Nikon D800 Coming Soon

Hello Again all.  I actually forgot about my third installment of  building a photoshop pc but should hopefully get to it soon.  After much  waiting and debating I finally pulled the trigger and picked up a d800 from b&h. I picked up the bundle kit so should have it by Monday and should have some samples and my thoughts posted shortly after that. With the holidays here I should hopefully get some very interesting shots to test the d800. hopefully I will also be free of the dreaded focus issues and etc.. But what the hell i'll try to get it fixed or make compromises. He'll life is full of them what are really going to do. you pay 3000 for a camera you expect it to be perfect, but the same could be said about paying money for your home and car insurance. You find out sooner or later that paying that premium may not give or get you exactly what you paid for. But for now thats all. 

Keep learning growing and shooting

Part2: Building A Photoshop & Lightroom Computer able to run a Nikon D600 or D800 2012

As promised the computer is built and up and running,  I'm also still alive :-) .  As I've read online your first build can be quite nerve racking. But let me tell you not knowing what to and how to touch things will make you very crazy but when you get a hand on everything with the exception of the few bottlenecks damn graphics card, it will hopefully be smooth sailing for you, so lets get started.

1. Pieces Of kit to buy:

 

I've read online that the first thing you should start with is picking your processor chip followed by  motherboard, but like most photographers, we see aesthetics first.  So before we get to the guts lets take a look at the shell.




Ladies and gentlemen if you have never seen or heard of this computer case before let me introduce you to the NZXT Phantom410 midtower computer case.  When I first saw this case it was lust at first sight.  I just knew we had to be together.  For those of you in your early thirties or older, this case just screams Star Wars Stormtrooper.  With the sleek lines and hints of blue led case and fan lights, omg.    This case comes standard with  3 fans. I know for sure the exhaust  fan is located in the very back of the case.  Upfront, in the black grated area there is an in take.  There is also a top fan, but I'm not sure if this fan is an exhaust or intake. There's also room in the case to add another 3 fans is you so please. At this point the pc seems to run pretty ok with the 3 standard but I plan on adding more as i become more comfortable with going in and out of the case. The case also comes stock with a built in 3 speed fan controller and 2 usb3.0 ports and 2 usb 2.0 ports on the top of the case located along the right most black strip. If you want to find out more about this B.A.C.  please google or youtube or keyword search phantom410. There  is a ton of information out there on this model and other nzxt products. 

Ok, so lets get back to the internals, drool session is over.

Sorry turned into a rant, see the next paragraph skip to next paragraph if your not in the mood 

So next I did some research on what motherboard. Of course 99.99% of my case yielded results of overclockers and other prepubescence touting their all knowing info of gaming mods and overclocking and 20 other terms that I really have no idea of what the hell they're talking about. So thankfully my keyword searching finally yielded a photographer, yeah get this a photographer who built his pc to use to run Photoshop.  You would be surprised how far and few photographers actually build there own machines or at least share the info.  It kinda felt like trying to find a needle in a haystack.  I'm guessing most photographers don't want the headache of dealing with camera gear, equip, models clients etc.. than to have to come home and update bios and trouble shoot computer hardware.  I also understand that is the reason why most people prefer Macs.  Macs, well they just work.  I however am an adventurous soul, which could still prove costly and disastrous if things die prematurely or go wrong. My logic is this.  I really don't have the money to buy a mac to the standards of this machine and if I do it will be to the standards of a machine that may get by for a while but then I'll still need to upgrade.  But with price set aside I love macs but at heart I'm a die hard pc guy.  Now My other option was to do dell again.  For the machine I wanted dell was about 9-$1100 dollars out of my price range and still didn't offer a lot of the things found in a custom build. I also figured if something went wrong with my dell pc or died I would still have to play the shuffle back and forth and tech support game. Which shipping a 25-30lb pc back and forth and waiting for tech support to come and not be able to fix the problem on site priceless.  So I guess I'll take my chances with me and also turn it into a learning experience.  Ok I've gone off on a tangent again.  I call this long winded paragraph a rant.  

Mother Board

So I picked the Msi-Z77A-GD65 Motherboard. This will be the heart of my system.   This board is able to hold a total at this point (which will more than likely be obsolete by this time next year-2013) 32gigs of ram.  I hear the d600 and or d800 runs perfectly fine on about 8-12gigs, so with ram being cheap I decided to throw caution to the wind and instead of getting a solid state drive, throw the extra money into memory.  As they say you can never have enough memory with Photoshop, and this will also come in handy as I plan on doing some video editing once I get the new camera. But I can't stress enough how much I love this board and its fairly easy to follow and simple bios and utility settings.   

As a side note and helpful information for anyone reading this, I got most of my ideas from the photographers blog site which I neglected to mention in my rant above.  This photographers post kinda gave me the extra gumption to get building.  His work is really cool also check him out here

Christian Carroll Building a Photoshop machine on a budget

I don't have a link but you should also check out PCGAMER  fall 2012 edition.  its entitled Step-by step guide- to building your own gaming pc.  It also just so happens to use the same case that I used, but in a gun metal color.  Did I mention the case comes in several different colors?

Processor Chip

Basing my build pretty much to what Christian Carroll did, I built my system with the same motherboard and processor chip.  The chosen Chip was the 2nd generation Intel Core I7-2600k  Sandy bridge chip. The stock clock speed of this processor is 3.4ghz. The processor also has intels turbo boost technology, but If you want to push some extra performance out of this chip, the "k" means that it can be overclocked, and that my friends is where I checkout as a computer geek and as a photographer and as an investor in my pc. I don't want or have the time to play with latency's clock times droops vdroops and cooling goo and etc... That is out of my league. For the time being I will leave well enough alone as turbo boost should be more than enough for my work flow.  But its good to know that the option is there if needed.

Power Supply

   

After looking at both Christians Blog post and the article from pc gamer, I chose to use the Corsiar Tx750psu.  I've read this is great for gaming enthusiast, so it should be great for my needs.  I also believe I could have gotten about with about 550-600watt unit, but I believe its better to air on the side of caution.  To much power not such a bad thing.  To little and you could damage parts of your system or have them not work at all. There are sites online you can research to determine your exact needs, but finding a gamer or overclockers website forum should yield some pretty good answers.  This pic is also a little deceiving, the odd octopus of scary ass wires and connectors that await you are not displayed here :-)  .  But once you get everything sorted out its not so bad.

Memory 

Corsair Vengeance.  I choose 4 sticks of memory with each stick being a total of 8gbs (32gbs total).    in almost any information I found about Photoshop from photography forums photoshop is a memory hog and the more the better.  Which means I actually really could have went with an i5 processor and been fine, but for the sake of my chosen motherboard I had researched I was fine with my selection.  Having extra memory will not hurt to have around, and if you moonlight playing video games or video editing it might be more than welcome.  But I think my pc might be able to stand up to higher mpix medium format say 80gbs(maybe Im pushing it)with the specs I have but who knows.

Hard drive 

I picked 2 western digital 1 terabyte  each drive. given me a total of  2 drives.  My inital plan was to have 3 hard drives and 1 solid state drive.

The 1st would be for the operating system

2nd was for applications  Photoshop, Lightroom etc..

3rd for media and photo storage.

lastly the solid state drive would be used as a scratch disk. 

Well Like I said, I had a budget to keep to $1500 or under. So I traded my scratch disk for extra memory and the third drive for the time being, will be my external seagate black drive which already hold all of my lightroom and p.shop treasures. If your in the same boat I would most definitely try to have at least 2 hard drives. one for the operating system and 1 for applications.  

Video Card

 

This video card is not top of the line. It is an EVGA GTX560 (not the ti version shown above) 

The budget was crying and had I did more research I may have skipped the card altogether. What do you mean what about photoshop and the entire open gl thing?

  Well from what I gather online there are some tricks and tips and things that photoshop will use the video card for but with the 2nd and 3rd generation of intel chips, I understand you can do pretty well with the on board graphics built into the processor chip.  This particular card has a modest (gamer standards anyway)  1gb of memory built into the card.  This card also runs on Nvidia software.  I believe even cs6 only really requires 512mb of dedicated graphics memory. So, if you do light photoshopping and not to much gaming try to find a card that still supports the open gl standards for photoshop but at a smarter price point than I did. This card was also almost the death of me, well the card anyway it was the single component that gave me a headache and was almost sent back as broken :-( , but I'll save that for the wrap up in the 3rd and final portion of this 3 part on my pc build. 

Cpu Fan 

I also would like to add that I used the boxed version cpu fan cooler that came with the chip.  right now I'm running temps between 39-50 degrees Celsius  So about 80-120 degrees Fahrenheit.  It wasn't so much the 35 bucks I would have had to smack down for this coolermaster ev0 212, but I did some reading and figured that since I have no plans on overclocking my cpu this would be just fine, but with hindsight being 20/20 I should have picked up the much better ev0 212.  Heat is most definitely an enemy of pc components and   the cooler you can keep this puppy the happier it will be. So I would highly suggest you dump the standard and go right to the coolermaster.  Because now I have to try and disconnect my fan maybe move some ram around and then try to add the new cooler. And know I also have to remove the thermal paste and clean the top of the chip off this sounds very dicey.  

Disk Drive

I also picked up this cheap drive, i'm not even sure if it will play dvd's but for $30 bucks it was more than adequate to get my system up and going to install windows and a host of drivers and  p-shop & lighroom 

So look forward to my thoughts and some problems that I ran into in my 3rd and final post on building a pc to run photoshop and handle d800 and or d600.  As always please keep shooting.  

And remember if you have a few bucks and have always been thinking about building a pc why not give it a try. I'm not the most technical  person and with a little help and online tutorial you can do it also. Remember baring all factors for the most part we are the only thing that holds up back. 

Prepping for an upgrade: Building a Computer to run D800 or D600

Hello all, its been  sometime since my last post.  At this time I think its time to upgrade from my d700 and take a look at something new.  I've had my eye on the D800, but the D600 although, a step in the wrong direction, looks very enticing.  My Laptop probably has a few months on my camera or the other way around.  The i5 is still nice and speedy, but hard drive and 4gigs of ram won't cut it for these beast machines.  I played with a raw or 2 in photoshop cs5 which actually worked better than expected, but like I said playing around.  Had I started adding layers and tons of manip my laptop may have tried to give up the ghost.  Also, I do 90% of my work in Lightroom which means one way or another its time for an upgrade. 

 What I've decided is that building my own machine is the way to go, hopefully not a very expensive learning lesson.  I've decided to forgo giving dell my hard earned dollars this time around and give it a shot myself.  Funny thing is I've scoured the Internet looking for help building a computer geared toward portrait photographers/photographers/photoshop and surprisingly didn't find to much.  So, with that said I hope to make this a journey that people in the same boat as me will be able to hopefully find some useful advice and helpful info.  I did however find one very good blog which I not sure how active the blogger is anymore, but with some great build info which got me started.  I most def  check out his site great pics and great advice. you can find the site here Great photoshop Cs6 computer build.

 Again, I hope my build goes will and I plan on blogging about the experience hopefully when I decided d800 or d600 to post some vids on the build to supply further help. Thats all for now please keep shooting.

Words

Hello all, its been awhile since my last post. Usually I try to keep it light on words but it never really happens, so this time just a brief intro and just some pics. The following pics were taking at a photo shoot in nyc's famed 42nd Street Times Square. Again as a photographer I'm learning that if you want to be seen you need to be heard.  The model in this set of pics was just a tourist from Germany.  I was in the middle of helping a friend on another photo shoot when this stunning young lady curiously came upon our shoot.  The hair stylist approached her and next thing you know where involved in a full fledged photo shoot. Lesson learned. A closed mouth doesn't get fed. And a closed mouth doesn't get the photo shoot. keep shooting..

p.s. Mark Wallce and Zack Arias to name a few would  tear me to shreds not be very happy with me as I've broken most of the rules here in terms of framing. ie, limbs cutoff above and below certain places but with time and practice I'll pull it all together.

Manhattan-Changing West Side Part-I

Learning While Behind The Scenes

Alien Bee / Paul Buff 11" Long Throw Reflector

Inspired by Zack Arias and his wide angle work and use of grids with the alienbee 7" reflector, I've taken a leap of faith with the 11"ltr.

Name That Lighting Pattern

While watching some of Mark Wallace's great youtube video's (Traditional Lighting Setups:Ep 206) I decided that I would do a quick study and write up trying a few of the patterns

Please forgive me as there was no post processing other than turning these raw files into low res jpegs to post up.  All of these pics were shot using a standard alienbee  classic 7" reflector.  The same effect can be achieved using a soft box, but without complete darkness it becomes much harder to see the light.  The 1st pattern we have here is very simple to do.

Loop Lighting- is named for the loop-shaped shadow that it creates under the nose, this is probably the most used lighting pattern.  It is a relatively flattering and adaptable pattern that lights a large portion of the face while giving a sense of depth.  This light is conceived by placing the main light above the face(not to high now) at about a 45° angle.  The sitters face, in this case I call her my girlfriend :-) , face is also angled away from the light. 

Which is soo-cool about this is that it actually creates another type of pattern which we will call for all intensive purposes broad lighting. 

Broad Lighting- this can be defined as light hitting or illuminating the broad side of the face, or side of the head visible to the  camera ?????

When I first saw this and looked at blog after blog and definition after definition, I kinda understood it but was still like huh (kinda like the inverse square law- that's like quadruple huhhhhh , head explodes-nah just kidding but we will get to that some day down the line ).

Broad lighting is pretty much if you can see the entire ear of the model and the light is coming from that side you have broad light.  this type of light is generally used to make a face appear fuller. So, if you have a model that is on the extremely petite side, this lighting effect will help to add some pounds  roundness to the face.

Excuse my crappy NYC apartment, but its hard in the big city.  This pic shows where I had my lighting setup for this broad lighting shot. The light is about 12-24" away from my girlfriend and aimed down at about at 45ish° angle.

*Keynotes- these pics were actually taken using just the modeling light.
 Why did I use the modeling light? well living in a pretty ruff section of ny, the last thing you want people walking buy to see is lights flickering off and on. Its like saying "party over here", or "hey, lets go and checkout those purtty lights when he's not home" :-( ...

Secondly, while using just your modeling light you are able to play with and see how the light and shadows interact with one another.  Like I've said in previous post I'm not an expert and not formally trained. With that in mind, no matter how many blogs I visit or workshops I watch,  nothing will be the same as actually taking a hands on class or trying to do it yourself.  Most of the folk we now follow online, most are classically trained in the art, so most of this info has been engraved into their skulls.  As for up and comers like you and me ( I hope no one too experienced reads this, blushing), we need to practice try and try again until it sinks in . 

As juvenile as it may seem I'm just learning that the higher you push your lights up the lower the shadows go - as seen by the shadow on the wall behind my model. This will also determine where the loop shadow will fall on your subjects face.  Place it too high and the loop shadow starts to touch the subjects lips, which is not very flattering at all.  Place light to low and the nose shadow starts to creep up the nose headed towards the eyes.

Closed loop- Now lets say you want to close the loop( which just means connecting that nose shadow to the larger shadow on the side of the face that is already in shadow.  You simply start to walk your light around to a more 55-60ish° degree angle and bam there you have it.

Butterfly Lighting- probably one of the most used in beauty portraiture.  This lighting method is used by creating a butterfly like shadow under the nose, which you can clearly see in this pic ( its butterfly in your face dark ).  Generally you would want to introduce a second light ,fill card or reflector.  This second light source will open up the butterfly shadow and will also fill in that harsh  deep down dark shadow under the neck. 

*keynote- if your working with a heavier rounder subject you may want to leave a little more shadow as it tends to make the neck look smaller. 

The butterfly light tends to be just about on axis.   When I say on axis I mean right in front of the model to maybe about 5-10° ( I-love this ° symbol thing)off  axis. The strobe head is  pointed down in a 45° angle. 

I will leave the others for a follow up blog. I thought I actually took the pics but in my haste to get some sleep I think I deleted them.  But reading about them will only help but so much pic up your cam and give it a try. Can't find a hot male or female model? Well do like I did.  I went to a wig store in Manhattan and purchased my girlfriend here for about  $18 bucks.  I kinda ruined her face trying to put a gas mask over it (sorry babe- still love you) but she still can be used for most lighting setups to get a sense of what the light will look like. 

 Want a guy doll head? this may be a little more tricky.   I found that eBay would probably be the best place to find them, as most hair stores cater to women. 
Well house I don't have an Alienbee, Profoto, Einstein, nothing nada zip well, maybe a speed light. 

Well I'm pretty sure you have a simple lamp in your house.  Pop that shade off  get the room as dark as possible and walk that light around your subject.  Don't worry about taking pics at this point just watch the patterns that are created with the shadows. Take the light closer and further back from your subject and study how much darker and lighter your shadows become. 

 Don't have a  lamp you say. Well go down to your local hardware store and pick up 1 or 2 work lights (the ones with  the clips are cool and pretty cheap) with the reflector should cost more than $20 bucks. So, what are you waiting for give it a try. Life is short and times awaistin.

Nikon D4, does it spell the end of the 35mm digital format?

The above pic is taken from a screen shot from nikonrumors.com

more after the jump