sam_thompson2

Jeff, I am not complaining. In fact I posted a defense of Photo.net use of the share this page feature.

 

I am pointing out issues which will cause people to leave Photo.net. Anyways since my presence is unwelcome here. I will leave.

 

Josh, please change the name of my user name after I delete my account.

"The issue of nudity is one that is serious enough that we would not ever send an email or newsletter that included nude photography. Not only is that ethically a bad idea, but it may border on being illegal."

 

But that is contrary to the position at photo.net that it will not censor photographs and that this site is for adults only. In other words, if I as a photographer was posting mostly nudes I would not get covered in the newsletter.

 

These are not my issues. I don't care if Photo.net sends me stuff. I don't really care if they sell my address to spam sites. But I can see why people would care.

 

"As for typos, it would be much more helpful for you to send me an email so I can correct them. That is, assuming you were bringing the typos up so that they could be fixed, and not just to try and make me look silly."

 

The issue is credibility. Whether or not Photo.net sells info or not, or does anything with its list of email addresses has to be trust in two issues, 1) Do I trust that these people will not lie to me and 2) do I trust that these people to safely guard by information from unauthorized access.

 

Typos on announcements show a user that Photo.net is not careful with your announcements. It also shows that if Photo.net is not careful with announcements what else they might not be careful of.

 

If I wanted to make you look silly I wouldn't have told you at all.

 

Deleting your account is actually a new feature and is a welcome change. I didn't realize that you implemented a self delete feature. Kudos for that.

Go to Strobist.com they have a bunch of books that they recommend or forget the books and just read the site.

Josh,

 

I never said there was an evil plot. You just have to choose your words carefully. You lose credibility when you say they are not forced but clearly it wasn't optional. The reason why it's not opt in is clear, you won't have as many users seeing the newsletter. I understand that.

 

You also have to understand that there is nudity in Photo.net which is filtered which may not be proper depending on location. Some countries and workplaces ban the the domain Photo.net and sending a newsletter which may contain nudity to members who do not want to see it during the times when they open up their mail and when you bypass the domain by using mkt691. It's asking for trouble.

 

Also it is clear that when an account is marked deleted, it is not deleted, that email records are kept for some reason.

 

My argument is not that Silverpop will sell your email address. But Namemedia can and may use personal information among its other properties. In other words if a user clicks on a lot of Garden photography he/she may be sent an invitation for Daves Gardens. I am also not saying that its a good or bad thing. It is what it is.

 

Also you have quite of bit of typos on the announcement.

Nikon will probably update more lenses to be AF-S compatible and move more of their lenses to VR and G. That is the general trend.

 

Maybe Nikon will add VR to their wider angles like the 17-55 but I seriously doubt that even if they would to refresh that line the casing would look different.

Josh, you are forcing everyone to receive the newsletter. You cannot opt out before hand.

 

I can't show someone porn and then ask them to opt out. The damage is done. Personally I can care less.

 

You should put something about newsletters in your terms of service or privacy policy.

 

People should read the privacy policy.

 

Here is an interesting clause.

 

"If photo.net is sold, pledged or disposed of as a going concern whether by merger, sale of assets, bankruptcy or otherwise, the user database of photo.net could be sold as part of that transaction and all User Information accessed by such successor or purchaser."

 

This means that if photo.net ever changes ownership, they reserve the right to sell information to a third party. There you go. Also what's surprising is that passwords are kept in the clear.

"That's all they do. They do it for US Air, HP, MOMA, etc. Your effort to portray them as something other than that is baseless."

 

They are a marketing firm. There is nothing wrong with that.

 

I already know that they do it for US Air and others which is the reason why I chose Golden Key as my example as it is a non profit.

The newsletter company that Josh is refering to is an email marketer called Silverpop. The email marketers use a throw away domain like mkt691.com in case email filters filter them out.

 

http://www.silverpop.com/about/clients.html

 

From their website.

 

"With Silverpop?s extensive and detailed tracking and reporting services, Golden Key now knows not only which members are receiving its emails, but also if they?re opening them, and if so, which links they are clicking. Anbari explains that ?solving the deliverability challenge alone was not enough. We have used Silverpop?s reporting to tell us what our members were actually viewing, which has helped us refine our messages to meet our customer?s needs.?

 

So there you go.

 

See for yourself, when you mouse over each link in the email you will see an address links.mkt691.com/XXXXX=YYYYYY, that's how they track links. They even hash the email address so you don't know that they are communicating your email address back to them. Pretty clever,

 

Also the terms of service state that photo.net does not sell information to third parties but since their parent company is a large search optimization firm, well you get the idea.

 

It's not really unethical but Josh is not being honest when he describes the company as a company that sends out newsletters.

1d is not a full size sensor. 1d has a 1.3x crop where the Fuji has a 1. 5 crop.

 

Fuji is not really a 12 mp camera either it is a 6 megapixel camera but behaves more like a 10 mp camera but outputs 12mp.

 

1D is super fast, fast autofocus, fast frames per second built with superior "professional" build. The Fuji is slow slow slow, slower than even the D200 that the camera is based on.

 

Journalists and sports photographers tend to shoot the Canon and wedding and portrait photographers tend to shoot with the Fuji.

 

They are different cameras for a different market.

I use this Firefox plugin to look at EXIF data on the web.

 

http://www.opanda.com/en/iexif/iexif_firefox.htm

Your current monitor doesn't support resolutions higher than 1280x1024 and is not a wide screen monitor so it will not support wide screen resolutions. Although if you really want to you can probably hack the drivers and run it in non standard resolutions. Doing so might ruin your hardware.

 

http://www.entechtaiwan.com/util/ps.shtm

 

You probably don't need to update the video card drivers to get 1920x1200 but its probably a good idea to do so anyways.

Image quality should be the similar. They both use the tiny 2.5 Sony sensor. I prefer the Zeiss lenses on the Sony. The Sony has a big shutter lag. Both are pretty bad at flash photography.

 

You can probably adapt the Sony tele adapter on the Canon but then your image quality will go down. So if your idea is to use the tele lens on the 710 rather than the H2. H2 should give better images.

What is your shutter speed? You might be in high speed sync mode. That will take more power than regular sync.

I got to disagree with the consensus here. If you want to take pictures of children especially of them doing stuff, playing sports or whatever you will want to get an autofocus camera with a good zoom 70-200. The Leica R lacks in these two areas.

 

I'll return it, say thank you to your parents and get a Canon, Nikon "prosumer" digital SLR or if you want to stay with the Leica brand you can purchase the Leica Digilux 3. The Dlux 3 the OP has is a point and shoot camera.

 

The R9 is niche camera for people who like that kind of photography. Unlike a digital camera, a film camera is just a light box. As much as Leicaphiles don't like to admit, a 100 dollar Canon Rebel film camera with a Leica R adapter will take identical pictures as a R9. R9 has some features that are lacking in the Rebel but for a person just starting out. The differences in image quality are not that great especially if their film processed by the local drug store and the film is scanned using consumer equipment.

 

If you want wide in a digital you can purchase a Canon 5d for half the price of the R9.

Pattern matrix is same as color matrix. Each camera manufacturer has their own terminology for metering scenes based on patterns. Nikon calls their system Color 3d Matrix Metering II and Canon calls their system Multiple-Zone Evaluative Metering, for simplicities sake when embedding information into the EXIF portion of a file Nikon simplifies it and calls it pattern metering.

Picasa opens Nef files. Depending what your needs are it may be good enough.

It's probably safe but since it doesn't have any manual controls and is not compatible with iTTL its utility is limited.

No they won't work on the D50 you need to keep it to 2b and lower to maximize compatibility. This will be the case until Nikon updates the firmware so it will be compatible with SDHC cards.

It's not true. Look in your weblogs or their email header you should see an address that originates from Nigeria.

"?How fast a lens focuses has no bearing whatsoever on how accurately a lens focuses, and certainly wouldn't be a factor in portrait work."

 

If you are using the camera in continuous focus mode then it would have a bearing.

 

The two prime lenses are slow focusing and movement from the subject when shooting wide open may make the image not as sharp.

 

How fast a lens focuses has to do with how the lens is geared, how fast the lens is, if the lens is internal focus, the focal length of the lens, camera body sensors, camera body motor.

 

All that being said you probably won't find a faster auto focusing lens than that 28-70.

Nikon lenses that say AF-I will also autofocus with the D40 series.

The G9 has a reach of 200mm equivalent with IS. To get that with the D40 you need at add another 250 dollar lens.

They cost the same you can get a D40 at Costco for 500 dollars.

You don't need a prosumer built camera. A lot of professionals use Canon 5ds and they are not built as well as the Nikon D200.

 

I have seen studios that use Rebels and the pictures it turns out are good.

 

I went to a wedding once with two photographers. One was using two Canon 30ds the other was using the D50, D70. Results from the Nikons were much better not because of the camera body. But because the photographer was better.

 

You are better off having 3 D70s than 1 D200 but that's just me.

Problem with those Sandisk cards is that even legitimate dealers get fake ones. There was a story where a big box office supply store had a bunch of fake Sandisk cards.

 

Also another caveat is that there are stores that sell under the Amazon umbrella which are not too reputable.