On behalf of the Mansurovs family, I would like to wish Happy Holidays to our readers and friends that celebrate! May peace, love, health, happiness and prosperity always follow you and your family! Thank you for keeping us constantly busy and motivated, inspiring us to do more. This site would not exist without your support.
Merry Christmas and a Happy New upcoming 2012 Year!
I have been receiving emails, requests on our Facebook Fan Page and plenty of comments on camera gear from our readers during the last couple of weeks. While I will be spending the next few weeks working on a full Nikon 1 V1 Review (see my mini-review here), along with Nikon 1 lenses and other camera + lens reviews, I would like to dedicate some of my time this week to answering questions related to photography gear from our readers. It is a holiday season and many are looking for suggestions on what cameras, lenses and other photo accessories to buy.
It has been a tough year for Nikon and besides a couple of good deals on some cheap lenses like Nikon 55-200mm / Nikon 55-300mm and on the new Nikon 1 system, we did not really see any significant discounts on Nikon gear this week, while Canon has just launched another lens and speedlite instant rebate program. This is very unfortunate for Nikon, because their sales have been severely impacted simply by short supply and unavailability of DSLRs, lenses and accessories. Popular cameras like Nikon D7000, D700 and D3s are nowhere to be found, while some lenses like Nikon 85mm f/1.4G have been hard to find for a while now…
If you have any gear-related questions, please feel free to post them here in the comments section below. I will do my best to respond to your question as soon as I can!
As you might have noticed, I have recently added a new option for email subscription to our blog via a widget on the right side of the page. It is different from the email subscription option shown in our “Subscription” page, where it is fully managed by the Google Feedburner platform. This one is managed by WordPress.com and it provides many options for subscribing to new posts and updates – you can choose to receive emails the moment I post something (unlike Google Feedburner that sends notifications once a day early in the morning) or you can schedule email updates as often as you would like (once a week, etc).
You can find the new subscription widget on the right side of the page as shown below:
Please let me know if you have any questions and happy holidays!
Many of our readers have been emailing me about their inability to see the content of next pages in RSS feeds when a large review article is split into multiple pages. I struggled with this issue for a while and ended up changing the RSS feed to only display an excerpt rather than a full article, with a link to read the article just because of this. After I implemented this a couple of weeks ago, I received even more complaints from our readers, asking to get full posts in the RSS feed like before. Today, I am happy to announce that I found a solution to this problem and I was able to fix the multiple page RSS issue, so all of our subscribers will be receiving full posts over RSS/email, even when they are split into multiple pages.
If you have not yet subscribed to our site via email or RSS, please check out our Subscribe page to see all the options.
Like any manufactured product, Nikon’s products are also prone to quality assurance / quality control issues. While Nikon has a very extensive and comprehensive quality control process, some defective products can slip through and make it to the market. Other times, the pressure to increase the production output on Nikon’s manufacturing plants is so high, that the initial shipments of a newly introduced product can be defective or could have other problems not discovered during the initial testing of the product. Unless the defect is of physical nature, the latter is typically addressed through firmware updates later, which Nikon is pretty good about.
Nikon D700 Rubber Issue
In this article, I would like to point out some of the recent quality control issues I have seen in Nikon products. Specifically, on the latest generation DSLRs like Nikon D700/D5100 and some of the newer lenses, like the Nikon 24-70mm f/2.8G. Why am I doing this? Because first, I want to make our readers aware of potential QA (Quality Assurance) issues they might encounter and second, I want to provide some information on how to react to such problems. Please bear in mind that the purpose of this article is not to scare existing or potential Nikon customers. In fact, every manufacturer, including Canon and Sony occasionally have issues with defective parts and products, so this article could apply to other brands as well.
Another frequently asked question from our readers is related to dead, hot and stuck pixels they encounter in images or on camera LCD screens. Since there is so much confusion about these different types of pixel defects/malfunctions (people use them interchangeably without understanding the terms), I decided to write a quick article explaining the difference between them to avoid any confusion. Please bear in mind that there is no consensus between photographers when it comes to defining the types of pixel defects. The below information is my way of categorizing defective pixels that you might not agree with.
Dead (black) vs stuck (red) pixel
A dead pixel is a permanently damaged pixel that does not receive any power, which often results in a black spot on the camera LCD. Since digital camera sensors have color filter arrays, also known as “Bayer filters” in front of them, dead pixels do not normally show up as a black spot, but will rather show up of different color than adjacent pixels, or will be slightly darker than adjacent pixels. A dead pixel is a malfunction that is more or less permanent and does not go away over time. Dead pixels are rare on digital camera LCDs and sensors – manufacturers typically take care of dead pixels during their extensive Quality Assurance (QA) process. Dead pixels might appear on DSLR LCD screens and sensors over time, which is normal.
After losing a memory card with the best pictures from a trip I took across the western USA, I decided to write a quick article on how to store memory cards and how not to lose photographs during long trips. It was a lesson learned the hard and painful way, so a couple of days after the loss, I came up with a plan to protect my data going forward and try not to lose it any more in the field. Below you will find my plan and my recommendations.
Losing images from a long-planned and expensive trip can be very painful. After it happens, you realize that it is not the financial aspect of it, but the effort you put into creating those images instead that hurts the most. We as photographers have to work with the best light during the day, which happens at sunrise and sunset times, no matter where you are located. In Glacier National Park, the sunset times in summer can be as late as 10 PM and as early as 5 AM in the morning. Northern Canada and Alaska are even worse, with sunset times close to midnight in July and sunrise in less than 5 hours. Add +1 hour after sunset and -1 hour for sunrise to get back and to the location, and we are talking about less than 3 hours of sleep at night. In addition, those late hours are also the peak and active time for wildlife, making it dangerous to hike to get to a good spot. And I am not even talking about the weather, which can go against you in those twilight hours. In addition, you carry the heavy weight with you and spent a lot of time tweaking your equipment and composing your shots using different spots and angles. So with so much effort put into making those images, the last thing you want is to lose them. What’s worse is, if you have been shooting for a while, you know if you got a great photo right at the time you take it. You take a look at the camera LCD and you know it is a keeper, a potential for your showcase portfolio. Once you lose photographs, you start to remember those keepers and deep regret hurts even more. So, why even take the chance? Take all the steps you can to protect your photographs when traveling and working on the field.
You might have noticed that the secondary navigation menu of our site now contains “Our Gear” page. I created it for four reasons: a) our readers constantly ask both Lola and I about what camera gear we use, b) I want to centralize all questions regarding camera gear to one single page, because replying to comments in many different articles is becoming unmanageable, c) some readers just want to see a quick review of a product rather than reading my long full camera and lens reviews and d) I can receive and test more gear when you buy through affiliate links on our site and “Our Gear” page contains links to our affiliates. Please bear in mind that the amount of money we receive from our affiliate program is very little – we typically give it back to our readers through our giveaways and various contests. That’s because we do not run any advertising and post very few links to external websites to not annoy our readers. Perhaps in the future, if the revenue from the links on our site grows, we might be able to use that money to pay for hosting and other expenses. As for now, I am just asking you guys to buy from our links to be able to keep the partnership with our affiliates and sponsors like B&H.
As for “Our Gear” page, while it has been there for several months now, I only had some text links to what we use, without much info on the gear. Today I updated the page with some short reviews of the camera gear we are using and finished the “Cameras”, “Camera Accessories”, “Lenses” and “Teleconverters” sections. I will soon update the page with a lot more content and provide more information and links to other tools we use, so please check back the page later.
If you have any questions about camera or computer gear, please ask them in the gear page rather than other articles. I will be checking this page more often and replying to your comments as soon as I can. Also, if you have been sending some case studies to me, please be patient, as I just have not had much time to work on them.
I am currently finishing up with the Nikon 24mm f/3.5D PC-E lens review and will soon start working on reviewing the new Nikon 50mm f/1.8G lens, along with the Nikon D5100 DSLR. Stay tuned!
I recently witnessed how a friend of mine got robbed by an online camera store called AjRichard based out of New York, USA when he purchased a Canon 5D Mark II. The camera was out of stock for a few weeks in every single local and online store he trusted and he could not wait any longer. That’s when he decided to expand his search and see if he could find an Internet store that had the 5D MKII in stock. He eventually ended up on Nextag.com looking at a list of merchants with “in stock” indicators. The top sellers all had very high ratings and he noticed that some of the sellers were advertising the 5D MKII at lower than the $2,500 “normal” rate that everybody else sells for. The top result was AjRichard.com and with over 1,000 reviews, 5 star rating and a “Trusted Seller” status, he decided to take the plunge and order the camera at just $2,350 – a really good deal he thought he was getting. The sad part is, he felt something was not right while making the purchase and still did it, thinking that his credit card company would protect him in case something went wrong. Next day, he got a call from AjRichard sales rep, who told him that camera battery and charger were not included in the $2,350 price and convinced him to buy those, along with some accessories he did not need. The order went up to $2,629 and he was promised free three day shipping. He needed the camera ASAP, so he agreed to complete the transaction and paid in full. Here is what his order looked like:
This is Part 4 for the “how to create a photography blog” series of articles. In Part 1, I gave some brief history of the blogging platform, showed how to purchase a domain with a web hosting account through GoDaddy and how to create a database for WordPress. In Part 2, I showed how to get WordPress installed and configured with the most basic settings. In Part 3, I went through some basics of using WordPress and how to get the initial site structure going, along with using WordPress plugins. In this final part, I will show you how to use themes to manage the look of your WordPress blog.
Now that you have WordPress installed and configured, it is time to make your blog presentable by utilizing a theme. The true power of WordPress lies in its ability to use highly-customizable themes that can be tuned to your needs and taste. Thousands of free themes are readily available for you to download and use and you can install them directly from WordPress. However, free themes are rarely good and the ones that are good are used by many bloggers. If you want to have a more or less unique feel to your blog, your best bet is to get a commercial theme. Let’s go over the process of installing free themes first.
Let’s navigate to the currently installed WordPress themes through “Appearance” -> “Themes”. Here is how the screen should look like on a default WordPress install:
