Status / Update

Yes, yes... I haven't posted to the blog for quite long. My girlfriend visited me for my birthday, and we were exploring my favorite places - which means outdoors, which means tough luck with the current weather in Germany. It's the middle of May and I'm wearing a pullover, and I saw people that jog in the woods in the morning are wearing gloves! Brrrrrrr!!!

Here's one of the photos that is the result of D700 madness and my birthday present (the 105mm Micro Nikkor - wow, thank you so much, Shuwen!). It's a combination of 13 single frames, showing Cuckoo flower (german: Wiesenschaumkraut) swaying in the wind. It's not an in-camera multi-exposure, the images have been combined after the fact using Enfuse (LR/Enfuse for Lightroom by Timothy Armes, to be precise - and the same effect is possible in Picasa by using the collage feature). The results of in-camera multi-exposure vs using Enfuse are almost identical, so it's not really necessary to wade through the menus of the camera. :-P

Swaying Rosy Clouds (NIKON D700 @ ISO 800; f/8, 105 mm DX)

I had the camera at ISO800 to get a reasonably fast shutter speed of 1/160s, set it to continuous shooting mode, and that's it. Just cropped it in Lightroom and adjusted contrast & colors a bit.

This rotten way of a multi-exposure has led to an even more rotten technique of getting sharp handhold macros... just firing off a burst of shots, and usually one of them has the sharpness exactly where I wanted it. I then begun expanding that approach for photos with a relatively long shutter speed (blurring water)... I think I'll make a blogpost out of that. Thanks to that rotten technique, the shutter count of my D700 is already over 3000 releases... after just 4 weeks! Holy cattle, I celebrated the 10k release of the Fuji's shutter after something like 1 1/2 years...

Other than that... I pulled my own website and simply integrated the content as static Blogger pages to the Weblog page. I now use my name instead of "Everblog" as the blog title - makes more sense for the redirect when people come here from www.alex-kunz.de and land on the Tenset page (what's the Tenset? an idea by TOP) ...which reminds me that I have to finish it. :-P

In case you didn't know yet - my girlfriend Shuwen and I met through Picasa Web Albums. And we just found out that we're not the only Picasa Web Albums couple! "Bill" and "dOrataya" also met through Picasa Web Album and are engaged by now - how great is that?!

At the moment, I'm drowning in new photos... have to catch up with more than a week of pictures. Shuwen and I started a collaborative album where we collect pictures of a photo walk through Burghausen's old city.

To-Do list for the blog: 1. finally write Part II of the "Exploration" article and 2. do that "shoot out" between the D700 and S5pro, dynamic-range wise.