aaron l

<p>Get an 810/800 whichever. It's more capable.</p>

<p>Get FX unless you shoot wildlife. I have both and love my FX.</p>

<p>Nikon was always good about providing somewhat and very specialized products. For a long time, they seemed to get away from that, competing in the general market place, with little differentiation. Now, it seems they've gone back to their roots in a big way, providing something that no one else has. Perhaps someone can figure out a new and unique way to use this camera that'll blow the doors off photography. Or at least make it more interesting.<br> <a href="http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1120493-REG/nikon_1553_d810a_dslr_camera_body.html/BI/19632/KBID/12177">B&H Photo already has a page up to purchase it here</a></p>

<p>Mike - you might be amazed how much better the D810/D750 is compared to the D300s. Unless you're shooting far away animals, the D810/D750 will blow away your D300s in everything but shooting speed. I still can't believe how much better my D800 is.</p>

<p>I use the camranger on fashion/model and architecture shoots all the time. For model shooting, it allows me to show the client/art director exactly what I'm shooting so she can see if things are progressing toward their vision. I don't have to offer them to look at the back of my camera - dorky & awkward. Instead, they get a full screen view (I use my laptop) so they can zoom in 1:1 and see if everything is sharp, the composition is correct, models facial expression, etc.<br> For architecture, I can leave the camera in one place and make lighting adjustments and test them out on the spot. I don't have to walk back and forth across a big room/down/up stairs to see how my lighting is progressing. It saves me countless hours and lets me crank out my shots.<br> If my D800 had built in WiFi and an iphone app that offered me all the controls, then I wouldn't have to use it. Every so often the USB3 on my D800 gets a little loose or something and the link drops but it comes back.<br> I know other shooters who do awesome selfies fly fishing in morning shots with it. The only thing you can't do is focus point select & there are ways around that. Zoom control - of course not. There's no power zoom on any nikon DSLR.<br> Please, don't buy it or you'll be more competitive. Haha.</p>

<p>I hope you bought a few new hard disks to store your D800 shots. My last weekend's shoot produced 400 shots which ate up 16GB, shooting RAW+14bit+lossless compressed.<br> I'm blown away by my D800 every time I use it but the one niggle is the focus - give me more cross points, Nikon. I'll happily pay more. It's just not as accurate as I want/need with D lenses.</p>

<p>The lens fine tuning does make a difference. My 80-400 on a D800 shows a consistent focus error, so I have to fine tune that lens. At least we're in the digital era where you can check this instantly rather than waiting 2 hours for your slides to be developed.</p>

<p>Yes, the camera will only record to the computer using LR. If you want simultaneous recording, you can use a Camranger.<br> I love using LR to shoot with. You can also save the files to a network drive and have your other computer running LR automatically & continuously sync from that folder, too. It works well.</p>

<p>You can use your camranger and lightroom to do this. Shoot on RAW+JPG(small). The JPGs will be transferred over to the PC and you can set Lightroom to look in the folder that you have the camranger program dropping the photos. Then program LR to watch and continuously import pictures from that folder.<br> Then you can download the RAW later. The D800 files are too big, so the camranger can't do the full JPG let alone the RAW files. Hopefully you shoot 14-bit lossless compressed. The files are just too big. I've used this method with great success.<br> The eye-fi card isn't that great but YMMV.</p>

<p>I love my Pocketwizard TT5 with the SB-800's. What a combo. Complete CLS control but with RF. And the MiniTT1 interface is super fast to change power on 3 different channels. I wish I'd bought them years ago.</p>

<p>Hook up to the HDMI out. I've used this and it works great.<br> Also, get yourself a Blackmagic HDMI to Thunderbolt so you can capture your shooting video. Then you can produce a video from your presentation and sell it later.</p>

<p>Why doesn't Nikon make every sensor a cross-point sensor. More often than not, the non-cross point sensors just don't work well enough to cut it. I would like not to have to focus and recompose. Not that I'd jump ship to Canon just for that - that'd be ludicrous.<br> I still love my D800, it's still continues to amaze me. Flip out sensors - nice consumer feature, it's just another thing to fiddle and break for me. If I need that view, I use a Camranger.<br> Hopefully this 20mm is much better than my f/2.8 version. I'd never give the f/2.8 version up, though - I can do fixed aperture shooting for time lapses without flicker right out of the gate that the G lenses can't do. Hail the 1980's.</p>

<p>I'm wondering if it's a single error or an endemic problem. Either way, I need to get something I know works, so it's back to the ND400 and another 0.9 filter. Oh well. I'll avoid metalized filters from now on.</p>

<p>I could actually see this effect just by looking into the filter with my eyes. It wasn't the lens at all.<br> So you think it's the dichroic coating that causes this? These are CF bulbs but they're in a glass globe. I looked directly into a bare CF bulb and could see the same thing. I don't see this effect with a tungsten bulb or on a cloudy day. It must be the CF spectrum with the coating. I just don't want to go on an expensive trip only to come back with irreparable issues.Looks like the filter is going back.<br> You're right, Rodeo Joe. I've needed an ND 0.3 or 0.6 for a while, so maybe that'll be a better combination.</p>

<p>Here's another sample.</p><div></div>

<p>Has anyone used the Hoya ProND1000 filter? I just received mine and found it's showing green and purple rings in the image around light sources. I can see it even just looking through the filter not on the camera. This is supposed to be a single piece of glass but the pattern looks like moire. Has anyone else used or seen this? I need a 10 stop filter but am at a loss for something that actually works. I currently have a Hoya400ND and it's pretty good, though it adds a little green cast. I need a darker filter, though.<br> Is there any way to post pictures to show this problem anymore?</p><div></div>

<p>I've been blown away how much better my D800 is compared to the D300s. After I got used to the body, I've not used my D300s since. It's a backup.<br> Ilkka - I've never heard of the 1/500 and up being a problem for VR. Is this a known thing that I just didn't know?</p>

<p>Jochen,<br> Your information makes great sense, thank you. I was thinking of a way to shoot all of the catalog shots at poster quality. But now that you, Rodeo and Cory mention it, catalog material does not have to be poster sized at all. It only has to be 300dpi for the size it's going to be printed on.<br> Yes, it does require some customer education but I think they'll agree there's no reason to pay for poster quality images when they're only going to be printed 2" across.</p>

<p>I've been doing quite a bit of jewelry work and I need to increase my shooting efficiency. Right now I'm doing focus stacking with rings and am using a Nikon D800 with a PB-4 bellows. Although it's helped me improve my depth of field control, it's still not good enough. I can reduce the number of shots I have to stack but it's still stacking. Past f11 on every lens I've tried, the diffraction starts to cut image quality.<br> Is the land of medium format able to capture enough DOF in a single shot to get, say, a whole ring? Are their lenses just that good that you can shoot at really small apertures. I've looked for answers in the Nikon forum but without luck. I just can't imagine someone would shoot an entire catalog like the one in the link and be focus stacking every image.<br> The only other option is to get farther away to increase the DOF but of course resolution craters. I want to pick up more high end clients for major events, but I need to be able to work faster. Does anyone have the magic bullet? What does someone shooting a catalog like this use?<br> http://aaronlinsdau.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/stuller_catalog_sample.jpeg<br> <img src="http://aaronlinsdau.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/stuller_catalog_sample.jpeg" alt="" /><br> I spend huge amounts of time in PS already retouching and that's part of the deal but sometimes the focus stack just doesn't work perfectly. It's far more work and more risk. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!</p>

<p>I found I get a lot more value when I'm out pounding the pavement, talking to store owners, convincing them that their photos are poor and not doing them any favors. They know this but still struggle because they don't realize bad photos make them look bad. The clients I do have who've realized this don't regret what they get from me.<br> If you want to starve, try to be the artist. If you want to be in business, you've got to sales/market roughly 30% of the time. And that'd not putting up a website and hoping. Over the years, my site traffic has slowly dwindled, so it takes a lot more effort. Buy some Google ad listing. I've tried this and didn't have it dialed in, so I'm revamping my campaign. Businesses that succeed have a sales force and when you're a solo photographer, that's you.<br> It's very tough, you have to show them what you can do compared to what their cousin/niece/uncle does. I told my last client, "Your sculptures are $4k-$15k. Do you want your iphone photos to make you sculptures to look like a dime store?" That won him over. He didn't want to feel like his expensive sculptures should be in the dollar store because that's how they looked.</p>

<p>Register your photos every 2 weeks with the copyright office PRIOR to you sending them in for use/publication. It'll cost you $55. You OWN the photos, as you were not working as an employee. If your nightclub owner wants to go to blows, he will lose. You will win. But you must register with the copyright office, otherwise you'll only get what you could have charged, no damages. The magazines calling you know this and assume you've already registered the images and they don't want to cough up $50k to pay you and your lawyer off.<br> Oh, yes, your nightclub owner buddy does NOT own the images.</p>

<p>Don't forget about "charities" - the people working there get paid, the people emailing you get paid, the people processing their paperwork get paid. They're not working for free, why should you? I've had this several times and I ask the person emailing or calling me if they receive a salary/hourly. Invariably it's yes. I ask how much it costs for them to show up to their job - usually nothing save gas and that doesn't count. Then why should I who've invested $1000's in gear and training, who has much more at risk, not get paid.</p>

<p>If I'm cranking, I can do 4 items/hour, all inclusive of stacking, styling and such. It usually takes me an equivalent amount of time to do the editing when I have a large batch. So from first click to finished product is usually 2 items/hour. When I have more time & volume of pieces, I contract out the masking and editing so I can focus on market & shooting.<br> As for the fixing of items, the flaw repair is in items that are made in multiples, so a single item must represent the best possible ideal. Also, jewelry photography shows items far closer than you'd ever see them in real life. If you were to look at a necklace or earring on a person, you'd better know them real well...<br> Do you have any idea what the going rate is for museum presentation?<br> The analysis of cost of income - (living + business) is difficult to analyze because I'm not rolling this full time. If I were booked constantly, I'd like to think the equation would be easy to figure out. My goal is to keep my investment/expenses less than 35% of my total income for the activity. As I've seen with other photographer commentary, any higher than that in expense vs income means I'm doing this as a hobby & will be out of business.<br> My goal is to figure out how to become nearly overbooked. But it's a chicken-egg issue for dialing in the right market price. I've seen other photog's around losing bids because they were way too low and the client tells the higher bidder, "The other guy is too cheap, he/she must not be good."</p>

<p>What is the going rate for high end jewelry and museum-style product/art piece photography? I'm in the Rockies in an art town and have had a few clients who are very happy with my work. However, I want to make sure I'm in line with the market and not leaving too much money on the table or lose jobs as a lowballer to people with equivalent skill and but know what to charge. I'm trying to move up the ladder as quickly as I can come up with clients.<br> One of my girlfriend's friends owns a jewelry company and her LA-based photographer charges her $125/piece. And he didn't retouch the inclusions in the stone nor make sure the background was 255 white, as we could still see some of the paper texture. My first client was at $29/piece finished. I've got more queries in and want to make sure I don't look like a clown.<br> Also, I just picked up a bronze sculpture client and I'm wondering what photographers charge museums and other artists to make photographs of their works on a gradient background.<br> You can see my work here: aaronlinsdau.com/portfolio<br> Technical shooting notes: I'm shooting with a D800 and just (finally) picked up a bellows PB-4 and Nikkor EL 105mm lens for the tilt shift. I was getting tired of stacking 11 shots. I use a 70-300D with a 6T adapter for greater than life size and shoot at no higher than f13. I keep looking at the 200mm macro but I end up in the same focus stacking boat, hence the PB-4. As much as I'd like to buy a Phase 1 and Cambo body, I can't justify it yet. I -really- enjoy the technical and artistic aspects of jewelry shooting, as it's complex and takes a lot of post work to make it look beautiful.<br> All of my clients are small stores with high price tags and want license for the images to use for catalog, web, or whatever. I put an exclusion clause in for billboard images, as that's a different pricing. What it'd be, I'm not sure. I'm after the high end market but am a ways from shooting Breitling or Tiffany's yet.</p>

<p>What are you photographers using for light gate and audio triggering? I was looking at the triggertrap app on the iphone. The dongle looked okay and the price beats the heck out of Nero or any of those other devices. I've had need for triggering with vibration, sound, and light gates but don't have anything but my best guess for firing the camera. I've seen some fun and neat work done that would only work with and audio or light gate trigger, so I'm hoping the combine PN knowledge will lead me in the right direction.<br> I'd rather have a good, dedicated piece of hardware that works rather than relying on the vagaries of my phone, but it's a dollars vs delivery issue, too.<br> Thanks!</p>