50mm f/1.8E, part 2

Last night, I took my D80 with me to a restaurant called The Pomegranate, on College St. just east of Bathurst. The inside of the restaurant was nicely decorated with Iranian art. The 50mm lens I decided to carry around then, was not wide enough to take pictures of the restaurant but far in the corner, there was this garment hung on the wall. It looked exquisite. I might have some trouble shooting it with my 18-200mm lens but with the 50mm it was a snap. However, it did take me a couple of shots to get the right exposure. Damn, these manual lenses are slow to work with! :)

Anyways, I am a bit surprised to see how sharp the chandelier was. These two shots were taken at f/1.8. I don't remember the shutter speed or ISO setting.

My home-made NAS, part 2

I visited Canada Computers tonight. I came out empty handed. The cheapest power supply they have was $32. Should I have gotten it? It is cheap but I thought I'd salvage a power supply from another computer I have. So, we'll see. I might be able to get my NAS back in operation tomorrow. Tonight, I am tired. Eyes are droopy. Time to take a long nap until the first spec of light wakes me up.

My home-made NAS

My Network Attached Storage (NAS) machine is about three years old (?) and has seen better days. It's on a stretcher now. The other day, I wondered why my mail server was hung. I noticed later that an NFS mount point got frozen because the NAS went south.

It is probably no real news. I heard the fan. It was coughing and gasping for air a couple of weeks ago. Its legs were feeble and trembled at every rotation. I reached behind the machine yesterday and found that the fan is dead. Maybe the power supply is dead too now as I can no longer start up the computer. Completely black screen, no LED, no sign of life.

I have thousands of photos on this NAS.

I will shop for a new power supply this weekend.

Colour temperature

Here is something to play with -- the colour temperature setting. The original photo looked a little flat with a dull colour to it. I threw the photo in Irfanview and adjusted the colour temperature, turning it down until the water looks blueish. We're in the fall so the colours of the leaves should really be red and yellow now, but they are greenish in this rendition. I kinda like it this way. It looks like a late summer shot.

50mm f/1.8E

I once owned a Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 and sold it to a student of arts. Well, after a friend showed how his camera was able to capture a billion more stars than my camera could on a camping trip to Cyprus Lake, I decided to get back one of those 50mm f/1.8!

I found on craigslist an old 50mm f/1.8E version. This is one of the original 50mm Nikkor made. I wanted it and knew how I would use it. During the day, my faithful 18-200mm f3.5-5.6 is still my primary lens but from time to time, when I need to shoot in the dark, the 50mm f/1.8 will be it.

So tonight, when I drove out to the Waterdown Falls, I made good with this 50mm lens.

I first shot with my expensive 18-200mm lens. The image came out too dark to work with. I could not make out anything in the image viewed on the LCD. Just not enough light.

I then remembered I brought the 50mm along. After swapping the lenses, I re-shot the pictures. I knew I could not get the same wide angle shots but at least, I would not have wasted the fuel and time driving out there.

Here was the result, colour-adjusted:

Flickr

Well, I have uploaded a couple thousand photos to Flickr. It was a painless process assisted by a Flickr Uploader software installed on my notebook. The software can do image resizing on the fly but I decided to resize my photos before uploading. I could have uploaded the original image however if I wished but it would have taken days to upload all those photos.

A couple of things I like about my Flickr Pro account -- and they may exist in the free version too -- is that you have access to online photo editing and photo management tools. With the photo editing tool, you could do cropping, colour saturation changes, brightness, contrast, and other useful photo editing functions. The management tools allows you to create collections and sets, and apply three different levels of access permissions on each photo. I could for example create a collection for my trip to California and within the collection, I could create sets for each day of the week or for specific locations and events. Because these photos are of my family, I could make it so only family members can view them. If I had wanted friends to view some pictures, I could also open them up to friends. These can be done one a file-by-file basis or set-by-set basis.

What I don't like about the management tool is, there is no way I could find to select multiple photos in set and apply global changes to them. For example, I may have a family photo set. If there are twenty photos in the family photo set I want to share with friends, I have to open each photo individually and change its permission setting. I thought you might be able to use the Ctrl key to select multiple photos but that did not seem to work.

With Flickr, I have stopped using JAlbum.

Flickr online photo album

Well, I have finally bought into the Pro Flickr account. It started to become difficult to share photos I took of families and JAlbum, while it's great, requires a desktop application to create the photo album. So, I decided to use Flickr's Pro account. At about $25 USD per year, it is a good deal. I will post more about Flickr later after I have had more experience with it.