Nikon DSLR and Lens Rebates
As I have noted before, Nikon is currently offering rebates for customers who are buying a DSLR together with a lens. Although not all Nikon lenses are available with this offer, some of the best Nikon lenses such as Nikon 70-200mm VR, Nikon 70-300mm VR and Nikon 24-70mm are available for an instant rebate.
Traveling to Washington D.C.
Just wanted to let you guys know that I'm heading out to Washington D.C. tomorrow and I will be out until Tuesday of next week. My schedule is packed and I am planning to meet some friends and relatives this weekend, in addition to trying to photograph some scenery there. By the way, if you have any good locations in mind, please let me know, since I have no idea where to start :) I have been to D.C. multiple times in the past, but it was before I got into photography. I'm primarily looking for good landscape and architectural points of interest, but if you know some good birding locations in winter, I would love to check out the best one as well.
As for blogging, I don't think I will have time to write from there, but I might do some quick posts in the evenings.
Nikon Lens Rebates Starting February 28th, 2010
If you have been wanting to buy a DSLR with a good lens, then wait until this Sunday. Nikon is announcing great rebates on some of the best Nikon lenses, including the new Nikon 70-200mm f/2.8 VR II and the outstanding Nikon 24-70mm f/2.8G lens that I use primarily for my landscape photography. The recently reviewed Nikon 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6 VR lens is also going to qualify for an instant rebate, as outlined below:
- Buy Nikon 70-200mm f/2.8G VR II with any DSLR and get a $400 instant rebate
- Buy Nikon 24-70mm f/2.8G with any DSLR and get a $300 instant rebate
- Buy Nikon 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6G VR lens with any DSLR and get a $200 instant rebate
- Buy Nikon 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6G VR II with any DSLR and get a $250 instant rebate
- Buy Nikon 24-120mm f/3.5-5.6G VR with any DSLR and get a $200 instant rebate
These are some great incentives by Nikon and the first three are definitely great performers and Nikon's best lenses. It would have been even better if the incentives were for the lenses only, but those deals do not normally happen until around Christmas time, or when Nikon needs to clear out the shelves.
We are now on Alltop!
We are proud to have been accepted and featured on one of the most respected online catalogs - Alltop.com. Alltop is truly a unique resource, where they only feature the top "picks" out of millions of websites on the Internet. Check out their "About" page for more information on how Alltop.com works.
You can find us there now in their Photography section. We are currently down at the bottom, but hope to get higher up as we grow! :)
This is great news for us, because it really shows that we have achieved a good status and respect among the photography community.
Canon EOS-1D Mark IV Autofocus vs Nikon D3s
Rob Galbraith, a well-known and respected photographer from Canada, has recently posted an article on autofocus performance of the new Canon EOS-1D Mark IV after using the camera for a while photographing various athletes that were preparing for the Vancouver 2010 Olympics. After weeks of shooting the camera, he compared the autofocus performance of the Canon EOS-1D Mark IV with the new Nikon D3s.
Here is a quick excerpt from his article:
It's worth noting one other fundamental difference between the AF system in the D3S and that of the EOS-1D Mark IV. When Nikon focus is out, it doesn't tend to be way out. More often than not, peak action frames that are not perfectly focused aren't that blurry, making some of them still viable. That is, if you're of a mind that it's better to have a slightly soft frame of a great peak moment than a totally blurry one. The EOS-1D Mark IV, on the other hand, produces many more frames that are too soft to use for anything, no matter how sweet the moment.
To sum up, our experience with the D3S' AF system is that it's trustworthy and dependable enough for us to be confident using it for peak action sports. Not perfect: it needs to be a bit faster off the line, in addition to the other quibbles we've mentioned. But it does work as needed most of the time, which is in stark contrast to the experience of the EOS-1D Mark IV in the last month.
The above review is pretty much in line with what many other sports and action photographers have said after doing comparisons between the two cameras - the Nikon D3s is currently, without a doubt, a leader in both autofocus and low-light photography (high ISO performance).
When I looked at some sample pictures of the Canon EOS 1D Mark IV, I got a little worried about Nikon D3s future. However, after seeing some high ISO comparisons and hearing from pros on autofocus performance of both cameras, it turned out that D3s is the leader and it looks like it will stay that way for at least another two years! Sure, it is unfair to compare Nikon's full frame sensor with a 1.3x cropped sensor, but poor autofocus performance has been Canon's biggest weakness (especially in 1D Mark III) and despite the fact that Canon re-engineered their autofocus system from scratch in 1D Mark IV, it is still worse than Nikon's legendary 51 point autofocus system.
Nikon D3s wins, end of story.
Business Card Photo Contest
One of our readers was kind enough to send us a link to a free photo contest that is open for everyone. They have a grand cash prize of 1000£ British Pounds (equivalent to approximately $1,560 USD) or a Canon EOS 500D Digital SLR Camera!
Here are the prizes:
- Grand Prize wins £1000 or a Canon EOS digital SLR camera and 500 free business cards
- Second Place wins £100 and 250 free business cards
- The first 15 contestants to submit their photos will get 200 free business cards
- For our UK entrants: The town that submits the most photos will be featured on our web site. We will include local sites, facts and a showcase of the photos you submit.
Nikon 24mm f/1.4G
Along with the Nikon 16-35mm f/4G VR lens, Nikon has also announced the new super-fast AF-S Nikkor 24mm f/1.4G ED prime lens. It is a replacement for one of the sharpest Nikon lenses ever produced - the discontinued Nikon 28mm f/1.4 lens. This new lens sets a new standard on contrast and sharpness, because it beats the older 28mm f/1.4 lens in all aspects.
Nikon 24mm f1.4G ED
Nikon 16-35mm f/4G VR
Today Nikon announced a brand new FX lens - AF-S Nikkor 16-35mm f/4G ED VR, world's first ultra-wide angle zoom with Vibration Reduction technology. The lens is ultra-fast with AF-S silent-wave focus motor, has Nanon crystal coating against flare and is sealed against tough weather conditions. Unlike the Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8G lens, the new 16-35mm f/4.0 VR has a 77mm filter thread, which is great news for landscape photographers.
Nikon 16-35mm f4G ED VR
Our new Technology Section
As you might have noticed, we now have a new "Tech" section on the top of the page. I decided to move my geeky articles over to a new section that I called "Technology Tips and Tricks" for now to separate them from photography articles.
In addition, we now have a new contributing member to our blog - my good old friend and technology geek Karim. I have known him for over 12 years and he is like a brother to me. He is very smart, super sharp and he is graduating from University of Colorado at Boulder with a Master's degree this spring!
Karim will be primarily writing in our Tech section and I will try to help him out with some of my work-related stuff as well :)
It took me some time to port things over to the new section and get rid of the old junk, which is why I have not had a chance to work on new articles. I will start catching up this weekend though, so stay tuned!
Big website changes
During the last two weeks, I have been heavily working on the website, making big changes to the site layout/design, content and sections. I had no idea that the database I was running on before was so problematic...apparently I have been running it on a wrong character set all this time! It took me a while to convert the website content to the UTF8 standard encoding and even now I'm continuing to experience some problems with weird characters showing up in some posts, so please let me know if you see a bunch of weird characters showing up and I will take care of them.
On top of that, I decided to get rid of the "www" in front of our domain. I have always been using "www" in front of all of my domains and this year I changed my mind and decided to make the domain shorter. It was a painful decision, because it will affect search engine links and rankings, whether I like it or not.
I also decided to get rid of the old gallery and start over with a brand new one. Instead of putting junk into the gallery like I was doing before, I will only be uploading the best pictures that are worth staying in the gallery. Initially, I was going to reuse the same gallery software, but I decided to try a new one this time, which should be more integrated to our blog. So far, I like the results and I will be posting the first gallery in a couple of days, if everything works out as planned.
I'm sure you have already noticed the top of the main page where it says "Last Two Recipes from Lola". It took me a while to figure it all out and I had to write custom code for that, but the top part will now automatically pull the latest two recipe images from Lola's Recipes page. She has been busy with other projects lately, but promised to put up more recipes very soon!
Oh, and the new Nikon 70-200mm VR II is soo good!
Lola took this shot wide open at f/2.8, 1/5000th of a second. Simply incredible, one of the Nikon's sharpest lenses ever!
Nikon 70-200mm VR II 100% Crop
