D700 - First Impressions

As you may have heard, I recently picked up a Nikon D700.

1st impression: Wow this thing is heavy.

2nd impression: holy moly this manual is huuuge (as in 444 pages)

3rd impression: It's all in English (obviously wasn't printed in Cali).

Seriously, this is one beast of a camera.

Here are my favorite features (as of yet, just got the camera late last week):

Auto ISO: You tell the camera what is the slowest shutter speed you want and the highest ISO you want and it will magically raise the ISO when the speed gets too slow. This is something I have dreamed about and saves hours of fiddling with buttons and dials and switches and menus oh my!

AutoFocus: This camera does a better job focusing on the eyes (which is where you usually want your portraits focused) in full autofocus mode (no points selected) than my Canon did with a certain point selected and aimed right on the eye.

AutoFocus 2: The Nikons have this amazing tracking mode where you tell the camera what you want to focus on and wherever that object moves, it follows, and it works! I shot my bro-in-law running around with an old 70-210 lens and it got 7 out of 10 hots in perfect focus (where my canon would get 1 out of 10, the first one).

Okay. Pause. I started this post almost two months ago. In the interim my camera died! Took my cf card out, stuck it in my reader, transferred the epics my comp, put the card back in the camera and BANG. Camera shut off and wouldn't turn on.

Shoot back in time a bit. (I'm writing this on my iPad so it's going a bit slowish). I was looking at dif places. To buy a camera online and eventually settled on ButterflyPhoto. Why? Because Bing gave me percent back and it was a good price to start (almost too good). Extremely stupid reason to choose a store. Before I bought it I called to make sure it had a USA warrantee, they said yes, but I should have asked for an email to that effect so I would have some proof if it didn't. So i get the camera, doesn't have a warrantee inside and comes with a European wire with an adapter. Warning bells go off, I call ButterflyPhoto freaking out and they tell it is a USA warrantee but since things are odd (they said it usually comes with both wires, one must have fallen out. Right.) they would send a USA wire and a 3 year warrantee from CMS (never heard of them), and they would sen me an email certifying it was a USA model (which they never did).

So a few weeks later after being in shooting heaven my camera won't turn on and I highly doubt that Nikon will take care of it.

So I timidly go to the Nikon repair center in Manhattan Beach (Cali) and lo and behold it's a USA model under warrantee and they said they will take care of it!

Turns out the card reader screwed up the CF card which screwed up the camera and pushed some pins into the AC power thingamajig (holy cow! My iPad actually recognized that as a word, but it can't get a city name straight unless I capitalize it). The Nikon rep said it was my fault and they shouldn't have covered it but they did anyway (4 points for Nikon).

Morals of the story: 1. Forget about saving a buck here and there, just buy the camera from B&H and get over it. 2. Don't spend too much time worrying if your camera has a warrantee. 3. Get a decent CF card reader. 4. Don't tell you wife that the camera you just bought instead of a dishwasher is broken and might not be under warrantee (I didn't tell her until it was at the Nikon repair center and they assured me they would fix it). She really appreciated not having to worry along with me.

Now that I got my camera back, I want to shoot instead of writing reviews, so I'll get back to that eventually.

Tracht Gut Vet Zein Gutg

Texas Hold Em'

First official photoshoot (occurred a few weeks ago). I walked around the park like 3 times, scouting out the best "open shade". Never found any. But we did move around bit, hanging out under the trees, getting some fun sunny shots, hanging out by the lake, good times. It helped that the fam I was shooting had mucho patience and the kid was ultra cute (you should hear her vernacular!).

She picked these flowers and paraded all around with them, couldn't have been more perfect.

But then, the figurative skies darkened and imaginary rain began to pour.

I had an epiphany: My camera could not autofocus on any of the outer focus points to save its life. I threatened to drown it, choke it, burn it, blend it, all to no avail. So I was left with quite a bit of beautiful out of focus pics (and some in focus ones thank gosh). And so started my search for the lean, mean, spot on focusing machine (which I wouldn't have to mortgage my apartment for, which I can't because I'm renting and my landlord would blow a fit).

I am proud to proclaim my victory over darkness: the Nikon D700 (thank you Mr. Szental for your wonderful help in the matter).

"But you are heavily invested in Canon?!" exclaims my dismayed (imaginary) reader.

No I'm not, silly. 3 lenses and a flash does not a heavy investor make. To the market they must go. Although I shall miss my first love with photography, I have to move on to greener and in-focus pastures. Out with you, my beloved 100mm f/2.8 Macro, the junk blurring, 50mm f/1.8 and you shoddy wimp of a lens you 18-55mm aperture changing piece of garbage. Off to the trading market with you all. Goodbye to my Canon Rebel T1 and all of its 18megabytes. Marvin K. Mooney, the time is now.

Purim in Mexico

This is a postcard I made for my wonderful brother and his Chabad House. The theme was obviously mexico and the food rocked. Viva Le Mexico! (is that right?)

here, have some sand

here, have some sand, originally uploaded by asparagus festival.

Chanaleh having a lot of fun throwing sand at me. It is beyond my limited capabilities as a thought thinking thinker as to why kids must throw sand. I think the thought process must go something like this: "I like tatty's face when he has things in his eyes and has to make all sorts of funny faces to dislodge the particles. Let's see how many pieces of sand I could get in his beard this time." Or maybe more like: "I like french fries. Let's throw sand. I want a bicycle." I think it may be closer to the latter.

Zevi's Upshernish Invitation

This was way too much fun to design. No clients' wacky idea of what a good design, no limits, no boardroom decisions. Just me, my laptop, Photoshop and some fun pictures to deal with (and my wife to edit it).

The picture isn't perfect (shutter speed was too slow, didn't know much about that stuff yet), But it totally does the job.

I actually got the idea from my upshernish invitation some 38 years ago (that was a joke). It was a picture of me with some verbiage also to the effect of "I want to look like a boy already". When I find a copy I'll post it here. I guess the quacky ideas run in the family. (I didn't just figure that out now).

We had a very small event, only family and such, so most people never had the pleasure of feasting their eyes on this lovely piece of art. So I am posting it here for Cyber-eternity (until my server dies, or is blownup, or hacked by some Russian kid, or censored by the Internet-police, or until 2012 (we all know what's gonna happen then, don't we).

I intend to post some designs I've worked on/am working on/will work on(?) every once in a while, so this is going to be first of many (with the help of g-d).

Once upon a time, when I first tried out blogging, I had quite a funny blog going on. Somehow my writing style has lapsed into boring/insipid territory, so I'm hoping it will improve with practice. We'll see.

Until then:

This is soon to be world famous Zalmy Berkowitz, adding to the millions of boring bloggers out there, daily (weekly/monthly). Over and out.