I was pretty disappointed that when I went to the Gasworks Park in Seattle that it was pretty cloudy. I was hoping for a shot across the water of the city. A couple of days later when I saw a break in the clouds, I hopped up and booked it over by bus. It was in the afternoon, so it wasn’t the best light, but I had Kerry Park that I was going to that evening. (I blogged about the other day.)
Now that we have a raid array created, we are going to create some virtual drives. Why virtual drives? Well, we have one large terabyte drive right now, and if we just put folders in there, it can quickly get cumbersome. You have no control on size of those folders, and permissions can be more difficult. And if you try to share this drive, you can’t assign different drive letters in windows to different folders, just one to the drive. One other issue is file system. I am going to use just a basic file system here, but in the past I have created different file systems based on the type of use ie. large video files, small text files, etc. Making those decisions is beyond the scope of this tutorial, and I have decided that for my purposes now, it doesn’t matter that much. You can decided differently.
What we will discuss is using LVM. This enables you to set up virtual drives that can contain different file systems, and that can be grown and shrunk (usually) to fit the space needs of the system. We will look at maintenance of these file systems at a later tutorial. Here we will create a backup, and a pictures virtual drive. We will not use the full terabyte of space, so that we can grow these as needed, or add another for say music at another time.
I will once again be doing this on an ubuntu system, but the use of these tools is fairly standard across linux distributions.
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This caught me by surprise. I was reading pixelated image about creating a “Oh Sh!t Kit” and he talked about having replacement clock batteries. For some reason, I had never thought about it. When I pulled the battery out of my old D40, or my current camera, the D90, part of the display is still powered, and the the setting and clock don’t get reset. Obviously there must be another battery.
First thing I did was try to look at the manual. I found a PDF of the D90 manual that you can download here. I found on page 28: 
¬†”The camera clock is powered by an independant, rechargeable power source, which is charged as necessary… two days of charging will power the clock for about 3 months.”
 This sure sounds like it is not user replaceable. So I did some more searching, and found this flicker D90 group discussion about his clock battery dying, and no talk about how to replace it.
I then found this Nikon support entry on replaceing the battery in the D3/D3x. Those cameras use the CR1616 “watch” type battery. That is not a rechargeable type battery. Is the D3 the only Nikon camera that has a field replaceable clock battery?
So good news D90 (other Nikons ???)¬†owners, one less think to pack in the Oh Sh!t Kit, but bad news in that if it does die, you will likely say more than “Oh Sh!t”.
I own the Tamron 17-50mm f/2.8 lens. If you follow this blog, you will know that I had to send it in for service a little while back. I had issues with focusing, and some parts coming loose. While I had the lens in for service, I had to rent the Nikon 17-55 f/2.8 when I had a wedding to shoot. This is a bit of a comparison after using both. Not scientific at all.
First of all, I bought the Tamron because it was $450. The Nikon is $1230. A bit of a difference. I now know what that money gets you. The Nikon is a lot heavier. That could be a plus or a minus depending on what you like. The weight is because the lens has more metal in it. The lens I rented was very much a rental. It was banged up pretty good, but still worked. With the Tamron I am always very careful, and one of the issues I had was that the front ring where the hood snaps on was loose. You could wiggle it.
Sharpness is good across both lenses. The Tamron appears to be fine now that I have it back. I was never really happy with, and it seemed to get worse until I sent it in. Now I have no issues. I have not tried to examine sharpness across all apertures, and I don’t have comparison pictures, but I am happy with it now. I shoot a lot with this lens at 2.8, and it seems just fine. (My Nikon 70-200 f/2.8 feels sharper, but I haven’t¬† tried to collect proof.)
Focus speed is a world of difference. Night and day. You can’t hear the Nikon, and can’t tell when it is focusing (except for the odd time that it hunts, but so do all lenses). The Nikon seems instantanious. The Tamron is slow. I don’t really care about the noise. It doesn’t bug me. But it means that I can tell how long it takes for the lens to focus. It almost always turns to get close and then a few smaller micro adjustments. I have very bad luck with moving kids. That can be an issue with any lens, but I fell it is an issue with the Tamron.
So, it really depends how you want to use this lens. If you want a fast zoom lens (aperture) to use on a small light weight body, and price is a concern (when is it not), then this is a good option. If you want to shoot sports and moving kids, I am a little unsure on giving it the thumbs up. I do shoot my own kids with this lens, but not with great results. I try to shoot with my 70-200 if I am after moving things, but that is a much longer focal length, and a much heavier lens.
For me, I am considering replacing this with the Nikon version. This issue really holding me back right now is the full frame one. If I am going to move to a full frame camera, and I want to eventually, then the 17-55 will not work on those cameras. I will keep my D90 as a backup, so maybe it is a good lens to keep with the camera. In the meantime, I will have a better lens. Doing it over, I would probably try to save for the Nikon. Paying double (or more) seems like a Nikon Tax, but there really are good reasons that it should be priced more. It’s just whether you think the durability, the weight, and the focus speed are deal breaker issues for you.
One of the places I really wanted to get to take a night shot from was up on Beacon hill. I had seen another shot on Flickr that I wanted to try to get, and that was the location. I wasn’t sure where exactly to go. I managed to con Alison, my wife’s cousin to drive me up there one night. Again, I wasn’t completely sure where we were going, so we had to drive around a bit. We finally found Jose Rizal Park. I climbed up on a big metal storage box of¬†some kind, and set up my tripod. I was trying to get higher than the trees that are in the lower right of the picture that¬†hide some of the car light trails.
 
This one turned out ok. I like the look of the clouds and the Quest Field with the green light on the left. The pictures I took earlier didn’t have this green light to them.
Well, this is not quite the end of the story. In order to get my camera on a tripod, I had to remove my BlackRapid strap that screws onto the bottom of the camera in the tripod hole. I set it down on the ground as the light was disappearing. And left it.
David duChemin of pixelatedimage got into it on Twitter (check  his twitter stream:http://twitter.com/pixelatedimage ) yesterday. This is what he posted there to start things off:
Just saw this quote: “To really be a photographer, you have to be a business…” BALONEY! Please discuss…
The issue in question was what makes a “real” photographer. There was lots of lively conversation if you can call it that on Twitter. It is really hard to follow though unless you can see all the 140 character thoughts from everyone chiming in. So, to clarify, David has a post today to clarify his position: A Question of Definition.
I couldn’t agree with him more. Why we need to tie money to art/sport/craft/activity to legitimize it is very frustrating. I realize that it comes from people that get paid for their craft/art wanting to separate themselves from others, but the only thing that is separating them is the money. As a people that buy¬†goods and services, watch actors, hire¬†trades people,¬†and buy art, we get so caught up in the “If it costs more, it must be better” crap.¬†People that do amazing things or create amazing images should be able to charge more for their work/art, but price is not the sole indicator of the value of that work.
It seems like all my pictures from Seattle have the Space Needle in them. There are quite a few. I went out at night to capture the city several times, and it is hard to take a picture without getting it. The city lights the tower quite well, so it kind of begs to have pictures taken of it.
This time, I was specificly going for the typical Seattle Space Needle shot. The location for this is Kerry Park. This is so popular a place, that there were 6 or 7 other tripods there the night I was there.
So here are the “postcards” that I got from the trip.
 
This post is all about the space needle, and reflections. Annie and I were out walking through the Seattle Center area when I noticed the reflections on the side of the Music Experience building. Annie had the idea to sit on the wall and get her with her reflection.
I also noticed that the reflection of the Space Needle was coming in really clear, so I posed her to get the best reflection.
I had actually been here earlier and was looking for reflection shots, but this was later in the day and the light was a bit better. It was a better angle for the reflection.
North of downtown Seattle, across Lake Union is Gasworks Park. The place is pretty cool. The was a place where gas and oil were refined and separated. This is the main boiler.
What’s cool is that someone had the sense to preserve all this old machinery and turn it into a park. It is a great place to walk around and take pictures. I bet you could get some cool pictures here in the evening. (I don’t remember when this park closes)
There is a lot going on around the Space Needle in Seattle. There is the Music Experience, the Science Museum, a Children’s Museum, a concert hall, and amusement park, and (probably some other stuff I missed) this great big monster fountain. Taken from the right angle, you can see it and the Space Needle in the same picture.
One of the cool things about this fountain is that you can go right up to it. It is not in the middle of a lake like most fountains. It is at the bottom of a big concrete bowl. It looks like a crater from when an alien ship landed from outer space, and they turned it into a fountain. Kind of Men in Black was my thinking. Anyway, kids loved this fountain.
This is the blog of Christopher Ward. He is a Canadian currently living in Minneapolis. Chris is a photographer and computer consultant.
You will find posts about tech frustrations, and details about his passion for photography. See you around.
For info on a photographer for weddings, kids, family and senior portraits, please see Christopher Ward Photography.com
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