The Best Ever

I'll post a photo every now and then. I took this on Saturday, with my girlfriend :)

Taken with a Nikon D200, 18-55mm lens @ 18mm, 1/2000 shutter and F/4.5 on a 10 sec timer. The camera was on the ground, and I put my phone under the lens to make the camera point up.

The photo haven't been processed besides a crop, and adding the signature in the corner.

Honestly, I was dumb enough to shoot it in JPG, so there is not much I can edit on it. Maybe that is the beauty of it... :)

UPDATE: We are married now:

How to make HDR images

Ok, I know it's not nice to say this, but hey, google it! There are millions of tutorials out there to teach you.

For example, here is one I find really useful: http://www.stuckincustoms.com/hdr-tutorial/

Or here is one. This guy knows his stuff: (this is NOT for lazy people) http://backingwinds.blogspot.com/2006/10/how-to-create-professional-hdr-images.html

I have done quite a lot HDRs, and there are things you need to look out for, for example to avoid "clown-vomit"(example), too much tonemapping, or the flat grey stuff. Also not everything has to be HDR to be amazing.

Good luck!

How to shoot those happy people silhouette photos?

I bet you have seen lots of shots like this.
Here is how I took this photo:

Nikon D700

Manual exposure
Exposure Time: 1 / 1999
Flash did not fire
FNumber: 1.8
Focal Length: 50
Focal Length In 35mm Film: 50
ISO: 2500
Lens Model: AF Nikkor 50mm f/1.8D

The most important thing is that it have to be shot in the late afternoon/evening, or really early morning. This is because the sun is quite low, or even behind the horizon, like on my photo.

You want the light come from behind the subject, so shoot it facing the sun.

The way I did it, is I set ISO 2500 and 1/2000 shutter speed, with a wide open aperture.
I If you can not set such high ISO, shoot earlier, when the Sun is above the horizon, so you can still have really fast shutter speed. You need fast shutter, otherwise the subject is gonna be blurred.

If you don't want to capture a fast moving subject, you don't have to use such high ISO and shutter speed, just make sure you expose the sky correctly, so everything else is underexposed.

Another trick is to have the camera close to the ground, so it looks like that they jump really high.

I set a 10 second timer, metered for the sky, focused on a spot on the ground then put the camera down in the grass. We ran to the spot and jumped just on time.
If you are not planning to take a photo of yourself, you have to leave out the timer part, obviously.

My original photo was a bit under exposed though, so I lightened it up in Photoshop Camera Raw, hence the quite visible grain.

Here are a couple of other examples. These are not my shots:
friedmanarchives.com
rolandwooster.com
flickr.com
flickr.com
shutterstock.com

How to export a standard PDF from InDesign

NOTE: This does not apply to CS4 and CS5 on OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.

You can read on, if you are old-school and rocking CS3 or older.

FX DX focal length confusion (updated)

I was really confused about this subject.
First of all, I have a DX and an FX camera too, and I was told about the 1.5 crop factor whatever bla bla, which is fine, but I had a question which didn't seem to be answered anywhere really:

So, if I have a 18-70mm for my D200 (DX) then what lens should I buy for my D700 (FX) to cover the same zoom range?

Let me start from the beginning.
I have read THIS article on Ken Rockwell's website, which cleared up most of my confusion, but then i was still like: ???
I did lots of research, and I figured out that the best is, if I compare lenses by their angle of view, and not by their focal length.
This might be BS if you are a pro photographer, but I'm not one, and I find this solution the simplest.
I made this table, listing the focal length, and the angle of view at that focal length on full frame, and DX crop.
On the bottom of the pic there is an angle measure thing, just in case you need to see how wide are the angles that are listed.
The blue lines just indicate some of the angles that are (almost) identical, so you can see the equivalents of the focal lengths on DX and FX.

I hope it helps someone :)

UPDATE: Here is a Nikon Lens Simulator. This can help you to see the differences between FX and DX. You and "mount" any lens to any body, and check out the results. Really useful:
http://imaging.nikon.com/products/imaging/lineup/lens/simulator/