 

Personally, as a recent D70s owner, I wouldn't trade up to a D200 anytime soon, because I don't want two types of chargers, two sets of camera controls, two types of remote releases, etc. For me, the D70s is as much of a camera as I need for my own personal and professional needs - family, travel and nature - and I get to play with two of them for the price of one D200.<div></div>

Hmmm......I have a Pentax 500mm f4.5 - I think I should see about converting it for use with my Nikon.

 

As for Stephen's $700 budget - how about a Tokina 400mm f/5.6 lens, for about $250 - or less - on ebay? Add a 1.5 doubler. Yes, you'll need to stop down, but with the available high ISOs on your D50, you should have all the aperture you need - PS can clean up the noise.

 

There are all sorts of ways to come close to birds (or have them come close to you) depending on where you live. I'm heading off to photograph sandhill cranes this weekend and 400mm on my digital camera, coupled with my shooting locations and the size of the birds, will probably be overkill. So buy what you can afford, and be creative.

As Jonas said, >The AF 75-300 f/4.5-5.6 is similar (longer range at the cost of autofocus speed) and equally adequate.<

 

I have this lens. It's on the large/heavy side, it's noisy, but it's not expensive and it's very, very sharp.

>this tripod..is...very convenient to carry while I hike. So instead of buying a second tripod I would like to know if its worth buying a monopod which can support the weight of the new lenses.<

 

I'm with everyone else - a monopod isn't going improve on your admittedly inadequate tripod. Are you sure you just didn't want to buy a tripod to add to your toy collection? :-)

 

In California, where I live, and on t.v., I usually see tripods used at sporting events, where there's lots of light and big lenses with large apertures - the monopods basically offer a way to balance these monster optics, they don't necessarily steady the camera.

 

I used to think I couldn't make a true photograph of nature or wilderness if I didn't walk far off the beaten path. Then I realized most of Ansel Adams' great photos were made right from his car. So, when I'm going for a long hike, I don't bother with tripods or lots of lenses.<div></div>

It will not be a good year for wildflowers in Death Valley unless the storm track drops towards the south. There has been something over an inch of rain since last summer.<div></div>

"Backroads of Southern California," by Dave Wyman, Voyageur Press, 2005; it includes several scenic roads and locations around San Diego. It's in bookstores, amazon.com, and libraries around the state.

If you're going to spend $600 or so on optics, I say the obvious choice would be the 18-200mm. If you spring for the 12-24, and keep your current lens, you're seriously short at the long end with your 28-80.

Jules,

 

I'm disappointed in you a little bit. There "isn't a whole lot of interesting things around"?!? This might not bode well for your future as a photographer, but I'm just going to chalk it up to the blues we sometimes suffer from during the holidays; I know you can snap out of it, if you haven't already.

 

As someone above mentioned, if anyone here gives you an idea, then it's not your own. Still, here's mine: explore Valley Forge - right now it probably looks a lot like it did when G. Washington and his troops spent time there.

 

There are infinite possibilities, but I suggest largely focusing on the statues that are at the park - and there are not very many - Washington, General ﾓMad Anthonyﾔ Wayne and Baron Friedrich von Steuben. This will give your photographs a certain irony - you are going to imbue statues with life.

 

Start with some establishing shots of the park itself, show the statues in the middle or far distance, and then move in. Perhaps you can intersperce photographs of the environment with the statues. Think silhouettes, think near-far juxtopositions, think macro, think texture, shape, and form, think representational, think abstract.

 

You can make photographs of the statues from all sorts of angles. But the statues are rather large, so you might want to see about gaining permission to bring a painter's ladder. You still won't reach the top of the statues, but you can move back some distance, put on a long lens, go with a small f/stop to hold DOF, include tight shots of the back or sides of the statues' heads in the foreground. That way you can show what the generals and Captain von Steuben are looking at, from their POV. You might also be able to include visitors near the statues, although I think your photos will achieve a more timeless quality if you leave out suggestions of the 21st century. Then again, you might be able to play the statues off the tourists, recording what amounts to the contrasts between the sacred and the profane.

 

If you can make digital photos of paintings in the various museums on the site, you might be able to come up with some interesting photo montages - try combining the paintings with the statues, for example.

 

Pray for "bad" weather - that will make it harder to come up with good exposures, which in your case, as a student, is a good thing, and this sort of weather will let you experience, in a minor way, what the American soldiers experienced.

 

Remember, I get a finder's fee.

 

Happy holidays!

I have no experience with the D200, but it's clearly superior in many ways to the D70s. If I were about to purchase a new DSLR or had to upgrade and could only have one camera, with a choice of the D70s or the D200, I'd choose the latter. The D200 has some great features the D70s is missing (can Nikon make some software tweaks for D70s owners - e.g. make the ISO visible on the LCD? - with a software upgrade?).

 

However, my next camera will be a D70s. That's because I already have a D70s. It's my one and only DSLR and it's a great camera. As an avid amateur and semi-pro, I want/need a backup body. Currently I'm toting one of my high end digicams as my backup, but I don't want to endure a camera failure when I require a long telephoto, or need to shoot in low light without noise, or need instant shutter response.

 

Two D70s cameras from B&H cost $1660. The D200 x 2 costs $3400. Mix and match is a possibility, but then I'd have to remember which camera I'm using, the batteries/chargers are different (and I've already got separate chargers for my laptop and cell phone when I'm on the road), the IR remote release on the D200 is expensive and clunky, and the higher megapixel count isn't significant enough for my needs.

 

I'm "stuck" with my D70s and my digicams until I sell enough photos, or Santa lays a some unexpected and impressive gelt on me, to justify a second DSLR. It won't be a D200.

Dan, I think you're right, the Field Photography volume would be good for beginners.

 

I probably have made use of a tripod most of the time I've gone greater than 1:1. However, I did hand hold the spider pic (with flash), since I was on my belly looking up at the spider, my cheek scraping the desert floor, and there was no way to set up a support. I made a lot of shots - film - and only a few came out. It's definitely difficult to focus when magnification is so high and DOF so shallow, even at small f/stops, so some sort of a support is usually the way to go.

You should acheive 1:13 magnification with a 50mm lens - on a film camera. The wider the lens, the greater the magnification, and the closer you will have to come to your subject. A 28mm gives you about 2.32X, with a 2 inch working distance.

 

Good reading in book form: "The Manual of Close-Up Photography, by Lester Lefkowitz." Probably out of print, but everything you will want to know about the subject is there.

 

It doesn't much matter where you focus the lens, because the effect, given the magnification achieved by lens reversal, is minor. Yes, you need a small aperture to maximize depth of field, which in any case will be minimal. DOF is so small, calculating it is probably useless.

 

Finally, although I have a focusing rail, I rarely use it for subjects in nature, my primary use for close-up photos. I move back and forth until the subject is in focus.<div></div>

>There is a lot of roads that are indicated as "High Clearance required" or some as "4WD required", including roads to the Racetrack<

 

About 1964, when I was 16, my friend and I traveled to Death Valley with our cameras - we both had dark rooms and I had a cool book filled with black and white photos of the park, by someone I didn't know much about, a photographer named Ansel Adams. We made the trip from L.A. in my friend's family car, a nice, newish Buick. Steve promised his dad we'd be very careful with the car.

 

While in the park, we traveled the amazingly rough 27 mile road to the Racetrack - at that time it was possible to drive right onto the dry lake bed. The drive left a few permanent rattles in the car. Once on the lake bed, my friend pressed down on the gas pedal, and soon had us traveling 120 miles per hour. That speed seemed, to Steve, a natural thing to do, given we were on the Racetrack.

 

When I think back to that trip, I am amazed we - and the car - returned alive. I have never quite repeated that sort of high speed experience (at least not on dried mud), but I've managed to take any number of two-wheel drive vehicles - mostly my own - over some very rough roads. It's probably not a bad idea to pack a shovel, a few boards, and make sure the jack works - then go for it!

David,

 

I'm semi-professional. I sell pictures when I can find a market. That's what you need to do with your photos.

 

- If you have a vast library of images and plan on making more on a regular basis, is a stock agency. They aren't going to find you, you'll have to seek out the agencies. Small stock agencies will accept a smaller number of photos.

 

- Find a venue that would be interested in publishing your photos. One obvious venue might be a magazine. But magazines typically don't just want to purchase pretty pictures - they need to illustrate a story. So practice your writing skills and/or find a partner who can write. Start pitching story ideas to editors.

 

- Travel guides: pitch photo book ideas to publishers. Where to find them? Check out the publishers of such books in your library or local book store or of course start googling. Again, this will entail some writing skills.

 

- More photos on-line. This past year alone I sold photos for CD, and a dinner program (a Great Pyranees dog owners's association) and got the nod to write the text and contribute the majority of photograph for a photo book about Yosemite. Each of these sales came from customers who found me by googling and then by persuing photos on the webpages and websites where my pics are hosted, primarily at pbase.com, which serves as a sort of unoffical stock agency for many of my photographs.

 

I suggest you upload more of your photos, and consider a site like pbase.com, which allows visitors (potential customers) to search a basic index to find images you might have. You might want to have your own website, too, with your own domain name, and lots of links to the webpages with your photos, and links from your photo pages back to your home page. I don't think the website you're currently using has a professional enough look. Keep it, but add others like pbase.

 

Good luck.

I'm just playing Devil's advocate here, because obviously many serious photographers use extreme telephotos to make terrific photos, like the ones in shown in this thread. (And I have nothing against longer optics. I have a compact 400mm f/5.6, and a monstrous 500mm f/4.5) <p>

 

But is there not more than one route to enlightenment? This is the digital age. With Gaussian Blur, for example, it's fairly easy to blur any background made with any lens, from wide to telephoto. Cost of a great lens: $5000? Cost of Photshop Elements: $69. <p>

 

Yes, I rather use my longer lenses to photograph birds (or elk, moose, etc), but I'm not convinced those are necessary requirements for making personally satisfying wildlife images. The original poster, of course, didn't say precisely what he wanted to do with his bird photos - make prints, post them online, sell them to magazines, or all of the above - so that makes it a bit more difficult to answer his question.<div></div>

Mark, beautiful photograph of the owl. Question: while you've shown us the full frame photo, could not someone with half as powerful a lens simply crop their own photo so that the owl would be approximately the same size as we see it presented here?

 

Obviously it's going to be a better (i.e. shaper) photo if it doesn't have to be cropped, but there's surely nothing wrong with cropping. Here's my cropped photo of a gray jay in Yellowstone, the camera hand held with an inexpensive little 55-200mm lens (on my DSLR. The jay was waiting for my fellow photographers and I to leave our picnic table to score any leftovers.

>digital offers real benefits (crop factor<

 

Is this really a benefit? For example, my 400mm lens becomes, on my DSLR, about a 600mm lens. But since it's a cropped image (from what would appear on 35mm), is there a real gain? Film can be cropped, too, and the size of the subject - let's say a bird - is essentially going to be the same digitally and on film, isn't it? Or no?

>But pros don't always use pro cameras. I've seen a PJ use a Nikon 990 a couple of years ago, with some kind of big bracket for a flash.< <p>

 

I put away my Nikon film cameras several years ago and have had <A HREF="http://www.idrivebackroads.com"> two pictorial travel guidebooks </A> published this year. Many photographs were made with my 5 megapixel digicam. The "pro" designation for any camera is defintely marketing hype, and all part of the fun/frustration in picking a new camera.<div></div>

I can plug as shamelessly as Gary! I conduct nature and travel photography workhops and tours throughout the year and have done so since 1982. Locations are primarily in California, and I conduct for the Yosemite Association, the San Diego Natural History Museum, and through my own <a href="http://www.iqtours.com">Image Quest Photography. </a> <p>

 

I also conduct workshops in Yellowstone and usually somewhere in the southwest each year. <p>

 

The attached photo shows a happy participant from my May, 2004 <a href="http://www.pbase.com/davewyman/yosemite_2004"> workshop in Yosemite. </a> <p>

 

Dave<div></div>

I think your subject header says it all - you're on a limited budget.

 

Yes, you get what you pay for, but do you need what you're going to get, paying for the D200?

 

If I had the same choice as you do, I'd go for the D70s - the extra features on the D200 aren't enough - for me - to justify the extra expense. I don't need the D200's 8 shots per second, wonderful as that would be. The D200 is more durable than the D70, but - for me - the latter camera is durable enough. The D200 can meter using my ancient Nikon lenses, but I don't want to use those optics anymore. Bigger viewfinder on the D200? I am happy with the viewfinder of the D70/s. (O.K, being able to see the ISO in the viewfinder would be nice.)

 

If you need those or other extra features, go for the D200. If you don't you'll never regret owning a D70.

>At least some (not huge, but far from zero) percentage of the homeless are happy to be noticed, happy to be treated as something other than their usual pariah-from-whom- eyes-are-averted.<

 

That's a perceptive point.

Hi, Zach,

 

If you visit homeless people, you have any close contact with them, and they are going to ask why you're there. <p>

 

This is going to be the awkward part. You've told us what you're thinking, basically: "I'm here to experience what you're experiencing, and I want to document that, I want to show what you are feeling with my camera, through my photographs." You're going to have to be able to articulate this and you might find some verbally hostile reactions, people I think you risk stepping on the dignity of people. <p>

 

This is going to be very different form photographing "poor people in a village" I think you're presuming that people in a village are by definition poor. But poor is a relative term - and someone who lives in a small community, a village, is not necessarily poor, or homeless. In addition, many people in such communities are quite comfortable with more technicalogically outfitted visitors, and so your presence would not be upsetting - you might be welcomed, and quickly put at ease. <p>

 

So, while I am sympathetic about what you want to do, I don't, from what I've read, think you've given enough thought to what you want to do. <p>

 

That said, here are a couple of approaches I've used when photographing people I don't know. <p>

 

First, plan to hang around an area with people you want to photograph and keep your camera in a day pack or fanny pack. Of course you're going to attract attention, with or without a camera. In fact, if you can keep your camera out of site, I can almost guarantee people who approach you first. And when that happens, you've been invited into their lives, rather than intruding into their lives. <p>

 

After you've spent some time - perhaps a few hours - making friends, directly with conversation, or even just with smiles, you're going to gain at least a measure of acceptance by the people you want to photograph. In fact after a while you will just become part of the scene, and people, if they see you at all, will not think of you as an outsider. <p>

 

Secondly, I often carry along some prints in a small album, or a page of slides, and after I've spent time talking with someone I've met, I will pull out my photos and explain that I like making photos of people. When the person I've been talking with looks at my photos, almost without exception she or he wants to have me make their photo, too. At that point, they want to be in my album, too.<p>

 

My suggestion - make your own album - photos of your family, friends, people you've photographed almost anywhere you've been, from your neighborhood to vacation locations, and of course some of the subjects of your wedding photography. Now it's time to pull out your camera and come back with what I think are the pictures you want to make. <p>

 

There is a lot of info on the Web - just google. Here's one place to look: <p>

 

http://www.nonphotography.com/ <p>

 

and of course on photo.net, here: <p>

 

http://www.photo.net/learn/street/intro - especially some of the comments. <p>

 

Other links: <p>

 

1. Here are some good tips (among them ask permission to make a photograph and say something nice to the potential subject) and some good photographs: <p>

 

http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=7201&page=1&pp=10 <p>

 

2. Here's a more general article and lots of comments, including some on street photography, about portraits: <p>

 

http://www.photo.net/learn/portraits/ - there are some suggestions about overcoming shyness, too. <p>

 

3. More tips and photos, including some thoughts about paying subjects: http://www.vividlight.com/articles/3702.htm <p>

 

4. Shyness: http://www.pinkheadedbug.com/techniques/shynessone.html - click on the "next" link for a series of additional and excellent street photography tips. <p>

 

5. Inspiration: The master street photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson - some of his photographs are here: <p>

 

http://www.afterimagegallery.com/bresson.htm <p>

 

6. My own photographs of the last couple years of the Day of the Dead at Olvera Street are at: <p>

 

http://www.pbase.com/davewyman/photographs_of_the_dead <p>

 

Events like this are a good place to practive, since people are often very receptive to being photographed. <p>

 

Good luck, <p>

 

Dave

Some of my Rollei photos are at:

 

<A HREF="http://www.pbase.com/davewyman/its_hip_to_be_square"> http://www.pbase.com/davewyman/its_hip_to_be_square </A>

 

 

I've still got my first Rollei, a 'cord IV, that I saved up for when I was 14, a Rolleiflex T (the one I use the most), as well as my mom's MX-LVS Tessar (my favorite), and her 2.8F Planar (which she never used, and I've barely touched, myself). I love 'em all.

I also enjoyed your photos - so many, beautifully atypical photographs that none-the-less tell a story about the location in which you made them.

>I prefer the 35S because I can see the exposure meter needle and set the aperture and shutter speed before I bring the camera up to my eye, which is quite improtant for taking candid pictures.

 

I'm with Robert. In addition, the origionally designed Rollei 35 is similar in aethetics to it's big sibling, the Rolleiflex, which also employes separate shutter speed and aperture wheels.

 

And with the zone focusing scale on the lens barrel, all the controls are visible at once.

 

Somehow I ended up with three of these cameras, including an original f/3.5 "Made in Germany" model, a S and an SE. My S is by far my favorite, but each camera is wonderful. All my 35mm gear has been retired in favor of my digital and Rolleiflex cameras, except for my Rollei 35 cameras.