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I have searched on here for Topaz and Nik, and many folks seem to use them for noise reduction, but I'm curious about things like Topaz Adjust and Nik Color Correct. Does anyone use them here? I already have Photoshop, so it seems like these plugins are not doing anything I could not otherwise...

I bought the Nikon AW120 compact camera for a sailing trip to Bermuda next week. When we made the same sail 13 years ago, 3 different cameras were destroyed by salt water. In testing, I have been very pleased with both the still pictures and the video of this waterproof camera. The AW120 has...

To me, the moon is much more interesting viewed as a moving object. Attached the D800 to a Maksutov-Cassegrain, making it efffectively a 1,500 mm lens. You can clearly see waves of atmosphere changing the moon's appearance, and some late night birds fly across the moon's face a few times...

I got hit with Cryptowall 3.0, a new strain of "Ransomware" that hijacks your PC until you pay a fine over the internet. I got rid of the virus easily enough, but not until it had encrypted all of the pictures and folders that were on my PC desktop. The idea is that I could pay a $500 ransom...

A professional acquaintance asked me to shoot some business portraits. He developed a cool web-based app that lets you access your encrypted desktop from any device, any place in the world. I agreed to shoot for free just to get some experience. Please give me your serious constructive...

I took a great videography class in Atlanta yesterday. Ray Roman makes these huge cinematic wedding videos. Capture Cinematic Weddings He uses DSLRs exclusively, except on his drone. Even when shooting outside at a beach wedding, he ignores the conventional wisdom of "1/50th shutter speed at...

Can you recommend a good quality waterproof bag to store light camera gear (one DSLR and large lens)? I get the chance to sail from NC to Bermuda on a 34 foot boat in May. We did this 12 years ago, and it was great, but last time we ruined several cameras that got hit by salt spray. (One...

I saw this in another Nikon forum, and it worked so well it's worth sharing. I have the Focal software, and it's slow to use and a hassle to set up. For this method, you don't even need to take any pictures. For beginners, high-end Nikon bodies have a feature in the set-up menu called "AF...

It's a gloomy Sunday here, so I got this idea from Googling "Rainy Day Indoor Photography Ideas." To give you a sense of scale, the water drop is coming out of a standard eye-dropper. New (to me) D800 with the Nikon 105mm 2.8 macro prime and a Mecablitz speedlight on-camera pointed directly at...

I'm finally taking the plunge to 36mp, moving up from my D600s to a used D800 from Craigslist. I'll be looking at it later today. Price is $1,500. He's had it on Craigslist for a month, and he finally brought the price down to something I'm willing to pay. Are there any known issues with the...

The auto-focus on my AF-S Nikkor 28-70 2.8 (precursor to the modern 24-70) went kaput during a class last week. Nikon estimates $600 to repair the lens. I bought it for $800 in the last year... Ugh. Final decision: buy a new Tamron 24-70 2.8 with VR (VC) to replace it. That done, I decided...

Last night I picked up my D600 to get a few quick shots of some dinner party guests. They were all overexposed, even though the camera's exposure comp was set to 0 and the flash TTL setting was -1/3. I realized after the party that the camera was set to Auto-ISO, which I had been playing with...

I keep seeing ads for Alien Skin, and the recent ad showing a black-and-white photo looked great. Does anyone here use these plug ins? Are they automatic, like Look Up Tables? Or do you have to adjust a myriad of settings, which you can already do in Photoshop? At the Alien Skin website, it...

The itch to actually print large photographs has been growing lately. Whitewall.com had an ad in the newest Shutterbug, so I decided to give them a shot with a pic of my wife that I really like. My custom sized print was 36" x 20", and I ordered it printed on acrylic. Whitewall puts aluminum...

After months of watching, Craigslist finally yielded a great local deal on the long-coveted Nikkor AF-S 17-35mm 2.8 ED lens. It was only $600 (less than half of new) because the zoom is a little sticky, but the auto focus does not squeak and it seems perfectly sharp in my initial tests today at...

The rain shot down my tennis match, so nothing to do tonight but mount the D600 on a tripod and shoot six different lenses at the same subject, all shooting at 50mm/5.6 with an SB-700 set to manual, so there should be no difference in exposure time, f-stop, or flash amount. These are crops from...

Do any of you wedding togs take pictures of the groom and bride - in her wedding gown - before or after the actual wedding day? Some of these wedding videos (like the Jerry Ghionis videos from BH Photo) show pics of brides and grooms that are very complex (in a rowboat?), so I don't see how...

I have reviewed the threads here, and they create more questions and uncertainty. On Sunday afternoon, I was shooting in a church with sunlight coming through the windows. My wife's orchestra was performing and she wanted some shots of her and others taken during the performance (so no flash)...

Four shots from four different lenses: two primes and two zooms. In no particular order, they are Nikon 28-105mm 3.5-4.5D AF (paid $120 used) Nikon 105mm 2.8 G ED AF-S VR (paid $500 used) Nikon 105mm 2.5 (old manual lens, paid $75 used) Sigma 70-300mm 4-5.6 AF (bought new, right now about...

Ever since the D600 became notorious for dust/oil on the sensor, I've started noticing those spots in many other photographs, especially blue sky shots. Here's a pic my friend posted of himself skydiving. I don't know what the camera was, but this pic was made before the D600 ever came out...