I mentioned in my mini review of the Sigma 30mm that flare was a potential issue with this lens. At the time all I had noticed was the occasional aperture blade pattern. Veiling flare has now reared its head:

That’s with the hood on! The circumstances were admittedly extreme. The light from the setting sun is pouring in through the window on camera left hitting the lens just about parallel to the front element. I’d expect some flare in this situation, but the veil was dense enough to almost completely obscure the view through the finder. I’ve been spoiled by RF lenses with their tiny front elements.

I’ve been working on assembling my first real portfolio in a long time. I had a portfolio back in highschool when I was spending twenty or thirty hours a week doing newspaper and yearbook photography. That portfolio is long gone, which is probably for the best, so I’ve been working on assembling a new one. Originally this was going to be part of my Salt application, but I’ve put that on the back burner for a while.

I’m kind of taking a shot in the dark on how to do this, but I’m betting that showing work in a single theme is more representative in some ways than showing a whole bunch of different things, so I settled on showing class room photos from my six months in Korea. Choosing from the hundred or so available proved to be the most difficult part of the task, until I started asking for feedback. Ask ten people to pick out the weakest photo in a set and you’ll be lucky to get the same answer twice unless you’ve included some incredibly awful shots. For example the shot below has already been identifying as both the strongest and the weakest shot in the group.



Keeping that in mind, I’m soliciting comments from a number of different online communities. You can see the rough edit and make comments over on Flickr. I’ve also embedded the slideshow in the photo essays section of this site.

Embedding the slideshow was surprisingly trivial. I haven’t used Flickr much, but I’ve been toying around with it as a place to put things that might be kind of transitory. The overhead is low in comparison to creating galleries on my site, and the ability to embed slideshows gives me the best of both worlds. It took a little poking around google to figure out how to embed a slideshow based on a pre-defined set, but I eventually found the syntax for it here. To build an embedded slideshow based on tags or group/user id, check out this nifty tool.

Q: What’s B&W and Vibrant All Over?

A: JPEGS from the D80.

Not at the same time of course, but the options are there. In camera JPEG processing keeps getting better and better. The D80 - and a lot of the other recent DSLRs - are offering far more options than they used to, or at least more predefined sets. In the case of the D80 you get predifined settings for B&W, Portrait, Vivid and More Vivid (I think that one goes to 11). There’s also a custom setting that allows you to define your own sharpness, saturation, hue, and color mode. Of these, I’m finding the B&W mode to be the most interesting. In B&W mode you can choose sharpening, tone compensation (contrast) and Yellow, Orange, Green or Red filtering. Those filtering options are particularing interesting. When combined with the contrast settings this gives you a lot of control over how a scene is rendered. I’m currently shooting with Green filtering and Medium Low contrast; it’s a lot like Delta 400 or TMY.

Now, you may ask what’s the point of using these JPEG modes. Why not use RAW? It’s a valid question, and at the moment one of the main reason I’m using JPEGS is curiousity. Certainly camera manufacturers wouldn’t include them if they weren’t useful? Right ;-)

Apart from curiousity, I think there’s value in anticipating your post processing - and comitting to it - before you actuate the shutter. I know this is a radical idea in the world of RAW shooting, PhotoShop, highlight recovery etc etc etc, but it’s one that I’m fairly comfortable with. For years I’ve made these choices with film. The limitations have made me a better photographer, and I’ve still got a ways to go. I’m not ready to throw them off yet. Luckily the D80’s JPEGS are pretty much entirely free from artifacts.