Mission peak trekking

Last sunday (10/25/2009) me and shishir vai went for another (we did it the earlier week as well) trekking on mission peak. This time we started to ascend at 5:35AM and reached the top by 7:05AM - one and half hour in total. So after a long time I had the privilege to enjoy the sunrise again. It was beautiful - just beautiful. Though it was pretty early, there were a small crowd of people on top. And I overheard this conversation :D

I was a bit reluctant to take my camera with me (it weighs a lot) but had no regret when I reached the top. Here are couple of pictures that I took -

Modifying Flickr feeds through Yahoo Pipes

Flickr api provides rss feeds which I think is really awesome. I can get all my friends updates right within Google Reader. But there is a caveat, those feeds comes with only small size images. So I searched around flickr api to find feeds with bigger size images - but there were none. But luckily there is yahoo pipes. As the feed already has the image url, I can just change the width and height of <img> attribute and get better images in the feed.

So here is what I got. If you want feeds from one individual, then you can use this pipe (or this pipe) to get feed with larger images. Here is my flickr stream feed. And when I ran through yahoo pipes I got this feed.

I liked this pipe very much. Its simple and basically it can set any flickr stream feeds images to larger images. Now you can pipe feeds from your contacts or from friends & family.

Best place to buy used photography items

If you are looking for used photography items, this is the best place to buy. Why? - cause the rating they uses is pretty strict. I bought several items from here and found items graded lower than they should be. Like new (LN-) items are marked as excellent (EX). So you can blindly keep faith on their grading. The price a little bit high though. But the satisfaction you get from the product - thats worth it.

in reference to: KEH Camera: Used Cameras, Digital Cameras, Film Cameras, Laptop Computers and More. (view on Google Sidewiki)

Fireworks photography

I found it quite hard to take fireworks pictures. When visiting Lake Tahoe over the labor day weekend I suddenly came across the fireworks show near south Lake Tahoe. This was my first time to take fireworks pics. The main problem i faced is its very hard to predict where the main burst will happen. So framing is damn difficult. Next problem is you will want better DOF to get the whole fireworks in focus, I tried with F2.8 but found F8 or higher would be better. So for that you will need some pretty slow shutter-speed. So if you are without a tripod then don't expect to get 'awesome' fireworks pics - though you might get some decent one.

Anyway here are the ones that I got




After searching on internet for fireworks photography, I found these setting. Next time I am gonna try these.

1.
Exposure - Shutter Priority (6/8 sec)
ISO - (upto good level of your camera)
WB - AUTO (shoot raw and you can fix it later if not good)
Focus Length - Manually to Infinity
Extra - Tripod, Shutter Release

2.
Exposure - Manual
Shutter Speed - 6/8/10/15 sec(vary it if you got time)
Aperture - F8/F13.. (might try F2.8 or lower)
ISO - (800+)
WB - AUTO
Focus - Infinity
Extra - Tripod, Shutter Release

Another thing to keep in mind - Fireworks emits heavy light so exposing for long time will overexpose your image.

Geotagging your photo...

I have been searching for program that can geotag my pictures based on a gpx file. On my android phone I have this awesome app called 'MyTracks'. It records GPS tracks and let you view live data. The sweet part is this data can be exported as gpx file. There are few softwares that lets you geotag your photos based on this. I am using Jeffery Friedl's GPS plugin for Adobe lightroom. I like this plugin cause it doesn't hamper the workflow of post processing. And it works like a charm. There is also Geotag, a java software which lets you do the same thing.

I have geotagged my team offsite pictures. Here is the result.

Google Reader team on a boat trip..

On september 2, we, all the members of Google Reader team went to a boat trip in San Francisco Bay area. This was our official team offsite and it was great fun. We played this song several times and I think its still circling inside my head. Surprisingly the weather was too good that day, warm and sunny - not like typical San Francisco weather. It was almost 2 and half hours journey. Here is the route map generated from my android phone.

As usual, didn't miss the chance to take few shots. Here is the album.

Photography Experiments : Water droplets

I haven't done any shooting or experiments lately. Got my tripod few days back. I bought Benro C-258 M8 and Benro B-3 Ballhead. So far I am satisfied with the tripod.

Yesterday I tried to take a picture of water droplets. Here are the pics:





I had to set the focusing manually cause the lens was having very hard time focusing on the droplets. Strobist info: I used white background, SB-600 at 24mm, 1/16th power placed 1 feet away from the drops. And It was triggered by gadget infinity's cactus v4. Camera's white balance was set to tungsten to get the blue effect.

Update: I tried to describe the whole process here.

Awesome videos on Digital Photography

Here are few great videos on digital photography I found on youtube. These are mostly on off camera flash photography. First one is a video series made by photographer Bert Stephani. Its called the "Confession of a Photographer". Here it goes.



Also check out other videos made by Bert.

The second one is by Mark Wallace of snapfactory.com. This series called "Digital Photography One on One".



You should watch his other videos other videos.

Photographers Legal Rights

I have found a great document on legal rights of photographers. I think every photographer should know whats legal to shot and what not, also whats legal to publish. The document explains what to do if confronted for photography.

Download the flyer from http://www.krages.com/phoright.htm. I think its good to have one copy in your camera bag.

Also read Legal rights of photographers written by Andrew Kantor.

Ebooks on Digital Photography

I have found a good collection of e-books on digital photography. I haven't read all of them. So I can't tell you which one is good and which one is not. I am definitely planning to read few of them - at least the books by famous Ansel Adams. You can download them from here.

If you happen to know any good books on photography, please leave the name in the comment section.

Cleaning my Nikon D40x camera sensor

Today I got my DSLR sensor cleaning kit from copperhill images. Few days back I tested the sensor for dust and I found plenty of them. I never did this before so I was a little bit afraid. But anyway did it. The result is awesome. Almost all the dust are gone. This video helped me a lot. I just omitted cleaning with the old pec pad and the vacuum cleaner. Though I think you should read the instructions carefully given in copper hill images website.

Color Degradation in Adobe Lightroom

Surprise! Surprise. I was totally in dark about this. Nikon's raw format (NEF Files) is proprietary. I didn't know that. Thus Adobe Lightroom couldn't render the images properly. I was so pissed of, I see beautiful color in my camera lcd but when I open it in lightroom, it kind of blurs out. Then I tried to open the file with Nikon's Capture NX. And voila. It renders the images properly. Now I love the options and workflow of Lightroom and I don't want to buy Capture NX (yes, its not free). So what should I do? The gurus here already faced this and they also found the way around. Apparently Adobe released DNG Profilers in their labs. You just have to select the correct camera profile. There is another way to cope with this. Shoot in NEF+JPEG mode. It will eat up your CF card space but you won't have to worry about post-processing that much. As Most of the time I just do cropping. If you need to post process then you have the NEFs as backup.

Here is the comparison with one image which is just coverted to JPEG from NEF by both softs without any edit. Capture NX one resembles the exact color.

Random snaps of flowers

I have got my Nikon D40x almost 3/4 months now. But I haven't done any serious experiments with that so far. However this week I tried to take few snaps around my apartment and my office. Most of them targeted to flowers. Feel free to comment if you like/dislike any of these.

You can see all my flickr pics here.

BTW: Most of the pics taken with the awesome AF-S NIKKOR 50mm f/1.4G lens.