David Fisher : What is Noise Blog

Tonight I went to the O’Reilly Ignite Boston 4 and took a handful of photos. I saw a lot of great friends there and had a good time hearing the presentations. Here’s a few of the photos. Check out the Flickr album here. If you what a full resolution tiff of any photo, just kick me an email and I’ll send it to you. Everything’s creative commons NC-BY-SA as always. (note: phase 1 of the photos going up first, the rest later tonight)

Tags: 4, boston, four, ignite, o’reilly, photo, photos

I didn’t take that many photos at Podcamp Boston 3, but I took a handful that I thought were decent and fun so here they are on my flickr feed. Enjoy! Comment, favorite, share! BY-NC-SA

Tags: boston, Harvard, PCB3, photos, podcamp

We held a funeral for DRM by encasing an iPod and a Zune in concrete and dropping it into the Charles River between Boston and Cambridge. We ended up getting front page of Digg with the invite. I was invited to take photos and video. I still haven’t had a chance to edit the video and stupidly left it all on a hard drive at home. I took (what I consider) to be some great photos however. They are all posted to Flickr as CC (by-nc-sa). See some of the photos below.

ROFLCon Crew, dressed for the part. Christina, Tim, Diana, Dean

Burial at sea, view from the bridge

The Splash

Dean about to lower the Zune and iPod

The Brick resting peacefully

Everyone gathering at JFK Park

Evening prior from the 8th floor of the Harvard Science building roof

Tags: burial, charles, christina xu, diana, drm, entomb, fcs, free culture, Harvard, ipod, river, roflcon, tim, zune, zuneral

Everyone’s got their own general photo workflow. Mine is as follows

1. Prepare to take photos. This involves making sure all gear is charged, lenses and filters clean, cards cleared off, and cables/gear packed in my trusty backpack
2. Take photos. Not that hard
3. Transfer photos to external hard drive in an Aperture library
4. Split into various libraries if needed
5. Create two or more “Smart albums”. One has items rated above 4 called “to upload”, one is called “X” and contains only photos with a rating of -1 or X.
6. Rotate all photos upright. Aperture 2.x no longer gets this right, as in Aperture 1.5 they automatically rotated based on the metadata. Aperture 2.x sees the metadata but does nothing with it. I suppose I could write a script to make this right, but this doesn’t take long
7. I use two monitors, the one on my MBP and a 37″ 1080p LCD. I have a mirror of each photo sent to the 37″ screen which I use to gauge sharpness, focus, blur, details and DOF. The MBP screen is used for all color choices (matte screen).
8. I rate all photos in the first pass quickly looking for gross errors, poor composition, blurring, horrid exposure, etc. Those get an X. I roughly sort the other photos
9. In a second pass then I focus on sorting the photos in priorities, trying to figure out the ‘best’ ones. I keep not the best ones as rating of 1, 2, 3 stars. Photos I think suitable for printing get a 5. I don’t give many 5’s. Photos I want to put online get a 4.
10. Photos with a 4/5 get a pass of color correction, cropping, etc
11. I upload the 4/5 photos to Flickr, and choose if they are Creative Commons or not. I’ve been using CC more often than not recently.
12. Photos that get a 5 might be uploaded to Smugmug for printing capability
13. I delete the photos in the Smart Album “X” as they are worthless and not something I want to keep. Anything that I might want to ever see again (alternate shots, etc) I keep however.
14. Delete memory cards, promote photos, twitter about them, etc. Start over.

Tags: camera, my, personal, photography, workflow

Thanks to Sooz this Saturday I’ll be giving the Nikon Nikkor AF-S VR Zoom-Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8G ED-IF a run through its paces on my D200, which I am rather looking forward to.

I normally keep the Nikkor 18-200mm VR lens on my camera, and honestly its a killer daily lens. The 70-200 is twice as big, nearly 3x as expensive and likely weighs 4x as much. That being said, it’s significantly faster and much sharper. The 18-200 isn’t ‘unsharp’ but it is certainly not razor sharp like this lens. To get any sharper you must go with a prime of some sort.

I honestly hope that I don’t like the lens TOO much, as it’s $1700 (actually over 2K on Amazon) and I’d rather not add this to my wishlist of photo gear. Ken Rockwell has some killer information and review of the lens. Err, and that’s his photo of the lens above.

Tags: 18-200, 70-200, 80-200, AF-S, camera, ED-IF, lens, lenses, nikkor, Nikon, photo, photography, sooz, susan kaup, VR