Jeff Blogs

I’ve been a Nikon fan for several years. The cameras are always first rate and they have some of the best lenses in the business. But it is more than just hardware that keeps me coming back to this manufacturer.

Nikon has continuously been developing their software and web presence to add value to their product line. This coupled with their Nikon Schools educational arm provides a wealth of information on just on cameras but on camera techniques.

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Recently I wrote about the WordPress plug-in Yet Another Photo Blog which I used to create my 1Photo2Share photo blog. This plug-in is amazing and provides all the functionality to create a very professional photo blog.

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I seem to have a plethora of blogs now running. There is my personal blog which you are reading. I also have a baseball blog – Diary of a Diehard and a photo blog – 1 Photo 2 Share where I post a single picture per day. Until recently I was running all of these through Movable Type but as I’ve documented previously I’m moving all the blogs to WordPress.

The text-based blogs were relatively simple to move. There are migration scripts to manage the entries allowing you to export the data from the Movable Type databases and import the data into WordPress database formats. When it came time to migrate the photo blog, it was anything but trivial.

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When I undertook an update to the look and feel of my Now Hitting web site that chronicles the history of the Arizona Diamondbacks I made a conscious decision to turn the home page into a revolving slide show of images I had collected over the first 12 years of the team’s existence.

I wanted this to give the visitor an idea of what they may have missed from the first dozen years of games played by the team. The issue I had was I needed a software application that would be graphics intensive yet allow for other content on subsequent pages.

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I’ll freely admit I am very biased towards digital SLR cameras. The capabilities they provide are just so much better than what can be found in a point and shoot camera. Not just the ability to change lenses to meet your shooting needs but in the other features as well.

The larger sensor sizes in the DSLR cameras provide better noise management especially when using higher ISO settings for lower light shooting. The ability to have a hot shoe flash that moves the flash further away from the sensor plane is also a huge advantage as it results in fewer red-eye pictures being taken. I have never been a fan of red-eye reduction flash since all it really does is pre-flash to fool the eye.

The problem with this is that the subject thinks the pre-flash is the actual picture so you end up many times with people moving or closing their eyes since they think the picture has been taken. That drives me crazy. But for all the benefits of a DSLR there is one thing about them that can be troublesome, their size.

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