Best way to find cheap UK prices

Seems an obvious post now that I think about it. I am one of those people that has to research until my eyes go dry in front of the monitor. I need to know I have got he cheapest deal and that I have not been ripped off. There are a couple of sites, one just for photography equipment and the other for pretty much anything, but they are both UK based. Over the years they have save me a fortune.

The first is www.hotukdeals.com This site allows users to submit deals they think are cheap. All the other users will then decide to give deal some heat or to cool it down. The hotter the offer the better the deal for you. In the past they have included substantial misprices so it is worth checking out.

The next one is related to photography and is a godsend for making sure you have got a good deal. It is called www.camerapricebuster.co.uk and serves to show you what is the current best deal available on any camera, lens or kit. It shows you all the deals from listed suppliers and then even better it tracks the prices drops or increases over the period the product is available. This then gives you the all time lowest prices and the all time highest so you can see whether you are paying a good price or not.

If you are UK based then I strongly recommend that you become followers of these sites. My Nikon D90 and the Nikon 50mm lens both came from deals I found on camerapricebuster.co.uk.

DX Wide Angle Shots Sigma 10-20mm

Here are a couple of the shots taken in Petra, Giza and Cairo. For the cheapest option, the Sigma really seems to be a good option. Sharpness never feels like an issue, nor does low light. However, some thought needs to be given before each photo to ensure you have taken into account the warp that will appear at the edges, particularly in the corners. For some reason on my lens this is most evident in the top right hand corner.

The first view of the Treasury at Petra. It was truly an amazing sight.

Apparently the whole building was carved from the top down out of the mountain. Look closely and you will see a lot of design that in the UK is believed to be of Victorian origin. 

Back in the UK

Well after an amazing holiday in Egypt and visit to Jordan, I am now back in the UK. My last post ended up being slightly inaccurate. I could not find a copy of the Tokina 11-16mm anywhere at all. In fact after scouring all the shops in the UK I could only find a single copy of the Sigma 10-20mm. With only hours to go before I left for Egypt I decided to purchase it and see how it did.

These were my first images after getting the lens. They were taken as test pictures while still in the UK:

Well I was very happy with the colour and the sharpness of the image, but having been aware that there would be some warp in the corners, I was pretty disappointed to see how badly this affected the sun in this image.

This was much better but it has got me thinking already about how this might affect images where straight lines are evident in the corners. Over the next couple of weeks I was able to take a large number of shots using the widest setting and in the main I think the images were pretty good. The Sigma 10-20mm certainly does not suffer any issues with low light. In fact quite the opposite, in the Mosque of Mohammed Ali there was almost too much light.

More pictures to be shown in the Egypt section.

Wide Angle Lens

I will be going to Egypt shortly and amongst other things we will be travelling to the Pyramids and Petra in Germany.

With the likelihood that this will be a once in a lifetime opportunity as we want to travel everywhere else as well, I have decided to purchase a wide angle lens. This is where things get a little expensive.

Just as big a problem as the expense is that I still don't really know what I am looking for. I am therefore reliant on the professional reviews out there to let me know what is good and what is not. Of course these reviews are in many ways subjective.

In short if you want a wide angle lens for a Nikon D90 then you are pretty much limited to 4 main lens manufacturers. Nikon (of course), Sigma, Tamron and Tokina. Sigma and Tamron are well known for being suppliers of good quality lenses with Tokina being a little newer to the scene.

My first review was one carried out by the fantastic Ken Rockwell http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/digital-wide-zooms/comparison.htm he is not frightened of making bold claims and despite being a die hard Nikon supporter, will always give a very fair review on other manufacturer's products.

In the initial review it seemed that the Tokina was the best lens to go for overall without paying Nikon's exorbitant prices. However that review was in 2006 and each manufacturer has brought new products to the table.

The new Tokina lens is the 11-16mm - http://www.kenrockwell.com/tokina/11-16mm.htm

The reviews are particularly good but I waited to see what the conclusion would be for the new Nikon 10-24mm which is here http://www.kenrockwell.com/nikon/10-24mm.htm

In the end when looking at the cost saving, durability and sharpness elements, there really was no choice for me but the Tokina 11-16mm. I will upload some images when it arrives.

Light

When I first started taking photos, they were dreadful. In fact I was not allowed to take any family pictures. Invariably my photos would have the subject dead centre and far away. I always thought that I needed to create perspective by having a fair amount of scenery visible all the way around my subject. With the digital age and photoshop I can get away with this by cropping. But with old film cameras you could barely see the expression of my subjects.

(The above is a great example. I look at these now and wonder what the hell I was thinking. The post on the right is part of the truck we are riding in and not one element of this photo is good or carries some point)

The above meant I spent more time framing the shots then considering the available light. Quickly I learned that the use of the inbuilt flash pretty much ruined my shots and so I have been spending as much time as possible trying to work out how light affects my images.

The following pictures were taken with the 50mm lens on the D90 on a sunny day in a forest. No flash was used for any of them and I have taken them against sunlight in some cases to see how the camera would cope:

The next three showed my problem trying to get the colours accurate. In this the green is about right but the blue is washed out.

The next effort had a much better blue but now the green looked distinctly ordinary and not realistic.

Some more fiddling about with the exposure compensation and the following was about the best I could achieve.

Again you can see that the sky has become washed out.

Lynton, Lynmouth and the Valley of the Rocks

This was a quick break earlier in the year. I think it was Easter. What I cannot possibly convey with these photos is how horrendously cold it was. We were all miserable and could not wait to leave, but did at least manage to enjoy some scenery.

Feeding the wild horses.

We came across this bridge. We were in a large camper so I had some doubts.

Well founded doubts. No chance the camper would go over this. Not even sure I would like going over it in a car to be honest.

I wandered across to the little pub/post office/village shop and asked if we could go through the ford safely. On the walk back thought you could better see how unlikely the bridge was.

Welcome to quintessential Britain.

A random photo but I was quite attracted to the light and shadow in the scene. I have failed to capture it fully but you get the idea.

This strange looking object represents the very latest in Devonshire high speed rail. Its over a hundred years old and seemingly works with water.

And off it goes. Whooosh though rumble rumble is a little more accurate.

Here you can see the two carriages passing each other. I have to say it is a bloody amazing invention.

The view from the top of the Valley of the Rocks. Quite a stunning view.

Same as before but other direction. Again I still have work to do if I am ever going to capture the view faithfully.

Nikon D90 Sharpness

Having used my Olympus E-410 for a couple of years, the sharpness of the pictures always impressed me. Of course this disappeared the moment it was used indoors. I was therefore looking forward to the quality of the images I was expecting from the D90. With its larger lens allowing in more light, bigger sensor, famous Active D-light ability and the fact the it did not use the four thirds system, I was pretty sure it would be superb (not to mention the extra 2 megapixels).

While the colours, and exposure were everything I was hoping for, the pictures were certainly not as sharp as I was expecting. In fact they were not as sharp as the Olympus. For six months I have assumed that this was just the way things were. But in the last week having done some research I have found out that there is a way to improve things and it does make quite a difference.

I had noted before suggestions from people that the sharpness could be increased in the menu. However I was reluctant to do this because Naively I thought this was changing the original image, whereas I wanted  the original to be sharp. However, when I stopped to think, I realised that the raw image probably was very sharp and it was simply the Nikons JPEG creator that was deciding what the default level of sharpness was. With this in mind I cranked up the sharpness by three and have been very pleased with the difference it made.

I will try and post some examples shortly.

Hurrah for 50mm

I like to read up on photography blogs, tutorials and anything to do with other people's experiences of photography. The stock lens that came with my camera is excellent. It is the 18-105mm VR kit lens. A great utility lens, let down only by the fact that it has a plastic mount rather than metal.

In any event, it seems that there is a universal suggestion as to what lens an aspiring photographer would move onto next. These are known as prime lenses and in simple terms they are lenses with a fixed focal length as opposed to being zooms. There are varying options available, but it seemed to me that the cheapest and most sensible step would be the Nikkor AF-S 50mm 1.8. This model can be had for around the £100 mark and they are praised worldwide.

It seems that the prime lens is something of a purist lens. The luxury of a zoom is gone and to compose your photos the way you want involves you physically having to move around the environment to get the right shot. On the D90 the 50mm works beautifully in low light without a flash, has a very quick focus and the shallow depth (Bokeh) looks amazing. In fact you need to try hard to stop every photo looking like you were trying to achieve some kind of artistic masterpiece.

I found the you gained a great deal more control close up as to what area you wanted to achieve focus.

Below were the first attempts when messing around with the new 50mm lens:
(You will notice that there is a distinct lack of sharpness to the pictures. This is not the fault of the lens and will be covered in another post)

So this is a good example. The three very small figures are stood in close proximity and yet the lens has no difficulty in focusing on the middle figure and giving a pleasant blur to the other two. Of course when trying to be too clever with manual focus this can go wrong as you can see with the next attempt:

This was an attempt to focus on the queen of the lego people. Sadly I actually ended up focusing on the backside of the two nearest genuflecting characters. Nevertheless it does demonstrate just how finely the focus can be used.

Ok the final test shot shows the fun you could have with a lens like this. Please ignore the softness of the picture:

A rich persons hobby

Well I think my wife is sick of hearing about my next must have purchases. Seemingly the bloody expensive camera was not the culmination of my shopping list, but merely the beginning. To give you some idea these are the minimum levels of kit I think are needed:

1. Camera
2. Zoom Lens (Ideally 70-300mm
3. Travel Lens (18-105mm or equiv)
4. Prime Lens (Lots of debate on this but 50mm is a good start)
5. Polarising Filter
6. Tripod for any kind of slow shutter speed or low light pics.
7. A better strap, not the crappy ones they come with which are too short for me to go over the neck.
8. A bag to hold this all in but not one that drags you down.
9. Memory Cards a minimum of 2 or 3 really
10. A remote shutter release. These are cheap and the infra red ones are ideal.
11. The holy grail of lenses (for me anyway) the ultrawide angle. Man are they expensive

Well that will do for now. I am pretty keen on an intervalometer for some nice time lapse work but maybe I am pushing things a little.

Fun in Germany

Well a sunny day, a cornfield and a willing blond subject can only lead to one thing. So this was an opportunity that could not be missed. The light just seemed to be right and I was very happy with the outcome. There are of course elements that could have been improved, not least that this was an impromptu shoot without any preparation, but these are some of my best shots. Due to time contraints these were shot on Auto (non flash) wih the Nikon D90 and the 18-105mm VR lens. If I ever doubted that the D90 was a suitable amateur DSLR, it would have been disproved this day.

There are many others but I have them in a less suitable format (ahem) so will not upload them just yet. I do have the first one in black and white, but this was done with my old processing method which I have learned is flawed and will improve on before posting up here.

Post processing

I pretty much lack any creative talent whatsoever. As a result of this, when looking to take photos I am often trying to capture something I know that I like. I tried this recently with the idea of focusing on a small flower and playing around with the focus so that I could have a relatively shallow depth of field. I also wanted to have the flower quite well lit. Almost like the sun was shining directly on it. I was happy with the result as it is what I was trying to achieve(ish)

The problem with the above is that I don't see any point in the finished product. Sure it looks ok but I am hardly going to put it in any kind of portfolio. So as usual I will try and fiddle about in photoshop to see whether I can achieve a more pleasing result. Normally I will go straight to black and white or rather convert to grayscale, but this time I wanted to play around with the tints as well. The finished product looked a little better in my opinion.

Nikon Back

Well I forgot to post an update on my camera. It came back from Nikon some time ago in perfect working order. In total Nikon Customer Services UK took about two weeks to send the camera back. I suppose that is not too unreasonable, but until you don't have your camera around you don't realise how much it feels like a missing limb. I will now be updating what I have learned.

Poor show

Well as always I have come up with an idea that has just trailed off. The website remains unfinished despite being started almost a year ago. When I set this blog up I wanted to have a fair number of posts on it before I mentioned it to any friends. At the moment anyone visiting here would wonder what the hell the point is of having a blog. I shall therefore do better.

Nikon Customer Services

Uninspiring is the best word I can use so far. I sent it by parcel and it arrived on a Friday morning at 8.40am. However it took until Wednesday afternoon before is was confirmed as having been received. It is now the Monday following and all it says is "awaiting repair". Maybe I am good at moaning but I have only had the camera for about three months and I am pissed off that it has already developed two faults. Ok rant over

Ramsgate or Siberia?

Well I appreciate these are now four months out of date but I am having a little house cleaning effort and thought I would post up the photos I quite like.

This was an attempt to get to work one morning. All the main routes were blocked, so intelligence failed to prevail and we thought a small road up a hill in a field would be the obvious way out. As you can see from the van in front, people coming from the other direction had the same idea.

A friend behind me had a less suitable car than mine and as the conditions started to get worse, I decided to bravely take photos from my car while everyone else tried to dig and push him out.

Heh heh

Oscar

This is one of our handsome kittens. Actually he is a cat now but I took this with the Olympus e410 some time ago. I would like to describe him as affectionate and loving, but really he is just jealous of his sister who catches birds and mice with ease.

My camera

Well after bleating on about the virtues of the Nikon D90 and how it would make me tea in the morning as well as composing my shots for me, it instead decided to develop a couple of faults and fail.

Some detective work on google reveals that one of the problems is very well known. The Lens has a tendency to drift slightly away from the contacts which results in an error. This has to be fixed by wiggling the lens or simply removing it and replacing it. Not rocket science but seems to me that's hardly the point on a two and a half month old camera.

The other problem has been stranger and not one I can live with. Any photo taken in the the sun in any direction comes out almost black. Using auto with re-set settings has not fixed this and yet the exposure is fine in the shade. Equally strange is that at full zoom it works fine in the sunlight.

So I now have to send it away. Apparently this may take 10 days and I get to pay for the postage. What a great system I don't think.

Still lets see what comes back.

Easy Tricks - depth of field

I have always looked at depth of field photos with some jealousy. To the unskilled like myself, they seem well out of reach of the normal user and by all accounts you need to fiddle about with the settings on the camera to achieve good results. 

Turns out I was wrong. This is one of the easiest effects to achieve. My results are pretty ordinary but if I had kept going I could have done better. The simple solution is to find an item with a background you would like to be out of focus. Stand away from the item and zoom in to it, the further you zoom in, the more out of focus the background becomes.

No prizes coming to me for any of the examples I have put on here, but you get the point

Another

And another, I am flying now...

First attempt

And here you can see my point. There is no colour to the sky and the focus is all over the place. More learning to be done.

Longer exposures and the need for a tripod

Well I can see that this looks something of a mess. However, it is a lot better than my earlier attempts. The Nikon tries to force the flash in any occasion so you need to force it off and play around with the length of exposure. I will try and post up the earlier disasters. 

I sound almost like I know what I am talking about but this is not the case. Changing the exposure changes the amount of time the shutter is left open and therefore changing the amount of light allowed into the image. I think! My earlier attempts gave me a dark and out of focus attempt. As I don't yet have a tripod I could only do marginally longer exposures and try and support it against something. 

This was the best I could get, but in reality the moon was perfectly clear not the bodged mess I achieved. But it still gives some indication of the strange skyline that night. 

Welcome

Welcome to my blog. I am hoping to keep this updated with successes and failures as I try and learn to become a better photographer. The site malaprop.co.uk will be updated less often and will only really hold heavily edited photos as I continue to experiment with photoshop.

Should you happen accross this blog and have some ideas of how I can improve, please let me know, I am always interested.

Thanks