Should photography just stay a love obsession or a career ?

This picture was an add in after the fact.  I had all ready written a long drawn out blog post that turns into one of my normal rants. It really should have been sweet and to the point. I digress again, pardon me. This pic is from the Nikon D800.  I've done some editing and frequency separation and skin color toning on this. I'm in the process now of trying to find a workflow to use regularly, as my workflow is usually all over the map 








Hello all. its been quite a while since my last post.  To keep with the theme of things the d800 is doing great.  Since the purchase I'm starting to learn a lot more about dynamic range and recovery.  I've seen and now understand about shooting to the right and being able to save a picture.  I've also decided to switch gears.  I believe my photography may start to switch more so towards family and friends. Trust me the beautiful ladies are great, but its not really what I think I want to do, or what I really want to express in my portraiture.  I need something else.  I'm not quite sure what it is I'm after but when I find it I will post and share :-) . 

     Also, Photography is great, nice fantastic a passion, but one that does not pay the bills.  I recently read an article on Scott Kelby's site by one of his guest bloggers, Ron Martinsen.  In a nutshell Ron talks about his experience and having spoken with full time photogs who find it hard as hell to make a living in this industry. So, quitting your full time gig to pursue a career in photography may not be the best idea.

      5 years ago you couldn't tell me that I wasn't going to ditch my job and become the next Zack Arias, David Hobby or countless other photographers.   However, after countless failed model mayhem attempts, cancelled photo shoots and yes paying jobs I've realized that this is probably not what I would want to do in a full time capacity.  The paying jobs of course are the things that interest me not, weddings, events,  baby showers etc... These all seem to be the money makers but its not what I want.  Its also not steady money.  So 5 years one marriage and a few grays later, I need to be realistic.  I don't have the time on my side to continue to pursue photography so aggressively.  I have a family bills, and other things to make me crazy.  I implore no one to give up on their dreams, but try to look at the balance of where you are in life and where you want to go. By no way am I giving up but I do need to weigh my opportunity cost of photography vs my stable job (stable at the moment anyway). I did say job.  At this point it pays the bills, and quite regularly I might add.  Some may say that if you feel that way, then you really do need to go all in on photography but at what cost? 

     I think the above paragraph speaks to answer the question of the overly saturated photographer/photography market.  Everyday there are a few 100 entering the market, and the next day a few more are leaving.  There are people who enter much like myself full on, but things happen, shit happens, life happens.  And I think overtime photography for most people who lack the skill, time or duration to see it through and learn the craft will also be washed away when the tide comes in.  That tide will be different things for different people but it will come.  I myself have become obsessed with photography, If I were to count the man hours of videos, books blogs, b&H visits shoots, etc... I should be well on my way to working on a masters degree in photographic arts.  But I will continue to shoot because it's something that I love, but chasing the big white one I will no longer as there are greater things at risk.  If the success or recognition does come in some way shape or form, I will welcome it, but take it with a grain of salt. 

     As usual I've gone off on a rant again. Thankfully for the most part no one reads this blog :-) but again its a cathartic experience for me.   As usual keep shooting learning and practicing.

D800 -Review Part-1

Hello all, its been quite a while since my last blog.  I have purchased the d800 since then and have spent some quality time with it.  Man, first off I'd like to start off by saying this camera is not for everyone.  First off if this is your first blog post of mine that your reading or have happened to stumble upon, I mostly shoot people/portrait photography.  What does that mean as far as the d800 is concerned?  A crap load of detail.  Which is great if your a retoucher or love seeing every little flaw and pore in the skin of your subject.  This took my by quite a surprise when using the camera for my first shoot.  I was amazed at how far I could zoom in  while in Lightroom and Photoshop and still see pure skin before hitting the pixel level grid, and even at the grid level in some instances I'm still able to make out skin.  This is great when dabbling with dodging and burning when I pretend to be a professional retoucher.  If you shoot landscapes or architectural photography I believe this camera is for you hands down.  If your a run and gun type of portrait photographer this camera is probably not for you, but if your  a self proclaimed  n,a,s head like myself, you know that you probably really really, don't need this camera but you'll find an excuse to get it. I would suggest at this point looking into a used d3s, d700, or the new d600.

Down side

The downside so far has been the upside, which would be the extreme level of detail.  Hey, looking back at my d700 there were times when I could get away with doing little to know retouching on a model, but the d800 will not work that way.  In person, in front of me the model looked fabulous; however, the extreme amount of detail in the file proved to be my undoing.  I believed we unmasked flaws and pores she didn't even know she had.  This camera if you so dare to step up to the challenge will call upon you to up your post processing skills to take full advantage of the files and to make your clients happy.  I plan on doing some d700 to d800 comparisons as time and subjects allow to show some visual representation of what I'm discussing.  But at this point one shoot is not enough to give anything more than a general opinion on the camera.  I will need to do a lot more work and report back to you guys/gals.

Disk Space

  This section will be short and sweet.  on my first shoot out I was happy as a pig in a blanket to finally have a dual card camera, coming from the single slot d700. However, that quickly changed when I filled up my 8gb sd card(setup to capture jpegs)  and only had a gig left on on 8gb cf-card   ( setup to shoot raw).  I believe I had almost 14 gigs after the shoot altogether.  My gig is a terabyte but averaging that much a shoot would surely send me to the poor house, or at least have me appear on an episode of storage disk hoarders.  So you will most definitely want to slow down when shooting and chose carefully the images you take and plan on keeping.

Vertical Grip

After much debate about spending an obscene amount of money on a grip, I went with a third party option.  So far the grip seems ok. (Flash Point D12 Magnesium Grip )  The grip can be purchased from the link above.  I am in no way associated with Adorama, just thought posting the link could be helpful.  So, the grip actually feels great.  Like I've heard others say besides the softness of I believe the af button or the back focus button and the clickly sound of the main and sub command dials I really don't notice much of a difference between this grip and my nikon-made d700 grip. 

Well, that's it for now  But I hope to drop updates in the coming months on my photo shoots and adventures with this camera.  So please like always whatever camera you shoot please keep on shooting and learning.  I'll leave off with a few pics that I've captured so far. 

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