New Gear From Nikon

Today Nikon announced the arrival of the new D700 as well as an update to their flagship speedlight, the SB900! There's been a lot of hype surrounding this new camera since it will basically be a D3 in the body of the D300. The price will be somewhere around $3000 which is $2000 less than the D3 and $1200 more than the D300. The D700 is FX which stands for full-frame and includes some new features that the D3 doesn't even have.

For all the info, click on the links above for the respective pages on the Nikon website.

More Interesting Places

This blog is all about us becoming better photographers and getting better pictures. And although most of the time that means talking about technique, equipment, etc., today it's about something that is way easier to understand. I've read in more than one photography book that "if you want to more interesting pictures, put your camera in more interesting places."

It sounds so simple, but how often do we go somewhere with for sole reason of taking great pictures? I know that it's hard enough to travel, especially with kids and the cost, but if we are to be better photographers, we need to take pictures of the beautiful and interesting places that God put on this earth.

So... I'm am going to start planning at least one international and one national photo trip each year. No, I haven't told Brooke yet, but I think she'll go for it... maybe. But until she says no, here's the details... this year I will start with just a national trip sometime in the late fall. It will be a short trip to somewhere in the north east where the colors are gorgeous that time of year and the pictures will be the kind of pictures you can only take in that area at that time of the year. So if you are interested in taking a 3-day trip with me this fall with the sole purpose of taking great pictures, please email me or comment here and I'll let you know when I nail down the specifics. This could turn out to be a really fun group that has the two trips to look forward to each year!

I'll leave you today with three pictures:


This is a port on the coast of Honduras.


I took this in the jungle in Ecuador.


Machu Pichu in Peru.

Color to Black & White DVD

This week I purchased a DVD from KelbyTraining called "Color to Black and White Artistry" featuring Katrin Eismann. I've only watched the first three segments, but I've already learned a lot and can tell this will be well worth the money. Here's a picture I transformed into black & white after watching just the first couple of sessions:



I'm looking forward to watching the rest of the DVD and getting a great black and white picture for this week's assignment. Here's a link to the DVD if you are interested.

Take Your Camera With You

No matter what kind of camera you have, it will do you no good if you don't have it with you. How many times have you said, "I wish I had my camera!"? I've been trying to remember to take a camera with me when I leave the house each morning, and yesterday was one of the mornings that I remembered. I left work to go meet Brooke and the kids for lunch and was a few minutes ahead of them when I noticed this church. I pulled over, got out with my camera, and got this shot:



Not the best picture I've ever taken, but definitely a "keeper" that I would not have gotten if I didn't have my camera.

As soon as I saw how the picture turned out, I knew I had today's blog, so what did I do last night when we went to dinner? That's right! I left my camera at home, and coming home from dinner there was a beautiful full double rainbow in the sky and all I could do was look at it. Take your camera with you!

Kids Assignment

I tried to setup a shoot last night for my kids outside in the front yard. I wanted to sit them on the lawn mower because... it just sounded kind of fun. Anyway, I got a couple of lights set up on stands, took a couple of test shots, and then it started to rain! So I rushed Ainsley out there and put her on the mower and got a few shots off before I pulled everything back inside. Here's the keeper:



I didn't have time to take a setup shot, but basically I just had one SB800 on each side of the camera aiming right at Ainsley.

So... next week's assignment?

--Black & White--

You can either take the image using your monochrome setting in your camera or use a post-processing technique to change it to black & white. See you next week!

Water Bottle Shot

I hadn't taken a picture in almost a week and was wanting to do something creative last night. I had remembered an assignment from the Strobist website that I had seen many months ago but had not ever tried. The assignment was to pretend you had gotten the job to shoot an ad for a bottled water company, and of course, you had to use off-camera flash. We had a bottle of Dasani in the house so I thought I'd give it a go.

I'll tell you what I did and then show you the result:

I taped four pieces of white card stock together to make my seamless background. I took the glass from a picture frame in the house and set it on the "seamless". I placed the water bottle on the glass which gave me the reflection I was looking for. I set up an SB800 just to the left of the bottle and fired it at the background behind the water bottle. I then took another SB800, placed it to the right of the bottle, and bounced it off the ceiling. I used my 60mm Macro lens on a tripod to get the shot. Oh yeah, I also used a water spray bottle to fake a condensation kind of look on the bottle. It was fun and really didn't take too long. I added some text in Photoshop to complete the ad. Here's a setup shot:



and here's the final result:



If you feel like doing the assignment, please come back and post a link to your shot so we can all see it.

Weddings

I've been to two weddings the last two weekends and didn't take one picture! That's right, two weekends ago I was the best man at a wedding in Nebraska, and this past weekend, I officiated a wedding in Nashville. I had a great time at both and of course I was watching the photographers like a seeing if I could learn anything from their approach while I was performing my duties.

So I'll get out and shoot some tonight and I'll have something that has to do with photography for you tomorrow. Until then, check out the Creative Photography Book website. It has a ton of great information in it. I'm certain you will learn something.