Sometimes the best way to photograph something natural is indoors, using a studio setup. This kind of studio doesn't have to be anything fancy, although you do have to pay attention to light and exposure. Often, the setup for indoor still life photography of natural objects such as flowers, shells, and insects is pretty ad-hoc and jury rigged. Case in...

Proving once again that a digital camera is a computer with a lens on front, yesterday I upgraded the firmware (or BIOS) of my Nikon D300. This was a simple process. I downloaded the file containing the up-to-date firmware to my Mac (of course, you can use a Windows PC as well). I de-compressed the file, and copied it to...

I've been shooting in low light at ISO 6400, partly on the grounds that my Nikon D300 is remarkably low noise, and partly on the grounds that noise can be used as part of the aeshetic of an image. My photos of the jellyfish in the aquarium tanks at Monterey are examples of this kind of high ISO work. However,...

In a previous story, I showed imposition proofs for my Light & Exposure for Digital Photographers laid out on our living room floor. I noted that the book is due out in the next few months, published by O'Reilly, and is being printed in Italy. As I explained, imposition proofs are used to determine the layout of the book into...

In my review of the Nikon D300, I promised to look into its Active D-Lighting feature. Besides pure intellectual curiousity, and the deep desire to be helpful to my readers, I needed to know how to manage this camera setting. As I noted in an earlier post, Active D-Lighting is written up as a kind of in-camera extension of dynamic...

Yesterday was a beautiful and sunny interlude in the Bay area's morass of soggy weather. Towards sunset, I grabbed Julian (my 10 year old) and we headed for Indian Rock. Julian climbed up, over, around, and through the rocks while I set up my tripod and long lens. The sun was a giant round ball, and I had hopes of...

Why do I show my work on Flickr? There are a number of reasons, but they boil down to 1,496,603. Let me explain my affair with Flickr. When I started Photoblog 2.0 in May 2005, I made the decision to serve my photos out of Flickr. This means that the several thousand photos in my blog are sitting on Flickr's...

I'm really excited to have three photography books coming out in the next few months. These are very different books. The commonality is that each of the three books is illustrated with my photos, and that I've written the text as well. Here's a quick description of my books, along with the book covers. In the due fullness of time,...

Each of the large sheets of paper shown in the photo below represents a signature of 16 or 24 pages that will be bound into the final, printed version of my new book, Light & Exposure for Digital Photographers. The book is due out in the next few months from O'Reilly, and is being printed in Italy. In the photo,...

OK. I'm going to give the punch line away. I love my new Nikon D300. I love this camera with a passion that rivals that of my feelings for some film cameras in the days of yore like my Leicas, my Nikon FM2, and my large format Deardorf. This is the first digital Single Lens Reflex (dSLR) that I've used...