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Old style star washer

I have had a black rapid strap, model RS-2 for a while now. I was really excited to get one, and loved it but…  Were you expecting a but? It wasn’t perfect. I loved the innovative way the camera hung at my side, hanging there waiting for the moment that I needed to quickly raise it to my eye. But, I had a few complaints I discovered after using the strap for a while. This is a bit of a RS-2 to RS-7 comparison. (Keep with with me, the complaints are all fixed)

• I didn’t like the connector thingy. (Technical term) It was just too bulky. It looked like a good first try from someone welding things together in their garage. It worked, but didn’t look pretty. And I lost mine. Twice. Some people even tried tying their strap with a little make-shift cord connector. That didn’t always work out.
• It was bulky. The strap seemed a little too wide. Too much material. It just felt too noticeable, especially with a jacket on. The model I had also had this whole extra flap that held memory cards, business cards, and had a pocket on it for a cell phone. This sounded good at the time, but just ended up feeling bulky. I felt like the cell phone pocket was right at my chin, like a poor mans hands free phone system. I eventually cut off the extra, but it still seemed a little stiff and bulky.

New Connector

• The strap wasn’t like better backpack straps that are curved to conform to your shoulder a little better. I found it would slip off sometimes too.
• My strap didn’t have a clip to hold the excess webbing strap. That was probably because I cut off part of the padding (the pockets) to make it smaller. It also seemed like it could use another clip to keep the camera from sliding around. If you switched shoulders it seemed like the clip was on the wrong side.
• The connector was completely re-engineered. It now looks very professional, and more importantly, works wonderfully. It is much smaller. It piece that screws into the camera is a much lower profile, and has a piece of rubber on the end. This does two things. Not having the lock nut and instead having the rubber make it more secure, and doesn’t seem to loosen anymore. The lower profile means that you can hold the camera with a portrait grip on it, which really wasn’t possible with the other connector. And last, using the locking mini carabiner allows you to remove the strap if you need to with needing to unscrew the whole thing.
• The new RS-7 strap is thinner. Much better profile, and this one doesn’t have any bells and whistles. Some people might like pockets and stuff on their strap, and they still have models that have them, and an accessory pocket can be attached to the RS-7, but if you don’t want the extra material, you don’t have to have it.

RS-7 vs Modified RS-2

• The new RS-7 is curved. Not by much, but it works. It seems to stay on my shoulder better, feels more comfortable, and seems less prone to sliding off. Seems great.
• This RS-7 is much more finished in every way. No matter which side of your head/shoulder  you wear this strap, it still fits well. There is a new clip that keeps the strap from flapping, and there are two clips that are designed to keep the camera in place, no matter how you wear the strap.

I did say I loved this strap didn’t I? Ok, at first I loved it, then as the issues came up, I stopped wearing it as much. Then the improvements started to come out.

The first strap I had felt like a great idea that was put together in someones garage. functional, but not the best finish. This strap is a whole new level. The straps, buckles, padding, connector, and even what they left off are seem perfect now. If I had to come up with one item for an update, it would be to have the material under the strap to be “stickier”, like a rubber or something that would cling to nylon/rain jackets better. This isn’t as important on a strap you wear across your body, but I sometimes fell it moves a little, and I have to keep putting it back in place.

That’s all I can come up with on the negative side. I love it. If you are replacing your strap, definitely consider this one. I think it’s worth the money.

So I decided to try the HI1.0 ISO setting on my Nikon D90. That is actually ISO 6400. This image was shot without a flash with a Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 at 1/20th of a second. I shot in RAW and adjusted the white balance a bit, and the brightness in Lightroom very slightly. Otherwise, this is the image.

Noise is quite obvious. It actually doesn’t look quite as bad in this little image, so I exported larger ones too, that if you click on the image you will see a larger version. There the noise is even more noticeable. I don’t think I would really want to use this setting. The only reason I even wanted to try it was a friend had taken some at this setting on his Nikon D5000 (about the same sensor) and thought they were fine. Me, not so much.

Now, it was taken while the camera had high ISO noise reduction on. I am wishing now I had taken another with that off for reference. Also, one in JPEG mode with and without it turned on. Sounds like another post.

Ok, I wanted to see if I could make the image usable, so first I ran it through the Nik Define filter within Photoshop. It may be that I don’t know how to use the filter yet (used default settings), or it could be that there was just too much noise, but I wasn’t that impressed. Then I turned it over to Nik Silver Fx Pro. I have used this filter a bit more, and I thought the BW turned out pretty well.

I think it hides the color noise, and looks more like grain than noise now. Maybe usable. At least it allows you to get a shot that you never would be able to get otherwise. Now, to be fair, it was really dark. Only my child’s night light was on. I had a hard time focusing. But the great take away from this is that it would be awesome to take pictures at this ISO, and you can with cameras like the D700 and the D3 versions. I am really starting to like the idea of a full frame camera. Someday…

Well, first go read this post, and if you just bought your camera, I will try to talk you out of buying anything.

So, why do you want a lens? Other than that glass is cool. Are you wanting more reach, to get images of birds in the trees? Are you wanting to take pictures of kids in low light? Would an external flash be better? Would you like something with a zoom, or something with a fixed focal length? Do you have $300, or $3000? Do you know what f/3.5-5.6 means?

You need to be able to answer those questions to make a truly informed decision. Reading the Digital Photography Book (post) by Scott Kelby would help with this too.

Ok, lets take a look at some reasonable (for photography) options.

Nilkon 50mm f/1.8

If you are looking for some “fast glass”, the traditional recomendation is the “nifty fifty.” Fast glass, or a fast lens, is a lens that has a very large minimum aperture size. This refers to a small aperture number, such as f/2.8, or f/1.4. The kit lenses are usually of a variable aperture, meaning they are not constant through out the zoom range. Zoom lenses are usually more expensive to make in a constant aperture, so most people look to get a fast lens with a single focal length. What does this do for us? By “opening up” the lens to a wide aperture, you let in more light, so the shutter speed can be faster when taking available light pictures. Also, your depth of field gets smaller, meaning that the area in the photo that is in-focus is smaller. This can be good and bad depending on the picture¬† you are taking.¬†

Nikon 50mm f/1.4 AF-S

The Nikon 50mm f/1.8 that most people call the “nifty fifty” has been a staple of most photographers, and the price hovered around $120 – $150 depending on where you get it. (amazon) There are a couple of issues with this lens though. First of all, your camera may not work with it. Cameras like the D40, and D3000 do not have a traditional motor drive in the camera body. This means that autofocus will not work with the nifty fifty. I used this 50mm lens manually focusing on a D40 for quite some time. Worked great for flowers, not for kids. You need a AF-S lens in Nikon terms to get auto focus. That means that the lens its self has a motor in it. But, it makes the lens more expensive. Amazon has this version for about $440.¬†

Nikon 35mm f/1.4 AF-S

Problem #2. The 50mm lens is a great lens. It used to be called the “standard lens” and many film era cameras shipped with just this lens (a 50mm). So what’s the problem? Sensor size. If you want to use your new “fast glass” to take pictures indoors without flash, the 50mm¬†can be too long a focal length. You might want to consider the Nikon 35mm f/1.8 AF-S instead. (amazon) ¬†On most digital cameras, the sensor is smaller than a film negative. This makes lenses appear to have a longer focal length, and why the 35mm works better indoors. 35mm x 1.5 = 52.5mm on a APS-C “crop sensor”. (I am not going to get into this anymore today, but there are lots of places to read about this,¬†like¬†here)¬†The good news is that the 35mm lens is cheaper. Amazon has it for about $200.

Nikon 55-200mm f/4.5-5.6

How about if you want to make small, or far away subjects look bigger in the viewfinder? A longer zoom? Or move your feet. Seriously. Many shots can be taken by simply getting closer to your subject. Also, telephoto lenses are not just for “making things bigger”. They also compress the scene. They make the background and the foreground appear closer together. For birds and¬†other critters, you may not be able to get close enough with your feet. If you want a telephoto, you are looking at getting something that zooms to 200 or 300 in a variable aperture, or you are spending really big money.

Some of  you may already have this lens, the Nikon 55-200mm f/4-5.6 AF-S VR. (amazon) Sometimes this lens is bundled in a two lens kit with some cameras. This lens is only $200 Р$250, and for a lens of this price, is really quite good. The VR (vibration reduction) helps to reduce hand shakyness, especially at slower shutter speeds. This was my first lens purchase, and one that I found useful.

What about macro? Fixed focal length zooms? Wide angle? All in one zooms? Take it slow. Learn your camera and the lens you have. See how close¬† you can get with your lens. You can get fairly close “macro-ish” shots with a kit lens. Move your feet and get closer to subjects. The 18mm of most kit lenses is reasonably wide. Learn how to use that. That said, I will tackle some of these options in another post soon.

Nikon 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6 AF-S VR

If you want a little bit more reach, a sharper image, and have some extra money, the Nikon 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6G AF-S VR is considered a very¬†good lens for the money. You can find this item for less than $500. (amazon) ¬†At $500 the cost is getting more expensive, but is still reasonable in the world of camera lenses. I don’t own this lens, but many people I respect have and like this lens.

 

Happy Shooting.

In two weeks I will be at the DLWS in Traverse City Michigan. I am pretty psyched. I picked the location because it was the only event near my birthday they had, and I picked DLWS when I found that two photographers that I read a lot about, Moose Peterson, and Joe McNally would be there.

So, there were a couple of things that I wanted to get. I have been going back and forth on what to do with my Tamron 17-50 f/2.8. In fact, I blogged about that here. I decided that for the trip, I was going to get the Nikon 17-55 f/2.8. Part of my hesitation is when I might move up to full frame, would I still want this lens? Well, I figure that I will keep the D90 as a backup, so I will either need it as a lens for the D90, or I can sell it for not that much less than I paid for it. Now that I have a paying job again, it seemed like a good time to get it.

This lens, and the Nikon 70-200 f/2.8 that I have, both take 77mm filters, so I got a Tiffen polarizer for them (was going to get the Nikon, but the store didn’t carry it), and a Lee 4×6 .9 graduated soft ND that Moose claims to hand hold. I still don’t get that. We go to the trouble of putting the camera on a tripod, using a cable release, and then hold a filter up to the lens? I’ll have to ask him about that.

Last item was the MB-D80 battery grip. I have wanted this for quite awhile for taking portraits when hand holding. Not sure if I really need it now for the trip, but I figured I would get it.

I ended up at West Photo for this stuff. I had intended to order from B&H, because they had the lens for a fair bit less. The other stuff seems comparable, but the Nikon stuff seems to go for less in New York. Well, as luck would have it, both B&H and Adorama are closed for Succoth for another week. I was nervous that even with paying for two day shipping that by the time they open, and get to my order, there might not be enough time to get it to me.

Anyway, I will probably have more on the gear as I use it. Anyone want a very good condition Tamron 17-50 f/2.8?

I am so done with anything to do with hard drives.¬† I am starting to want to stop doing anything that deals with creating files that take up lots of space and need to be backed up. (ie photography) But I know this is just “resistance”. (I have been reading “War of Art”, but that is another post coming up)

I gave up and sent the ReadyNAS back to NewEgg. I spent two long nights fighting with something that I thought was a plug and play device.  First, my drives were not recognized. Actually, the first of the three was, no matter which of the three I put in the first slot. Technically, the other two would appear as functioning drives, but on the volumes tab, where you specify drives, raid settings, and volume info, only the first would appear.

I first tried to upgrade the firmware, thinking there might be something flaky going on there. That took everything south. Couldn’t boot. Then tried to do TFTP boot, and a USB boot, but neither worked. It’s packed up and ready to ship to NewEgg. At least they didn’t give me any hassles. I am getting a replcaement, so the saga will continue.

More like two oops make a not so bad. I brought the removable drive with all my backups to a Geek Squad location inside a BestBuy store. Told them my sob story, and they told me they would fleece me to recover the data. Likely hundreds of dollars. Crap. I didn’t really want to give up on our baby pictures of Kate. The girl said she could plug it in and see what was there. She could see a bunch of home movies, and some empty folders. I was very confused. They must be seeing one of my first formatting/foldering setups I though. I left. Thought I might look for a different recovery place.

I got home, plugged in the drive, and saw what she had seen. Oops. I packed up and brought the wrong drive. Plugged in the second one, and there was the bad one. I decided to look around again. I found a folder called older, looked inside, and saw images from 2002-2007. These are all the point and shoot images that I taken that I thought I had lost. There were still here. I immediately backed them up to a working removable drive.

So… oops. Looks like I have most of the stuff I care about. What don’t I have? I don’t have the “backup” files from Annie’s and my computers from the last few years, and I don’t have all of my ripped music. I can spend several hours sometime to rip the music again, and there wasn’t a whole lot of value on the backups. Probably stuff we would have kept if we knew about it, but not so important that we can’t remember what’s there.

I still might get an estimate on data recovery from someone else. I didn’t do a format, the folders shouldn’t be that munged.

Big, big take away from all of this: Never have just one copy of a file. Even if you think it was just going to be a day or two until your new NAS was up (like me), don’t take that chance. ALWAYS have at least two copies.

I have been building a NAS for quite some time. That’s the problem. It was just taking too long to get going. I had it to the point where I had a Linux box with software raid, and LVM, and ssh going. I was using rsync over ssh from my Macs to get data there. But that just wasn’t good enough. I wanted Samba and NFS running securely with user accounts. I have got them to work before. It just takes some work. I decided that I would move on. Get something that was already working. Open source to the rescue.

I took a look at FreeNas and Openfiler. I thought that FreeNas would be everything I was looking for, then I realized that it couldn’t use LVM, so I would have to make static partitions. Not the worst thing in the world, but….

Openfiler looked to be the ticket. I decided to take it out for a spin. However, it would not recognize the data I had on my old raid array, or my other drive that was a backup of some of the data. I would have to repartition. So, I took one of the new 1TB external drives that I just purchased to hold my RAW picture files, and coppied everything over. Then, after making sure the data was there, I set to work setting up openfiler. This is not the most intuitive setup. And I had an idea of what I was doing, and wanted to do. I was getting frustrated. I could not create a share. It took me a couple of days to figure out that you had to create a folder, then tell openfiler that the folder was a share. As well, you must authenticate over LDAP, or Active Directory. They have a built in LDAP server, so I used that, but it was an extra layer of issues that I didn’t need.

If you are getting the idea that I should have just taken the time to get Samba running, I think that you are right. I was then messing with trying to get a rsync server working. You can’t do rsync over ssh. It won’t start anymore. It used to. It doesn’t now, and doesn’t return any error messages. Now I am frustrated.

So somewhere in this mess, I disconnect the “backup” drive from my Mac. (I had added some other stuff from my computer directly, so that when I when to add the data to the new NAS, I could plug in the removeable drive and just move it locally instead of over the network.) For some reason, the iMac does not think that it should be disconected yet. I was sure I told it to eject, but it must not have, because I got the message that says that I am an idiot for disconnecting a drive that wasn’t first ejected. Well, guess what, the fat32 partition table is hosed. Garbage there. Crap.

I am going to need a trip to the GeekSquad to try to get them to recover the data. I will have to spend more money than if I had bought an extra drive and had two backups. Maybe I need a blueray drive to do my 2nd backup. Anyway, I am screwed. Maybe. We’ll see.

So, I decided enough is enough. I ordered a Netgear ReadyNas NV+ from New Egg. It is a ready to go home/small business NAS that can take up to 4 drives. I will have 3 in a raid 5 configuration. It supports an interesting tech called X-Raid too that I will have to consider. It will let you replace the drives with bigger ones later one at a time, then rebuild when all are replaced. Pretty cool.

The box will do CIFS, NFS, HTTP (WebDav), FTP, and RSYNC. That coveres pretty much all the bases. It will send alerts when errors occur, and automatically rebuild when you put in a new drive. There are other nice things too, such as an iTunes server, and a media server that is auto discovered by media players. You can even set it up to access files remotely through an encrypted channel using netgear sotware you install on your laptop. You can even plug other drives into this box to share them.

I have debated something like this for awhile. What kept me back was the price and the ability to rsync. This device does rsync. This device will be far cheaper than the time is has taken me to putz around with other “solutions”.

I guess I am done for now with the “Building a NAS” series. I just wasn’t worth my time. Sorry.

P.S. It looks like I never did post my bit on getting LVM up. Maybe I will do that sometime.

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”.

Apple released some new hardware on Monday. I always get psyched when that happens. Well, sometimes it is just a speed bump, and a “what ever”, but Monday has some interesting things introduced.

The 13″ MacBook, the one with the aluminium case got promoted to a MacBookPro. They get to charge more for the laptops with a “Pro” at the end. You can compare the the different models¬†at Apple here. It did get firewire 800 and a new non removable battery that Apple claims to get up to 7 hours of life. Wow, that would be cool.

Right now I have a 15″ MacBookPro, and it can feel a little big and heavy to carry around. The 13″ is 4.5lbs, and the 15″ is 5.5lbs. I think mine is a little heavier than that. The question though, is does the 13.3″ screen at 1280×800 and only a NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics processor cut it for image editing. Granted, this wouldn’t be designed to be the main image processing machine, but still… how big a trade off is it. We will have to wait and see what people think of the 9400M and running Photoshop/Lightroom/Aperture on it.

So I headed over to the Apple store, and I configured a 13″ MacBookPro with the 2.53Ghz processor (faster one), 4gig of ram (default), and 256Gig of solid state hard drive. Total: $2299.¬†Yes, that’s right, a SSD. Living on the edge. You could get the 128Gig version and get the cost under $2000. I think that a SSD for travel would be a great option. No worry about moving parts, and they are generally a touch faster.

Still, $2000 for a laptop is still kind of expensive, but you could go with the regular 250Gig hard drive and the price is on $1499. Sounds much more palatable, but dang…. I want the SSD…

I won’t be rushing out to get one anyway. First of all, my current laptop keeps going and going and going. It is only a little over two years old, but I bought a refurbished model, so I was a bit behind the tech curve when I got. But the dang thing just works. I have installed Leopard, Aperture 2.1, Photoshop CS3, and it runs just fine. After a couple of years on a windows machine, I was¬†already cursing those laptops. This MacBookPro,¬†still works just fine. Sigh… no good compelling reason to upgrade.¬†

The other reason is that I always buy refurbished. I have an iPod, an iMac, and the MacBookPro that I have purchased refurbished. They have all worked out fabulously. I have saved quite a lot by doing that. So, if I was going to get one, I would wait for the next speed bump, and pick one up from the refurbished site. I wonder if any 13″ models with a SSD will show up there…