Author Archives: Seth Richards

DPReview’s “hands-on preview” of the D800

DPReview’s “hands-on preview” of the D800

36 megapixels is a lot. One thing that doesn’t seem to get mentioned much in all the online discussion about megapixels is the fact that increasing your camera’s resolution increases its demands on the rest of the system surrounding it. Some people mention the need for more computing power and hard drive space to deal with the files, but that’s not what I’m talking about, really. I’ve found that when I’ve upgraded to higher resolution cameras (from 6 to 10 and then from 10 to 16MP) that I’ve had to address weaknesses in my lenses, my tripods, and most importantly my own technique in order to really see the increased resolution in my photos.

In short, if you’re looking at one of these but don’t have top-notch glass to put in front of it, you might be better off getting one of the D700s that are due to flood the used market soon, and putting the money you saved toward some nicer lenses. That said, there are plenty of folks who can put all those pixels to good use, and I’m sure they’re thrilled right now. In the right hands, the D800 (especially the “E” version without an antialiasing filter) looks like a killer camera. I’ll be interested to see the sample shots when they start popping up.

2012

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BranchesBranchesPennsylvania, January 2011

I guess we’re a couple weeks into 2012 at this point, but that’s OK. It’s not like timeliness has ever been a major concern for this site. I hope everyone’s having a happy new year so far. Looking back on 2011, it was kind of a rough year from a lot of perspectives, so I’m hopeful that this year will be a better one.

White Mountains #3

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Well, so much for my brief streak of weekly posts. I guess it was inevitable I wouldn’t be able to keep it up as things got busy approaching the holidays. Hopefully I’ll be able to resume a bit more of a regular schedule in 2012.

Footbridge
Footbridge New Hampshire, August 2011

White Mountains #2

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Another shot from my ill-fated Panasonic, before it met its untimely end tumbling down a rocky path…

Parapet BrookParapet Brook New Hampshire, August 2011

I suppose "ill-fated" is probably a little overdramatic. I had that camera for something like 6 years, and I got some pictures I really like out of it. That’s not a bad run for a digital camera, especially considering some of the conditions I hauled that one through.

Regarding the photo itself, I was continually surprised at the amount of water we encountered in the Presidentials. We had to cross countless streams like this pouring down the sides of the mountains, and there were even a few small lakes up above the treeline. I expect to see that out West, where there are glaciers that melt all summer to feed the lakes and streams, but not in the lower mountains out East. With the difficulty we ran into hiking out there in relatively dry August, I can’t even imagine climbing those mountains in the spring with snowmelt and rain.

New Look

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Finally. I’ve been working on a new layout for the site for a couple weeks now, and it’s finally ready to roll out. There are still some rough edges that need sanded off, there are a few things I’m not quite happy with, and I still need to go back and readjust some of the old posts to better fit the new layout. But I’ve been holding back some posts until I had the new layout up, so I decided to go ahead with it even if it wasn’t quite finished. Expect the site to continue to change subtly over the coming weeks.

The main goal with the design change was to get rid of the sidebar and widen the main column, so that I could post larger photos without having to play Javascript lightbox tricks. This has been bothering me for a while now; it’s discouraging to work on a photo at full size on my computer and then shrink it down to a tiny 480 pixels wide for web display. I’ve got a few photos in the hopper that I think will benefit from the larger display, so they should be coming soon.

You might need to force your browser to fully refresh the page (ctrl-shift-R in most browsers) in order to get the new layout to fully load. If you see things that are obviously broken or that look wrong on your system please let me know. You might give me a couple weeks though; there are already a few things on my list to fix.  Otherwise, comments and feedback are always welcome!

White Mountains

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I’m finally starting to get through the photos from my backpacking trip to the White Mountains in New Hampshire a couple months ago.  Unfortunately the trip turned out to be a bit of a bust photographically.  Backpacking and photography are slightly awkward bedfellows on the best of trips, but in this case the trails were rough enough that there wasn’t a ton of time or energy left over to take pictures.  And it didn’t help that I dropped my camera on the second day and it stopped focusing correctly.

White MountainsWhite Mountains New Hampshire, August 2011

Fortunately it wasn’t my bigger, newer camera, it was the little Panasonic I carry in a chest pouch when I hike.  Still, it was pretty disappointing.  Not only is the other camera more work to get out and get set up (which cut down on the number of photos I shot during the trip), I’ve always been fond of the Panasonic’s native “widescreen” format which encouraged me to experiment with shots like the one above.  I haven’t inquired with Panasonic yet to see how much repairs would cost, but I suspect they’ll be expensive enough that the money would be better put toward a new camera.  So it goes with modern technology…