Onno's Blog

One thing I miss since the onslaught of digital photography is playing in the darkroom and doing black&white photography. Occasionally when editing a project I think “oh, that should look good in black and white.” In the photo editing application, I convert the image to black&white but seldom does it really come out as great black&white photos can as with the beautiful Ilford films of old.

My D90 can take be set to take black & white photos. I tried that once before but left the image format setting at RAW only then to be confused at first when the images were all in full color after loading them onto the computer…

This Sunday, remembering that lesson, I ventured out to Irondequoit Bay. I set the camera to black&white and to JPEG. The fun thing about the D90 is that it can also simulate yellow, green and red filters. And so I played with those too even while my photo club days at the SGN High School are quite a bit behind me, having to do a bit of memory surging to recall the effect of each filter.

There is something about black & white so be prepared to see more.

Have a look in the gallery to see how I did.

Today Hahn Photographic kindly assisted me in obtaining a new camera replacing the one I let so clumsily fall off the tripod a week ago. It’s a lovely Nikon D90 with twice as many pixels than the D70, much less noise at higher ISO values, movie mode and seeing the size of the manual a ton of other new stuff I have yet no idea of. Onno Junior patiently posed for the first picture. This shot was taken with Rachel’s lens that was on the old camera when it so rudely met the ground and it appears to have survived that event just fine.

The D90 takes SD cards instead of Compactflash, something that Steve at Hahn’s very timely reminded me of and at 13 megapixels a shot it seemed useful to get a larger SD card than the one I had. Otherwise a few pictures and the card would be full. Love it so far. The one little irk is that MacOS X does not yet support the D90’s raw format and so until Apple gets around issuing an update (hurry up!) the workflow consists of Nikon Transfer -> Nikon ViewNX -> transfer to JPEG -> iPhoto. By the way, the 4GB SanDIsk SD card I bought came with its own tiny USB reader – very handy since Rachel took my reader to the wedding today. The camera has a GPS capability. Definitely something worth fiddling with to geotag the photos and all that.

That’s it. Bye. Must take more pictures.

A bike ride via Pittsford Village through Mendon Ponds Park, via Williams Road out to Pinnacle and back through the park with a nice coffee break at Starbucks in Pittsford Village. It was beautiful weather so I took it easy and brought my camera with me to take pictures of the autumn scenes.

“Hola!”, I hear you exclaim, “Camera? Pictures? But didn’t you just write that your camera died, passed away? Is this a case of miraculous resurrection, spontaneous healing, perhaps automagical repair? This is puzzling.”

Sadly, the D70 is still broken but I also have a small Pentax point&shoot exactly for rides and travel.

I did bring the Garmin bicycle computer even while this blog post resonated with me. Last year I was without bicycle computer for a while and noticed during the rides I did then how much I look down to the little display on the handlebars. I noticed of course because now there was nothing to look at. It is really a lot; a few times every mile almost. Its presence sometimes skews my plans for a ride: I notice that I am in reach of say a 17 or 18 mph average for the ride and then start aiming for that outcome even while the intention was for a relaxed ride.

Anyways, this was a relaxed ride if for nothing else that I haven’t done a lot of riding the last few months but more precisely the weather and the color of the trees made it so: just pedal and look around.

Pictures in the gallery.

Yesterday my camera met its maker. Well, more precisely, it met with the pavement in a rather abrupt manner falling off the tripod from 5 feet high. This was the picture I had taken just seconds before the camera attempted flight.

It was a wonderful autumn afternoon yesterday: a little chilly and the sun low in the sky. Perfect opportunity to go for a walk through the neighborhood and take pictures of trees, leaves and other views of interest. All was going well until I came to this building on Main Street in the vicinity of Village Gate. The camera landed hard on its back. The lens tore most of the lens mount off the camera. I collected all the tiny little screws that attach the mount to the camera body. At home I managed to screw it back together. The light meter still works and the camera pretends to take pictures (shutter goes off when presses the release) but it doesn’t record on the card and the LCD panel on the back stays black and dead. The body lost some plastic at the bottom right so there’s probably light leaking in anyways.

Maybe I’ll take it to Hahn to have him take a look but very likely it will join the display of old, retired cameras. And so the question rises, a new Nikon or switch to Canon? I have a few Nikon lenses (I like my fisheye a lot) but then the colors from Rachel’s Canon are stunning although I won’t spend anywhere near a 5D price point.