***DSLR/Photography MegaThread***

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Stairway to Kevin
 
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So I ordered a PC cord for remote flash from flashzebra.com and even paid extra for priority shipping. After 5 days or so I emailed them to ask why it hadn't arrived and they sent me a USPS confirmation page on the tracking saying that it was delivered on Friday. I called the wife and she never saw it and neither have I. I have a gated yard and a pretty secluded porch (and a loud dog) so I doubt it was stolen.

WTF am I supposed to do now?
 
Go to your Post Office and report it. They'll talk to the carrier, and he'll say he remembered delivering it and that will be the end of it. Rarely do these packages ever surface.
 
That sucks, RR. I had this issue once with MLB.Com. I lived in an apartment and they delivered to the wrong building but same apartment number. I didn't know this so I called them and they immediately sent out a new shipment, no questions asked. While I was waiting for the 2nd shipment, I started thinking about the possibility of it being at another apartment so I looked around. Sure enough, it was sitting on the porch of an apartment nearby for what was obviously several days due to all the dust that had accumulated.

Good luck. If you have any issues, give this guy a call...

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Got my proofs back from WHCC today. I don't know what to make of it, really. They cropped things kinda funny and their colors don't match up quite as well as I'd hoped, even though I followed their instructions on program setup and monitor calibration.

They wouldn't look bad if you weren't me and didn't know what the original files I sent looked like, though.

I guess I need to figure out how to add a plain white border to my images. Can I do that through WHCC? Or do I need to do it myself in PS before I send the files?

EDIT: Ahh...I see a feature within ROES (the ordering software for WHCC) where I can select whether I want the image cropped or fit to page.
 
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So I went last night to shoot my niece's school choral concert. I figured: indoors...low-light...perfect place to work on some skillz.

I get home this morning and EVERY photograph is soft-focused. I had the focus point on her face the whole time (running in single point/single servo AF), yet she's soft-focused while the girl behind her is in focus. Every capture is like this.

FocusIssue.jpg


ISO 1600 w/flash, f/2.8 at 1/250th.

The red square is where the focus point was. You can see that my niece's face is soft-focused, while the black girl on the right edge of the image is sharp, as is the blond girl behind her right shoulder.

Argh. What's the problem? Is my lens out of whack??
 
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Try setting it to a one-point focus instead of the 8-point or whatever so it won't look at the entire group. Also, try a faster ISO so you change your aperture to get more depth of field. That is pretty basic but it's all I c an think of.
 
I was running in single-point AF. In that mode, it only looks at the focus point that's illuminated in the viewfinder (instead of averaging 9, 21, or 51 points). For that reason, no matter what my f# is, the subject under the focus point should be in focus. It isn't.

I was also running in single-servo AF mode, meaning that the AF system will "lock" on the subject and maintain that focus until the shutter button is pressed or released (rather than tracking a moving subject as it does in continuous-servo AF). The shutter won't even release unless the camera is focused.
 
Just got off the phone with Nikon's tech support (whom I'm impressed with, service-wise). They couldn't tell me exactly what the issue was, but they suspect that there wasn't enough contrast in the single AF point to give the camera accurate focusing data at that long a focal length. The reason they couldn't tell for sure is because I wasn't able to give them a .nef RAW file straight out of the camera (I'd imported them to Lightroom and converted them to .dng which strips a lot of the diagnostic metadata, they said). Had I used Nikon Capture NX (Nikon's post-processing program) that they'd have had no difficulty determining the problem because all the metadata would have been there.

Might have to play with Nikon Capture for a bit, now.
 
For the focus issue, a few things might be going on. The first is that often times the AF sensor may actually be slightly larger or even slightly misplaced, as those markings are on the bottom of the pentaprism and the AF sensors are located at the bottom of the mirror box (under the sub mirror), so it is possible that even though the marking for that AF point was on your niece's face, the actual AF point might have been picking up the girl behind her. Also, I'm not sure if this is true or not with the D3 or not, but often times the periphery AF points aren't "cross type", which means that it may only find focus on a vertical area of contrast but not a horizontal one (or vice versa), and they tend to be not quite as accurate. You can sometimes tell if this is going on if the camera will find focus in landscape but not portrait (or again, vice versa). It is also possible (but not very likely because you would have noticed in other shots) that that lens or the body is out. You can test it by mounting the camera on a tripod, locking the mirror up and shooting a focus chart. That link is actually kind of nice because it has a fairly in depth discussion of how AF works.

As for Lightroom, you can have it keep you files as *.nef s if you want (or you should be able to, I have it working with my raws), and for all intents and purposes, it seems to work the same as if you convert to *.dng.
 
Moving image, to say the least. I'd crank the contrast and black levels a bit, but that's just me.
 
I have bright window behind my monitor in the afternoons and it's hard as hell to get the tints right.
 
Great thread guys! (sorry for being last kid to come down to the dinner table). FlyBoeingJets, your industrial pics were intense! PM, D300, eh? Nice! I had lost mine to eBay... well, that is, sold it on eBay after hopping up to a D3 and realizing I don't really need 2 cams just yet. What lenses are you sportin'......?

Here's a couple my HDR's to add into our magic stew:









all pics are actually from just one raw file (eek! no bracketing!)... i'll post some more soon!

hopefully this thread isn't dead; if it is this it's time to wake it the **** up!
 
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