Why I need a 500mm lens

I was lucky enough to attend two FIFA 2010 soccer World Cup games; I tried using my Nikon 18-200mm VR lens, which is a great lens but nowhere near close enough. I did also use a Sigma 10-20mm wide angle lens for some reasonable stadia and scenery shots, but what I really wanted were some close ups of the players (as more than just humanoid shapes), and some of the on-field action.

 

I've decided that the newly updated Sigma 50-500mm optically stabilised lens will be a good purchase; combined with a pair of Nikon 12x50 Action EX binoculars, I should be ok :-)

 

Quick photo workflow software

Apple Aperture 2, Adobe Lightroom 2 and Apple iPhoto 09 (aka Aperture Lite) are awesome photography workflow tools.

But, they're a bit cumbersome if you want to preview a collection of photos, delete the rubbish ones, rotate the keepers and organise them quickly. All of the above packages require you to import them, catalogue them (or have them added to the catalogue), build previews and thumbnails and after all of that, do your sorting. You then have to export the photos, remove them from the respective application and get on with your day.

This sucks.

So, I turned to Camerabits Photo Mechanic, which had some rave reviews. US$150 ? You must be joking. For that price, it should give personal commentary on my photos, and I know its not going to do that. So, I looked around for a Mac version of old faithful, ACDSee. Yay, they have one! But, its in beta. I downloaded it and tried it, and yes, it works. As a beta. But it'll be expensive - the Windows version now goes for over US$100. Too rich for me, and not available yet.

More digging revealed Lemkesoft GraphicConverter. It does everything I need, and about 700% more. And its cheap; US$35! Thank you very much, it works wonders! I can highly recommend it.

Hoodman Hoodeye and Amod results

I wanted to go to the Johannesburg Zoo to show my infant son some animals, and to try out some photography gear. To recap, I suspected the Hoodeye was going to be useless, and the Amod would work correctly. I was correct on the Amod, and the Hoodeye, to be honest, I could have lived without. It made discernibly no difference. So, save yourself US$30 and don't bother buying the Hoodeye, and put it toward the Amod.

At US$30, its a great little GPS, and works exactly as advertised. Pity I wasn't in the frame of mind to take amazing photos, but thats another story. Gallery pics are online. The entire family was out together, and that more than made up for the bad photos.

PS. 10 month old babies don't get that excited at the zoo, they just like being outdoors with their parents giving them tons of attention. Good enough for me.

Camera goodies - geotagging and eye hood

I have a Nikon D80 (which is a great camera in spite of all the negative reviews). It was, without doubt, the best birthday present I ever received, from my parents. My wife bought me a Thinktank Photo Airport Addicted, which comes up second. The photo's I take are on my gallery; I don't think they're very good.

Anyway, I noticed in the iPhoto 09 feature list the inclusion of geotagged photo support. Now this is cool. It means you can tell, on a map, where you took a photo. Very handy when you take lots of photo's that are similar, and/or outdoors. But all the "neat" on-camera solutions expect you to have a D90, D200 or higher. I'm not changing my body for the once-a-month photo expeditions I go on.

So, I stumbled across a fellow D80 user who ended up using the Holux M-241 GPS logger, and Ovolab Geophoto. The Holux showed GPS time (which was cool to set your camera), but looked like a bannana-coloured suppository and required some serious shenanigans to get data off onto a Mac.

I found reference to a driverless GPS, the Amod AGL3080, which is essentially a very simple GPS, that starts logging in 1, 5 or 10 second intervals as soon as it has a satellite lock. It works, very well. I've used it in some testing, and it works exactly as advertised. Logs the data, which is stored as a file on the device. The construction is cheap, the manual is crap and the unit doesn't look like it'll last if you're not gentle with it. But for my purposes, perfect!

I ended up using HoudahGeo to actually tag the photos. The two big reasons to use this over Geophoto were

1. No CPU-crunching spinning globe on startup
   
2. Ability to associate multiple GPS tracks to a photo group as opposed to only one
   

So far so good.

As an aside, I also bought a Hoodman Corp Hoodeye, which sounded great, except it looks like crap and feels worse. And their website made my eyes bleed.

I'll be using both on a shoot at the Johannesburg Zoo this weekend; I suspect I'll have a negative review of the Hoodeye afterwards. Lets hope I'm wrong.