whirlwind

The past couple of weeks have been a whirlwind. I’ve been doing a lot of DIY photography equipment projects. I’ll detail some of them in different posts. I have learned more about photography in the past couple of weeks than I have since purchasing my D80. A lot of this knowlege has come from reading the Strobist blog. I’m no longer scared to use the manual mode on my camera as I feel that I have a good theoretical handle on how aperature, shutter speed, and ISO each affect the exposure of the image.

I picked up a Nikon 50mm f/1.4D lens for taking portraits and headshots. It’s a pretty amazing lens. I’m still playing with it, but right out of the box it was taking amazing pictures. I really like the shallow depth of field when shooting at f/1.4.

Getting the flash off my camera has been awesome. I was playing with Nikon’s CLS and my SB-600 for the last couple of weeks, but I had no way of triggering my Vivitar 285HV that Laura got me for Christmas. To fix that, I picked up a cheap set of Cactus V2s wireless triggers for $56 shipped. They’re not Pocket Wizards, but they will allow me to take this hobby to a new level. Maybe one day I’ll get the pocket wizards. They are working pretty well for me. One will sync my SB600 at 1/250s and the other will sync the 285HV at 1/200s. Stock range is good. I took them down to my parking garage ad was getting about 100 feet out of them. Since I can’t leave anything stock, I’ve heavily modified the triggers. Details in yet another future post.

I’ve also signed back up at the local community college.  I’m planning to take Pasadena City College’s Intro to Photography class. Figured that I might learn something and also to network with other local beginning photographers. Also, it will be good to have assignments to force me (or to give me an excuse) to go out and shoot.

I’ve got lots of good stuff to blog about, but no time to blog. I’ll try and fix this over the next few nights. Expect lots of posts/updates from me.