SmugMug Gallery Now Online

June 5, 2008 by Peter in Featured, Photography | Leave a comment

I’m happy to say I have finally launched an online photo gallery on SmugMug. Hats off to Duane for doing a lot of research (presented at Northern Voice ’08) and recommending this site. Thankfully I was able to use him as a referral which I think benefited both of us.

SmugMug is a site dedicated to photography and photographs, providing unlimited online galleries for users to show, promote and sell their images. I have created a simple gallery to start – Images of British Columbia – and will be adding more on a regular basis to have what I hope is a decent sized portfolio. Please have a visit and let me know what you think, rank the pictures (this is available) and post comments as well if you like. The official link to my SmugMug homepage is http://gallery.afocusedview.com/ or you can reach me via SmugMug at http://peterandersen.smugmug.com/. Hope to see you there!

The Upgrade

April 1, 2008 by Peter in Photography | 3 Comments

Finally took the leap, although it didn’t take much convincing. Picked up a Nikon D300 on the weekend and have been spending as much time with it as possible ever since.

There are many reviews out there, but the general feeling is that this camera is amazing. From what I know and have seen of it so far, I totally agree. The things that stand out for me at this point are:

Up to 6400 ISO – Clean ISO was almost unheard of in a non-pro camera until this one. The D300 can go to ISO 3200 (that’s about 10 stops of wiggle room in low light, people!) without overbearing noise, which is amazing. It can go to ISO 6400 before it looks like most cameras do at ISO 1600, which is completely amazing.
Focus system – 3 main modes including single, multiple and dynamic areas. The focus is pretty quick (apparently not as fast as it could/should be, which might mean a firmware update someday) and is typically bang on. I can be as selective as 1 of 51 points or as broad as all 51, letting the camera figure out what to focus. Lots of options in between as well, including face and 3D tracking (which I haven’t experimented with yet).
Colour level and saturation – really cranks it up 10 notches from my older camera, I can get eye-popping colour out of it if I want to. I actually set the camera at Vivid and +1 saturation and had to dial it back, it was so strong.
6fps out of the box. That’s fast, for me at least. I can goose it up 2fps more with the optional battery pack as well. I’m not a frequent rapid-fire shooter, but maybe I’ll become one now.
Lossless compression on RAW files. Since I like to use RAW files, this is great. Tons of storage requirements, but I’m willing to give that up for the ability to start with what is basically a pure image.

As for image quality, I have one picture that I can share with you right now. This was taken on the weekend at a Field Hockey tournament. Conditions were early morning, fairly bright sunlight. This image was converted from a lossless RAW file and I actually had to dial down the saturation a bit:

Taken with a Nikon 18-200mm VR lens. Should be noted I did photoshop this a bit, but only for cleanup and retouch of a couple of key points (glare on the plaque, coach’s eyes needing fixing, white flecks on grass, etc.).

Can’t wait to see what else this baby can do. Expect a lot of photos to my Flickr page.

Northern Voice ’08 Begins

February 22, 2008 by Peter in Blog, Computing, Photography | Leave a comment

I will join the no doubt dozens of others that will be blogging about this event. Being my first one, however, perhaps I’ll have a slightly different perspective. Probably just the perspective of wondering where to go and what to do next…

Northern Voice 2008 is a “personal blogging and social media conference” held annually at the UBC Forestry building. It is a opportunity for the community to get together in either break-outs (Friday) or structured presentations (Saturday). Lots of representation from commercial sponsors (including some that I’d rather weren’t… not mentioning any names but they sound like wamcity ;)). Looking forward to Photocamp from Kris Krug, should be today but not sure when. Also very interested in Matt Mullenweg’s presentation tomorrow. Matt is the founder of WordPress and is apparently an excellent speaker.

Like the rest of them, I will try to blog as we go. UBC Wireless is up (I’m there now, duh) so as long as the rest of the posters don’t hog the bandwidth I’ll be able to :p.