Just a quick teaser pic for now, taken with my Samsung T929:

Nikon D300, Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 DX VR lens, Manfrotto 488RC ballhead, Velbon EL Carmagne 640A carbon fiber tripod legs

Well, I finally bit the bullet…I placed my order for D300 body and this badass carbon fiber tripod on Friday:

Velbon EL Carmagne 640A Carbon Fiber Tripod Legs

Can’t really argue with a tripod that weighs about 3 lbs but can hold up to 25 lbs. w00t! I’ll definitely post up a review after I’ve put each through its paces.

My cousin Wence finally got his Advan TC-IIs on, so it was time for a quick shoot. These will eventually make it to TunerZine when I get a chance to take a few more photos. Special thanks to Kate for scoping out the location. This was my first time really experimenting with my SB-600 off camera + Lightsphere for automotive photography, and I think it turned out pretty damn well. A few photos, then the rest of the gallery:

I’m a month behind on posting this, but oh well.  For Mother’s Day, I made my mom a photobook of our trip to France last year.  The book has a leather cover and about 50 pages of the photos both my dad and myself took during our 2 1/2 weeks in France.  I’m extremely happy with how the book turned out and it made my mom quite happy too   This serves as a good example of the type of photobooks I can make for anything, especially weddings or a car build-up portfolio.  I use a book similar to this for my own photography portfolio as well.

I’ve been meaning to post up my review of this phone since it replaced my venerable Sony Ericsson w810i a few months ago. My old phone is still going strong is Kyle’s hands, and I still miss it to a certain extent. However, when I found out that this new Samsung Memoir not only had an 8 Megapixel camera (yes that’s correct, 8MP) but also 3G internet browsing, it was a pretty quick decision for me. There’s definitely more technical reviews out there that go over each and every feature with a video, but I just wanted to share my own personal experience with this phone after a few months of use. First off a few photos of the phone itself. The first two photos below show the gel case that I purchased with the phone when I first bought it. So far, the gel case has been a very good investment, but the phone definitely feels smaller and more sleek without the case.

Here’s how the phone looks outside of the case. The touchscreen is very bright and pretty responsive. It’s not quite as responsive or as accurate as the iPhone, but it’s also not pretending to be an iPhone either. The side bar on the left are widgets that you can customize to your liking. Obviously, you can see that I customized the wallpaper too.

Here’s the camera business side of the phone. It features a Xenon flash that’s very bright and effective, better than even most dedicated point-and-shoot cameras. The only drawback is that you can’t use it as a flashlight, which is one feature I miss from my old phone. The lens cover stays shut whenever the phone is not in camera mode, but then snaps open once camera mode is enabled.

The main menu is very straight-forward, and you can get to each feature very fast. It plays MP3s fairly well, but navigating through some of the files can be a little cumbersome.

The phone features 3G internet access, but the preloaded browser isn’t the greatest. It sometimes even croaks on websites that it calls “too large.” It does get the job done for the most part though, and I typically don’t have any problems finding what I need to. The browser doesn’t support Flash, but it does allow for secure connections, so checking my online banking is simple and easy. You can also download Java-powered apps and games, but they have to be unsigned. On top of that, the QWERTY keyboard can be a pain to enable on Java apps such as Opera Mini.

And now we get to the whole reason why I purchased this phone: the 8 MP camera. The camera has more features than I’ve ever seen on any other camera phone, including zoom, multiple scene and shooting modes, countdown timer, white balance adjustment, ISO sensitivity, custom metering, contrast/saturation/sharpness adjustment, guidelines, and even GPS embedding. Here’s how one of the photos looks on the photo review.

The camera definitely lacks shutter and aperture adjustment, but really wasn’t expecting that either, since I’m sure allowing for that would make the lens and mechanicals much more expensive.
Also, since the flash is very close to the lens, red eye can be an (albeit fixable) issue. Video is pretty high quality, however I find the microphone to be much too sensitive, so recording audio at live concerts and the like doesn’t even come out at all. Hopefully, this might be an easy firmware fix sometime in the future. The phone uses a MicroSD card and supports up to 16 GB. I’ve got an 8 GB card in mine right now, so I have no problem holding hundreds of photos, music, and video as well. Here’s a few sample photos taken with this camera, each of which have had a small amount of post-processing to make them look a little better. For a camera phone, I think these photos came out extremely nice.

Overall, I definitely wouldn’t replace a good, dedicated point-and-shoot camera with this phone, but if you’re out at the club or away from your big DSLR, this phone works great as a “just-in-case” or emergency camera.  To sum it up, here’s a list of my pros and cons:

Pros

• 8 MP camera is pretty damn good
• Text messaging and standard phone functions are great
• Good volume and speakerphone
• Responsive touchscreen
• 3G secure web browsing
• Decent battery life when using all the different functions
• Plays MP3s and videos, and can be configured as ringtones for contacts

Cons

• No shutter speed or aperture adjustment on camera
• Microphone for video too sensitive
• Can only run unsigned Java apps and lacks good apps overall
• No WiFi
• Touchscreen not quite as responsive or accurate as iPhone
• Samsung doesn’t sync contacts or calendar with Mac
• Smugmug not included in bundled photo upload services
• File browsing a little cumbersome

In short, you really do buy this phone for the camera and basic phone and text functions.  It’s definitely a very good backup/just-in-case camera.  If you’re thinking that this is a smartphone, you’re lying to yourself, and it’s definitely no iPhone killer either.  It really does get the job done and does it well for my tastes.  The only thing I really do miss from my old phone is the Mac contact and calendar syncing, but just about everything else is a vast improvement.

My friend RJ showed this to me today while I was at work and I finally got around to watching it.  Good stuff!  I’m definitely going to keep these simple but very effective techniques in mind

Christy Schuler’s Retouching Tutorials

It’s June, and that means it’s Graduation Season. My cousins Mike and Margaret graduated from Seattle University and Seattle Vocational Institute, respectively. I’m very proud of both of them, with Mike graduating Cum Laude in Fine Arts and Humanities double major, and Margaret landing a a solid, well-paying Medical Assistant job well before graduating and the University of Washington Medical Center. Good job, you guys!

My D200’s high ISO noise is really starting to show its age in these photos, with all the telephoto images being taken with my 70-200mm f/2.8 VR. Flash photos were taken with my venerable 17-55mm f/2.8. I really need to get my hands on a D300, but the rumors of the D300s are throwing me for a loop. I’ll be talking about that at some other point. Onto the photos:

I was having some stupid problems with the tabs at the top of the page…one pixel was leftover underneath the tab image, causing that to highlight with mouseover.  After several hours, I finally found the solutions here:

http://www.nixer.org/css-space-underneath-image

I hate coding…argh!  But it’s fixed…and it’s probably something no one else would’ve cared about too :/

I was on a mission to get this conversion to WordPress finished today, and now I’m proud to say it’s just about how I want it! I’ll be playing around with more plugins and widgets here and there, but everything is working right. If you guys see any typos or links that don’t work, please let me know! I hope to really be updating this blog regularly, since I also have it cross-posting to Facebook’s notes automatically via RSS feed. Enjoy!

Testing the SmugMug functionality!