Reach

Long time no see and no post, I know. I still owe you part III of my "On Photo Sharing" series, I know. It's in the making (and it will be a killer article of course - grin) but here's an interim post about telephoto lenses and stuff.

"Balance" // D700, 1/250s at ISO720, Sigma 50-500OS at 500mm, f/8, monopod.

Because I'm not really happy with the reach of the 70-300VR on the D700 and because I was curious, I rented the "Bigma" (Sigma 50-500 OS) for a whale watching cruise.

500mm on full frame? Sounds damn good. But to jump to the conclusion of this post right away: I'll rather use the 70-300VR on a crop sensor camera (namely, Shuwen's D90:) instead in the future if I need that reach.

Why? The Bigma is, well... big, of course. And heavy. The build quality is really convincing, and the sharpness at 500mm is good for the "low resolution" 12 megapixel sensor of the D700. But you can't really use it hand-held (and you shouldn't - I think the thing is heavy enough to cause serious strain on the lens mount of the camera, and when you're using that combination handheld, it will happen that you hold it on the camera body - if only for seconds, but still).

I've been using it on my monopod since I don't have a tripod head that suits these telezoom lenses. The monopod is also versatile and unobtrusive enough to use it on a boat, like on our whale watching cruise*. There would have been no way to set up a tripod on that boat.

When the cruise was over, some fellow photographer asked me about the lens. He had the 70-300VR on a D60. It was then that it dawned on me that he had a reach of 450mm (and the 50mm difference between 450mm and 500mm is really neglectible IMHO) with a fraction of the weight.

Yes I know, 300mm is 300mm even on a crop sensor, it's just the angle of view that equivalents 450mm, I could just crop my D700 image, yada-yada-yada... to which I reply: resolution. If I crop that D700 image, I probably end of with an OK 5 megapixel image (that's the resolution of the D700 if the sensor was DX size). Compared to a 12 megapixel image from the D90 that is maybe a little less sharp (at 300mm, the 70-300VR isn't that much of a performer) with some room for cropping, I'll end up with a rather good 6-8 megapixel image. See what I mean?

So for me, who only occasionally makes wildlife photos that need these long zoom lenses, it really makes more sense to use the slow and lightweight 70-300mm on the 12 megapixel crop sensor instead of the slow and heavy 50-500mm on the 12 megapixel full frame sensor. (And I didn't even mention the money.) Use the latest Nikon body like the D7000 with it's excellent high ISO image quality, and it's even less of a question for me.

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*) it attracted enough attention for the captain of the boat to ask if I would share the photos with him.

New Slideshow monstrosity on Blogger

Blogger has just rolled out a new "feature" that severly interferes with the way I'm displaying photos both here and on my main website. They're using their own, proprietary "lightbox" for displaying embedded photos all of a sudden. No announcement on the official Blogger blog on that, I stumbled over it by chance after posting a new photo. Way to go. The only coverage is on the Google Operating System blog, where I just vented in a heartily "how the hell do I turn this shit off?" comment.

I don't know what the folks at Google/Blogger are thinking when they introduce a feature like this without a way to turn it off. I don't know how many photo blogs where authors spent a good deal of time on the fine-tuning of the design they've just broken.

A couple of weeks ago, they announced "You can do amazing things with Blogger" on the offical Blogger blog ("Blogger Buzz") - I was hooked, and decided to use Blogger for my main website because of that very article.

And now they're breaking the user experience with that "feature" (just look at the artist pages on http://www.pinchgallery.com for example - images open in their own, stylish, designed lightbox, and under that, the rather bland Blogger lightbox opens. What a mess!

I hope this is just a glitch. Or maybe I should be looking for a hosting platform that leaves me in full control, instead of being exposed to the randomness at Blogger. Yes, I'm seriously pissed off.

UPDATE: here's the "main" thread in the Blogger help forums where A LOT of people complain about that new feature already, want it rolled back, and the Blogger folks get a (IMHO well-deserved) verbal beating.

UPDATE 2: in the thread mentioned above, on page 5 of the discussions, user "Bonjour Tristesse" posted a fix that works for me and does not break my existing Lightbox2 image presentation.

UPDATE 3: in what appears to be a very Google-typical move, after all the protest in the help forums over the weekend, Google officially announced the new feature on the Blogger Buzz blog as if nothing had happened, and nothing was wrong with it. Congratulations.

UPDATE 4: There's an announcement from Brett of the Blogger team in the forums, posted 21-Sep-2011, that they will roll back the feature and "make improvements". Whatever that means (no mention whether it will be able to turn it on/off on a per post basis, or how, what, etc.). We'll see!

Mashup

EDIT: Outdated. Didn't really work out too well in the long run. The new site runs Wordpress.

Blogger + Lightbox2 + jQuery + Picasa Web Albums API + FotoMoto = http://www.alex-kunz.com

In the past couple of days and weeks, as I've been sharing photos on Google+, I've removed some of the pages, information and functionality from this blog to my new website above. This blog will remain the channel for my photo tech and philosophy posts, I will eventually move it so it's a subdomain of the new domain.

The new website is still a work in progress and probably requires quite some more attention, especially design-wise, but I'm quite happy with the result so far. Feedback is welcome, of course.

What made me choose the combination of these free tools is not the fact that it is free, but that they fit me best. Long-time readers of my blog know that I've been looking for a good solution to present a portfolio and offer prints for quite a long time. With the combination of the tools I listed above, I have an easy to maintain site (I only have basic HTML knowledge and don't see myself hiring a programmer/designer at the moment:-) with an excellent WYSIWYG editor, the least redundancy (I share images on Google+ and use these very images for the portfolio pages and the "Recent" blog section), and a lot of freedom to customize easily.