Day of the Dead South Florida - Fat Village Art Walk

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On Friday, November 2, 2012, people of all ages painted their faces like skeletons and descended on Fat Village Arts District in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. There was a skeleton procession down Andrews Ave., art exhibitions, live music, circus performers, custom cars, food trucks, and more. To see more of my photos, visit my Facebook album, Day of the Dead 2012.

Moonlight over flooded A1A along Fort Lauderdale Beach

Earlier this afternoon, bulldozers and front end loaders piled up the beach sand that covered A1A, in an attempt to keep the ocean out of the road. By 8:30pm, the ocean was back in the street, with the water level higher than the sidewalks.

For more photos of this event, visit design215.com/photos/a1a_flooding.

Nikon D7000 with Nikkor 10.5mm f/2.8 fisheye lens. Exposure: f/2.8 3s ISO 800

Ocean floods A1A along Fort Lauderdale Beach

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A combination of weather, tides, and the moon caused major flooding on A1A, along Fort Lauderdale Beach today. Police had to close the road from NE 18th ST to Sunrise Blvd. Some residents were trapped or didn't want to cause damage to their vehicles by trying to drive through the salt water. There had been rain earlier in the day but the skies were clearing by high tide. I've photographed this event in the past but I've never seen it this bad. In 2008, it was an inconvenience but at least the road remained open. Are ocean levels rising? What is this going to look like in 10 years?

UPDATE 11.26.2012:
I made a gallery for this event, with updated photos: design215.com/photos/a1a_flooding

West Palm Beach 360 Degree Panorama

This is one of the first panoramas I've made with my new Nodal Ninja 3 panoramic head. For this shot, I used the Nodal Ninja to take 8 photos at 45 degree increments. The Nodal Ninja also allows you to position the camera to eliminate parallax.

I used Hugin to stitch the images together on my Macbook Pro. Hugin is free and very powerful but it has a little bit of a learning curve. There are numerous features I haven't even played with yet. After using Hugin, I ended up with a nice, wide, rectangular panorama.

Finally, I brought my "normal" panoramic image into Photoshop and used Polar Coordinates to create the image you see here. There are many tutorials on the web that explain how to do this, although I found some variation between them. At some point, I might do a complete tutorial of my own but I'm still figuring out some details and I don't like to teach something until I've mastered it myself. =)

Nikon D7000 with Nikkor 10.5mm f/2.8 fisheye lens. Exposure: f/8 8s ISO 400 x 8 images.
Manfrotto tripod. Fanotec Nodal Ninja 3 w/RD16 Rotator.

Keeley Lynn Graveyard Shoot

Today I did an impromptu shoot with my friend Keeley Lynn. The weather wasn't great but we wanted to do something outdoors. I knew of this little old graveyard off of the 17th St Causeway and I think it worked perfectly.

Nikon D7000 with Nikkor 105mm f/2.5 manual focus lens. Exposure: f/5.6 1/125 ISO 400.

Nikon D800 Sharpness Test - Tikidoll Sakura

 

The two photos above are from one of the first test shoots I did with my new Nikon D800 camera. My friend Tikidoll Sakura modeled one of her latest outfits. The area outlined in the first photo is enlarged in the second photo. Click on the second photo to see a 1:1 view of this area. No additional sharpening was applied to the image. I say "additional" because some sharpening is done in the camera at its default setting.

Before I purchased the D800, I was a little worried about sharpness because 1) many people were talking about it, and 2) Nikon offered a second version of the camera, the D800E. Nevertheless, I bought the regular D800 and I'm glad I did. After examining the images from this shoot, I cannot imagine the need for anything sharper. You can count the individual threads in the straps of the model's garter belt!

All of this extra sharpness actually created more work for me. I found myself retouching tiny little spots and specks that you would never see when the image is resized for the web or even for small print. I could have applied a small amount of blur or one of my noise filters to clean up the image but I wanted to leave the overall image untouched in order to demonstrate the sharpness of this camera.

Although the sharpness of the D800 goes beyond my expectations, some users might have trouble getting super sharp photos. This camera will test the limits of your lenses. If you are not using one of Nikon's sharpest lenses, you will not get the same results shown here. Also, I manually focus all of my shots to get the best results. You might find the camera is a little less forgiving when you are focusing. Because the D800 is a full frame camera, your depth of field will appear shallower than a DX camera, for a given lens.

Nikon D800 with Nikkor 105mm f/2.5 manual focus lens. Exposure: f/8 1/125 ISO 100.

Pineapple Grove, Delray Beach, FL

Tonight, I was wandering around Delray Beach again. I was looking for something unusual to photograph but nothing was really jumping out at me. I've photographed Delray many times before and I have a number of long exposures with trails from car taillights and so on. I just wanted something different. Earlier, I was talking to a woman who was also walking around with her camera, trying to get some interesting shots. One of her shots was a palm tree in Pineapple Grove, that was wrapped with "light rope". While her picture was nice, I wanted something more. I walked over to Pineapple Grove to see if anything there would inspire me. First, I climbed up in one of the planters and literally hugged one of the palm trees, in an effort to get an interesting shot. I was looking straight up the trunk of the tree. Nope, didn't do it. Finally, I reached in my bag and took out my fisheye lens. I lay down in the middle of the courtyard, flat on my back, with my head firmly against the ground, and took this shot. People thought I was nuts. One man came over to me with his wife and said he had to know what I was doing. I showed him the picture in my camera and he said, "Oh wow!! That's amaing!" and showed it to his wife.

Nikon D7000 with Nikkor 10.5mm f/2.8 fisheye lens. Exposure: f/2.8 1/4s ISO 800.

Nikon D800 vs. Nikon D7000 with a DX Lens

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I just received my Nikon D800 a few days ago and I'm still learning all of its nuances. The D800 is a full frame camera, meaning the image sensor is the same size as 35mm film. If you attach a standard 35mm lens, you will get the same coverage that you would get on a 35mm film camera. This is nice. I can finally use my Nikkor 24mm f/2.8 lens to take wide angle pictures like I used to do with film. When I put my 24mm lens on my Nikon D7000, the image is cropped because the sensor is smaller. On the D7000, my 24mm lens becomes like a 36mm lens. Not so good if you want a wide angle shot. Nikon calls the D7000 a "DX" format camera while the D800 is called an "FX" or "Full Frame" format camera. All of my good old fashioned, 35mm lenses that I used to use on my film camera, are FX lenses. Some of the newer lenses that I bought for cameras like the D70, D90, D200, and D7000, are DX lenses. DX lenses use smaller glass elements because they're made for the smaller sensor cameras. If you put a DX lens on a 35mm film camera or a FX digital camera, the image from the lens won't always fill the whole frame. You'll see black around the edges of the image, known as vignetting.

When you put a DX lens on the Nikon D800, the camera automatically crops the image just like a DX camera. In other words, if you're using a DX lens, you'll see roughly the same thing on a D800 as you would on a D7000. If you take a picture with a DX lens on the D800, you'll get a 16 megapixel image, not a 36 megapixel one! Yes, you read that right. With a DX lens, the D800 might as well be a D7000 with a few extra features. But wait...

I'm pleased to tell you that you can turn off the DX crop feature!! Yes, you can go into the menus of the D800 and set it to take full, 36 megapixel images all the time, no matter what lens you stick on the camera. This is awesome. One of my favorite lenses is my DX 35mm f/1.8 lens. You can buy this lens brand new for less than $200, its super sharp, and its an f/1.8 lens! Ah, but its a DX lens. That's why its so cheap. Anywhere you look for this lens online, it will say something like, "DX lenses are NOT recommended for use with FX or Full Frame Cameras." I'm sorry, but rules in photography are meant to be broken. Don't tell me not to try my DX lenses on my FX camera! Thankfully, someone at Nikon knew there would be people like me out there and included the option to TURN OFF the DX crop!!

I set up a tripod on the Pompano Beach fishing pier and used my DX 35mm f/1.8 lens on both cameras. Both cameras were set to the same exposure and the images are unretouched. The inner image from the D7000 is the same image you get with the D800 and its DX crop feature turned on. When you turn off the DX crop on the D800, look what you get! Yes, there is some vignetting around the edges but is that so bad? Obviously it depends on what you're shooting but its nice to know I have the freedom to choose whether I want my images cropped in the camera or not.

Finally, the D800 gives me a third option, called the "1.2" crop, which is between the DX crop and full frame. I'm not sure where I would use it because I can always shoot full frame and just crop it later in Photoshop. Having options is always nice though. Kudos Nikon!

Nikon D800/D7000 with Nikon DX 35mm f/1.8 lens. Exposure: f/4.0 2.0s ISO 1600.