This is a follow up on my initial post that can be found here:

http://blog.antonspaans.com/2007/05/24/nikon-d3-rumour

Thom Hogan has added some more information about his reasoning in speculating on the announcement date for the new pro-body of Nikon. Here are some quotes:

… With virtually all of Nikon’s pro announcements, there has usually been about a two or three-week early warning due to the press event …

… There’s also a longer lead early warning when Nikon Japan does the initial roll-out (in Japan) to the subsidiaries …

… It appears that the latter has occurred, which is fueling a lot of the speculation, but the former hasn’t …

… People with long memories will remember my hinting at the release date by pointing people to the sporting event calendar. If I were a betting man, I’d bet that the first public appearance of the new Nikon pro body would be at the world track and field championships in Osaka, Japan in August (Aug 25-Sept 2). I tried to hint at that back earlier this spring, but I guess I was being too cryptic. …

You can find the entire post here:

A response to "D3 on June 26th???; Re: Prediction"

There have been monstruous amount of rumours on the internet about the new D3 camera (D300? D3H, D3whatever?) from Nikon.

All just rumours, so far, as far as i am concerned, but i just read this, a long thread about the D3 here at dpreview.com:

"Why the 1.1x (or 1.13x) rumored D3 crop ratio makes sense"

And Thom Hogan saying - among other things - these statements:

"… So expect a D300 to be 35FF (that doesn’t mean we won’t get a D200s). You heard it here first ;~). …"

"… Expect a late June announcement with ship in August/September instead and you might be less disappointed ;~). …"

mmmmmm…

The first one is about a company stealing images from an accomplished Flickr user. Her name is Rebacca, she is from Iceland and makes gorgeous landscape pictures. A company in the UK called ‘Only Dreaming’ was selling her pictures… without her consent and without any compensation for Rebecca.

This sparked a heated thread on Flickr, understandably, which (overall) supported Rebecca and flamed ‘Only Dreaming’. Some of the posts went too far, containing threats toward the UK company and the Flickr-thread, including the pictures, were removed by Flickr management… which sparked yet another heated thread on both Flickr and other sites.

I myself fully support Rebecca, but the threads started to resemble mass blog-hysteria. Objectivity went out the door. Here is more about it from Rebecca’s blog:
Rebeccas Blog

Prisoner’s Dilemma

Smugmug is about to start a new service. It will offer their professional customers to sell stock photos. I am very curious how this will work out. However, how the following two issues are worked out will determine its success, in my opinion.

• Pricing: Can their customers (photographers) set their own pricing schemes for their stock?
• Search: The popularity rating of images determines the search results when agencies are looking for stock.

In short, how well will it work when Smugmug customers (photographers) compete with each other not only on the quality of their images but on pricing and ‘popularity’ as well. Will this work well for stock photography? This article can shed some light on this:
Stock Photography and the Prisoner’s Dilemma

May 9^th I went to a lecture given by Lou Jones (www.fotojones.com). It was organized by the Boston Photography Center (http://photo.meetup.com/52/) and took place in one of the rooms in NESOP. Thank god there was air-conditioning J.

His focus for his lecture was ‘documentary photography’ with some sideways into ‘travel photography’.

Lou Jones himself is – as you all probably know – a well established photographer from Boston and has traveled all over the world. His body of work is wide, from commercial photography, fine art photography, documentary photography, etc.

He began talking about his entrance into the world of professional photography. He was – and still is – a jazz lover. He decided to start a project to get him noticed with the editor of magazines and of other publications. This project involved photographing jazz players. Not in their own surroundings (at their homes, in bars or clubs) but in Lou’s own small studio. This ‘project’ is still on-going. He complained how hard it is lately, even with him being a well known photographer, to get access to the great jazz musicians. In the ‘old days’ it used to be much easier: Catch the musicians when they are alone – not when they are already talking to other people or just busy – and ask permission to shoot their portraits. He used to ‘stalk’ the bathrooms in clubs to get their undivided attention when they left the bathroom.

He then went on with some p.j., travel photography and commercial photography, about his projects for the Massport Authority, wars in Central America, pictures from New England and him shooting all Olympic events since 1984, for example.

Lately, he said, his work can be mostly described about ‘where land meets water’ (he’s afraid of water…) and ‘I’m interested in shooting what is too fast to see with the naked eye and what is too slow for the naked eye‘.

The last part of his lecture was about two projects:

‘Final Exposure’: An editorial/documentary about death-row inmates.

‘Pregnant Women’: I don’t know if this is the actual title… it is still an ongoing project. He shoots pregnant women (mostly) naked in his studio or on location.

Lou Jones has - by his own admission - a hard time keeping long stories short J but they are worth while listening too. I liked the lecture a lot.

I bought a book of him called ‘Travel Photography: Off the Charts’. Very informative and many pictures J. 

I went out shooting the Chinese New Year’s parade in Boston and a noticed that my exposures were waaaay off. Mostly too dark, but also too light sometimes.

I pointed the lens to the asphalt, my camera was in A-mode. The shutter speed jumped around from 1/20th to 1/3000th, up and down, etc.

I hard-reset the camera, removed the batteries for a while, changed lenses.. nothing would fix it.

And i saw a couple of times the CHA error, whatever that is. I think i’m on my way to the BGLOD (blinking green light of death) problem…

I guess i have to send my D70 in for repair. Only about 6000 shutter-actuations… shouldn’t have happened… ah well.

Question to anyone in USA to whom this happened as well: What is the expected turn-around time (time between sending in and getting it back fixed)?

BTW: I bought it at BestBuy.com with a 4 year extended warranty.

And a silver lining: I got a good excercise shooting in full manual mode (i have no external light meter)! ‘t Was a lot of work though, with the sun out and the shades of the buildings downtown. I’ll be posting some images soon.

I’ve been not feeling too well the last few days (I caught a cold, just like last Christmas…), but because it’s raining tomorrow and i really wanted to test out my new fish-eye lens, i went outside anyway - not too far away - to shoot some pictures.

First i shot a picture of the plaza of Christian Science Church. I was standing in the fountain area and shot towards Mass Ave. I noticed that i had to pay good attention to the following two things:

• Be sure that your hands (or your feet) do not appear in the picture.
• Figure out what must be horizontal and/or vertical. It is rather hard to get a ’straight’ horizon with a fish-ye lens.
• Composing a picture definately works differently with a fish-eye lens. 

Below is the first picture. It is cropped somewhat, because i had to rotate the picture 3^o clock-wise (for a ’straight’ horizon):

The next two pictures are one and the same. The first is the original picture. The second has been ’straightened’ using the ‘Fish Eye‘ tool in Nikon Capture, with ‘Include areas where there is no image data‘  checked, and then manually cropped to exclude those areas again.

The original picture:

The ’straightened’ picture:

I also noticed that checking the ‘Include areas where there is no image data‘, will affect the sharpening. I had to set the radius to no more than 0.2px in Photoshop, otherwise it would have been waaaay to over-sharpened…. strange… i have to search or ask for this issue somewhere on a forum (dgrin/dpreview) somewhere.

They forecasted it yesterday, but sometimes they like to exaggerate. Viewer ratings are god .

But this time they were on the money, even under-estimating it a little.

Because of the forecast, i did not go into work and worked from home instead. I woke up this morning with about 2" of snow on the ground. It changed to (freezing) rain around 11am and at 1pm the temperature dropped from 35F to around 25F. And the snow started to come down hard.

I just had lunch and was doing some work until i heard some thunder and saw lightning flashes. This lasted for about 2 to 3 hours. Lots of thunder and lightning, lots of wind and even more snow. After most of it washed away during the rain, the Back Bay still got around 6" of additional snow (update: Logan airport reported 7.5").

After the 2nd flash, i decided to go out quickly to shoot some pics. I got my camera and go outside. Suddenly i was reminded to buy a little ‘raincoat’ for my camera. It is no match for this kind of weather.

Well, here are some of the pics taken today:

You can find more of these pics in this gallery.

Update: I sent some of this gallery’s pics to NECN. I got an e-mail back from Tim Kelley, NECN’s meteorologist, that they may get featured on the show.