juhaniv

<p>Like others have already stated, there are Nikon bodies that give better results @ ISO3200 than the D90. However, I have succeeded getting quite decent photos with D90 @3200 when exposure has been right on, or slightly over and then corrected in NX2. High ISO and under exposure is the worst combination.<br>

You can to try to play with the noise cancellation parameters in NX2 to get the best possible results.</p>

<p>Happy New Year to all. I did not see any Santa photos yet so here is one. (And thanks Santa for the SB-900 - it works great!)</p><div></div>

<p>Take a plastic bag with you and when you return put the cold camera into the plastic bag before entering the warm and humid room or car. Seal the bag and do not take the camera out until it has warmed up back to the room temperature. This will prevent excessive condensation and possible damage to the camera due to that.<br>

I have been taking plenty of photos (like this: http://www.jv-photos.net/?p=590) in -24 to -30 deg C and I have not had any problems with camera other than the short battery life as mentioned earlier.</p>

<p>You mention color banding as one of the problems, but I did not see that in the sample picture. However, I do get rather serious banding on my monitor whenever I have very smooth color/luminosity gradients in my photos. In my case I'm pretty sure that those artifacts are created by my monitor, which has a TN type LCD panel. I suspect that the only remedy for those banding problems is to buy a better (and about 3x times more expensive) ISP panel monitor.<br>

Can you try a simple test with photoshop: Create an empty white image and then draw a large circular gradient going from pure black to white. Do you see smooth transition from black to white? I get rather horrible circular bands with that test.</p>

<p>Your sample picture had quite bad compression artifacts, but I do not know if that happened in the conversion to png or did it come out as such from the camera. Have you tried shooting raw? That one should be free of compression artifacts and you can decide in the post processing how much compression is tolerable for you.</p>

<p>Did you get similar (bad) results with the supplied Epson profiles, or did this problem occur only with custom profile? Are you using Mac or Windows? I have seen in some Epson printer reviews (other than 3880) commenting on double profiling in Mac under certain conditions. (http://www.northlight-images.co.uk/reviews/printer/epson_sp_7880.html - Search for 'A Mac only problem/fix')</p>

<p>Good Wednesday morning!<br>

My photo was taken last July in Paris. D700, 24-70 @70mm.</p>

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<p>I have occasionally had problems in getting my SB-600 to wake up with Alkaline batteries, but with rechargeable batteries it wakes up every time. I have no idea why the problem is that way - based on the voltages you would think Alkalines are more reliable.</p>

<p>http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/photoshop/upgrade/</p>

<p>I have had very little use for the 24mm AF-D after I bought the 24-70. Image quality of 24-70 is much better. 24mm is softer at larger apertures and it produces flare much more than the 24-70.</p>

<p>I just did my first dancing shoot in the Finnish championship event. It was a bit more difficult that I anticipated and I got only small percentage of keepers. I have some of the keepers in my gallery. A few observations I did:<br /> Competitive dancers moved pretty fast - I needed 1/200 speed to get reasonably sharp photos. In your case, maybe the movement is slower since it is not a competition? In my case the floor was fairly well lit and I was in the ISO 2000-3200 range at f/5.6<br /> I used 80-200 f/2.8 of full frame body and it was perfect focal range for my event. It may be a bit longish on a crop body, but maybe ok.<br /> If you have a monopod, take it with you. It will work great with the rotating tripod mount on the 80-200 lens.<br /> If you can set up the SB-600 to the side of the floor some distance away from your camera, I would consider triggering it remotely with CLS.</p>

<p>I believe it is an internal reflection inside your lens. The bright light coming through the tree branches causes some reflections in you lens and/or filter. Removing filter from the lens (if you are using one) may help, but may not remove it completely.</p>

<p>Good Wednesday evening!<br /> So may great photos again. Few that I liked the most:<br /> Narayan - Great, surreal feeling in the picture<br /> Dieter - great capture of the hawk<br /> Mike C - those Giraffes are hilarious<br /> Oskar - amazing macro shot<br /> My photo was taken last saturday. It was -22C here, but someone seemed to think it was a perfect day for a swim in the local river.<br /> D700, 24-70mm @29mm, f/5.6</p><div></div>

<p>A few comments based on a five minute test drive:<br>

Fairly easy to navigate and nice looking pages.<br>

I guess you are not planning to have much text there, as there is very little room for that. In my view this was more like a photo gallery rather than a blog. In a blog I would expect to have some kind of a diary type entries that gets updated every now and then and it would be easy to see what has been added each day. Well, I'm not sure if that aspect is important if your main goal is just to present your photos.<br>

A few points on functionality/usability:<br>

- 'contact' link does nothing<br>

- clicking one of the pictures on front page takes you to some location of some album, but random visitor will not easily see where he/she ended up. It would be more logical if you ended up into first photo of some album instead of last or something in between.<br>

- From the larger photo view mode you should get to album view mode by clicking the large picture instead of having to find the album name in small font in upper left corner. Now if you click the large photo, it apparently does something on the background, but nothing really changes on screen.</p>

<p>There is some warmer water led to the river about a mile upstream and they keep the river open just for the swimmers by pumping "warmer" water from the bottom of deeper part of the river. Water surface was just beginning to form some ice but the stream kept it moving fast enough so that it could not form a firm ice cover.<br>

I think the water could not have been warmer than 1-2 degrees C.<br>

As strange as it may sound, this a favorite free time hobby for many people here. They do not stay in the water for a long time, just long enough to get the blood circulation accelerated. However, this was the first time I saw they do it also at this cold temperature.</p>

<p>It was a bit cool day here in Oulu (Finland) today. I was taking photos at the Oulu river, but I had to get back home when my fingers started to get cold. On the way back I realized I should not be complaining about cold weather - it's all about attitude: http://www.jv-photos.net/?p=431</p>

<p>NX2 is certainly not the speediest photo editor or RAW converter you can get, so I would not assume that it will get any faster when you get the licensed copy of it. I'm running NX2 on a 3.16 GHz dual core Win7 x64 with 8Gig of RAM, and NX2 is still slow, if I do lots of edits into one picture.<br>

Nx2 has its limitations, but I like it's RAW conversion and some of the features such as B&W conversion. When I had only NX2 and Elements, I used NX2 90% of the time. Now I have CS4, and NX2 gets used mostly for raw conversion anymore.</p>

<p>I do also very similar photography as you do. I have two son's playing soccer, and I do take quite a bit of photos of them. I have D700, so I don't have the 1.5 crop factor as you do. I use mostly the old 80-200 AF-D and sometimes 28-70 AF-S from behind / sides of the goal.<br>

I have been thinking of getting 1.4TC for the 80-200, as it is a bit too short if the action is on the far end of the field. With D300 crop factor I think 70-200 would be very useful. Of course, you still would not be able to cover the whole field from one spot, but you would easily cover half of the field.<br>

So, I would say it is not a bad choice at all.</p>

<p>Update: It seems that the new display driver did not solve the problem.</p>

<p>Thanks for the good ideas. My video card is NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GT. I assume it should be recent enough to handle CS4. Driver is dated 14-May-2009 and I could not find more recent 64bit W7 driver from the net.<br /> Well, maybe I need to wait untill they release a new driver for 9800GT and give that a shot. Luckily this problem does not happen so often that it would make CS4 unusable - it is mostly an annoyance.<br /> Update a few minutes later:<br /> Windows "Update Driver" -function was able to find an updated driver - dated 27-Sep-2009. I installed it a minute ago. Lets see if that makes a difference.</p>

<p>I have been using Photoshop CS4 in my Windows 7 64bit PC for a couple of weeks now. I have encountered one problem with the mouse and I wonder if anyone else have seen it. I'm not sure if the problem is in CS4 or is it in the mouse driver.<br>

Occasionally CS4 seems to loose track of mouse coordinates and paints to totally random location in the image. Let's say that I'm painting over a mask on some effect layer - the painting brush cursor behaves normally, but at some point the painting starts to appear in a location that is nowhere near the cursor in some totally unpredictable location. Cursor does not move erratically - just the location of paint effect is wrong.<br>

Has anyone else seen this behavior? Any ideas what might be causing it. I could not find with Google any info that might be related to this.</p>

<p>Good Morning and Happy New Year. My photo is from last week studio shoot with my son. This was the first time for him in a studio, and first time I was setting up the lights all by my self. Nikon D700, ISO 200, 28-70 @ 52mm, f/5.6.</p>

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<p>I have been building my Photo website/blog with WordPress for the past few days now ( http://www.jv-photos.net/) Wordpress is definitely customizable and you can build static pages as well - not just the blog. There are plenty of plugins that can be used for image viewing and galleries, but you may need to do some manual tweaking to get the look you want.<br>

I had no prior Wordpress experience, and it took a few evenings to build my site, but I probably did many things the hard way.</p>

<p>I think you should consider Capture NX2 for RAW conversion and editing. It has the best RAW conversion for Nikon .NEF files. You will also have the same camera controls in the Capture NX2 than what you have in the camera. Edior is quite sufficient for fairly extensive editing.<br>

Performance of NX2 is not very good so you may want to have fairly speedy PC or Mac for that. One annoyance is also that it does not have cloning stamp feature - only healing bruch. There is a one month trial version, so you do not need to buy it before you know how well it works for your needs.</p>

<p>I looked at the EXIF data in your sample image and there were two items that could be contributing to softness:<br>

Sample pic was taken at f/2.8, which is the widest aperture for the lens. No lens - pro or consumer grade - will be at its sharpest at wide open. I think the sweet spot for sharpness for f/2.8 lens would be somewhere in f/5.6-f/8 range.<br>

Secondly, the sample pic was taken with 1/20s shutter speed. If taken handheld, it would be very difficult to achieve sharp result with that seepd. Even with tripod, there could be motion blur from the subject movement.<br>

So, I would suggest that try to add some more light, so that you can get reasonable shutter speed (1/100s or so) with f/5.6-f/8. I think you will see a dramatic improvement in sharpness.</p>