Winter camping

Last night, I had a brief chat with a friend over winter camping.  It looks like we are going to head out into the cold of Ontario winters this coming winter.  I started now to think how I am going to shoot our first time experience in the wilderness of Ontario at -20C.  I have taken my D80 out in the dire cold before but only for a couple of hours.  How will my D7000 or D90 fare in -20C temperatures?  I kinda like to do lapse photography, setting up the D7000 on a tripod and have it fire away every minute or so.  I need some way of protecting them from the elements.  I will also like to bring a camcorder, which has never been stress-tested this way before.  I will jot some notes down on this blog from time to time as I build my list of things to do and things to bring.  For one thing, I will surely bring my new GPS unit along so we will know exactly where the photos were taken.

Nikon D5100

It has been over a month since my friend bought a Nikon D5100 and got it shipped to my younger brother in the States.  Well, my friend will be in for a surprise when I drop by this morning with the D5100.  I just asked last night to borrow his ladder for a couple of hours this morning when I did not need one.

So I had a look at the D5100.  It feels very ergonomic.  The grip is well designed to fit nicely in the palm and fingers of your hand.  It has sort of smallish footprint and is quite lighter than the D300 I used to own.  Light is good when traveling or hiking up a hill.  The back of the D5100 has a big, bright articulate LCD screen.  This screen is big!  There is a fair degree of freedom to swivel it around.  It can swivel 180 degreees and pushed back flush against the body of the camera and operate just like a normal LCD screen.  For protection while storing away the camera, the LCD screen can be swiveled back 180 degrees so the LCD screen faces the body of the camera and its back faces out.  And one other thing I like about the design of the camera is the fact that the shooting mode dial is in the middle of the camera as opposed to the left of the camera as designed on the D80, D90 and D7000.  The dial on these latter cameras tend to get knocked out of position by accident.

I did not try the shutter release to take sample pictures.  It's Chris' camera.  He gets the first shot.

ViewNX 2, part 2

So, as much as I find ViewNX 2 slow and buggy, it kinda works well.  I had a series of shots where I was not paying attention to the light in the hallway.  I realized after shooting them that I had forgotten to set my white balance.  Lucky me that I shot in RAW+JPEG mode because it was easy enough to fix in ViewNX 2.  I simply tell it to fix the white balance by choosing a spot in the shot that I know was white and ViewNX 2 fixed up a batch of photos in one go.  It took it a while as I expected but it worked.

Canon SD110

My Canon SD110 has been a real work horse.  I used it at home, on the road, on the plane, in airports, in my car, on campsites, on waters, on canoes, in forests, under canoes while portaging, in the rain, everywhere.  It had a problem with the LCD but Canon offered a free fix.  Why am I bringing the subject of this camera up now?

Well, I do like the compactness of the camera--easy and light to carry around anywhere you go.  It however takes an awfully long time to power up and and the shutter lag often misses the moment.  Is there a camera that offers speedy power-up time and near instant shutter lag?  I am contemplating at getting a Canon G10, a Canon S90, or a Nikon P90, but for almost $400, why would I spend the money on a point-and-shoot compact camera?  I could get a decent DLSR with a kit lens for that much.  I am now looking for a used G10, S90, or P90, somewhere around $100.  Even that seems pricy for a point-and-shoot, for some reason.

Rubber zoom ring on Nikkor 18-200mm, part 2

In June 2009, after a trip to Cuba, the zoom rubber ring on the Nikkor 18-200mm got really loose.  I had to cut a few millimeters off the ring and glue the ends back together with Krazy Glue.  Two years later, last night, I had to do the same thing again.  I had to cut another few millimeters of the ring as it got fairly loose.  I must have cut about one centimeter in total so far.  A few drops of the Krazy Glue did the trick as usual.  The rubber ring feels tight and snug once again.

I wonder if this is a problem with the rubber rings on other lens manufacturers, or is it just because I use this lens so often in the humid and hot weather of Toronto/Cuba summer.

P.S.  I had mentioned that Nikon sells a replacement rubber ring for probably $10.  I thought I'd check on eBay.  The ring goes for $18 USD or so.

Solmeta GPS N1 for D7000, part 2

The GPS unit arrived on August 11, a couple of days before a BBQ.  It took under two weeks to arrive, faster than I expected.  The parcel was not shipped through China mail though.  It was through the Hong Kong post office.  Parcels do arrive in Canada faster when they are shipped out of Hong Kong.

Anyway, I got to play with the Solmeta for the first time yesterday at the BBQ event.  It was simple to use.  Just slide the main unit into the hotshoe flash mount, connect the USB cable to the unit, and connect the USB cable to the camera.  Now, interestingly, contrary to what I have read online, the USB end that connects to the camera is not so easily breakable.  It fits in very tightly.  I really have to apply a good amount force to plug it in and to pull it out--if the connector head is wet, it would be next to impossible to pull it out.

Once the GPS unit is connected up and turned on, it takes about a couple of minutes--I did not time it but it felt like a couple of minutes--to acquire satellite signals.  The LED at the top would blink as it tries to acquire signal, until it becomes solid when it is ready.  While the GPS unit is connected to the camera and is turned on, the top LCD on the D7000 displays "GPS"  beside the focus mode indicator.

When it is all ready to go, you just shoot and GPS information is recorded with the photo.  To view the GPS information, I would scroll through the photo detail screen as usual.  GPS information was now displayed along with the histogram, ISO, aperture, speed, etc.

Now, there was one annoying behaviour I observed but have not been able to reproduce after I returned home.  At the BBQ, with the GPS unit connected to the D7000, I was able to shoot like normal but then after a few shots, I was unable to half-press the shutter release button to focus.  As soon as I half-pressed the button, the camera took the shot right away so the pictures came out blurry.  Was it a problem with the GPS unit or with my possibly broken Nikkor 18-200mm lens?  To troubleshoot, I just removed the GPS unit and the shutter release button worked again as expected.  Something is funny about this GPS unit ... it could be because the USB cable was not fully inserted.

In the photo above, the camera fired away before the lens had a chance to focus as if it was shooting in manual mode.  This is a behaviour I have yet to reproduce.

ViewNX 2

Nikon makes superb cameras and lenses but when it comes to software, they need to partner with a strong software developer.  I have not used CaptureNX yet but am using ViewNX 2 to convert my RAW images to JPEG.  Oh boy does it feel slow!  It takes probably 12 hours to process about 500 RAW images with the default settings.  (My Lenovo T60 notebook has an Intel Core Duo 1.83GHz processor with 3GB of RAM and I am processing the images off a network drive--maybe my network is a bit slow.)  It also crashes after converting about 500+ RAW images, complaining it ran "out of memory".  It asks you to close other applications to free up memory even though it is clear that there are plenty of unused memory in the system.  The only way to deal with the "out of memory" problem is to restart ViewNX 2.  What a pain.