Category: software & equipment

I am about to shoot another wedding on Saturday. I am not exactly a professional wedding photographer, but I seem to have a lot of friends who find it a financial blessing for me to give them the gift of my photographic services for a day. So, like previous wedding shoots, I am trying my very best to give them what I would give paying customers, and in the process, hone my professional wedding photography services and skills…just in case somebody does decide to actually pay me one day.

With this wedding, the big service I am adding is posting the photographs online. In the past, since it has just been friends, I have gone the easiest route and just handed them the processed photographs on CDs. I just realized though, that providing online viewing, not only for the couple and their family but also for the guests, is a wonderful service to the couple—it really should be standard in this day and age.

That is a quote. I just talked on the phone with the camera repair technician at Hale Photo Supply in Oklahoma City, and he said, “I just finished with your 85mm lens…the fungus wiped right off.” Whoopee!

I can barely contain my relief. The lens had a lot of fungus, very widespread over several elements inside the lens, and knowing my prized lens is back in action with bright, shiny surfaces is wonderful to know.

I used to live under the false presumption that my lenses were sealed. I now know they are not. Now, if you have a compact camera, this basically is not problem for you. If, however, you have an SLR camera with changeable lenses, you need to keep those lenses dry.

I appeared quite suddenly, but not even knowing what it was at first, I did not realize anything bad was happening. The fungus looks a little like tiny spider webs or maybe some kind of dusty looking crystal. I now know we have fungus among us.

I can manual focus, I just did not know it. I had previously thought that when I went to manual focus on my Nikon D100, I just had to focus till it looked about right. I did not have the old split circle in the middle of my viewfinder like my older manual focus camera has, so I assumed I did not have anything at all to guide me. Wrong.

I was goofing around at Epperson’s Photo in Oklahoma City—I must say, having not been in a nice camera store for a few years, this trip was exhilarating—talking to a guy behind the counter about all kinds of topics: using this flash on that camera, this lens for that purpose, and such. I mentioned my manual focus woes, and he said, “You should be able to see the little dot in the bottom left of the viewfinder to tell you when you are in focus, even if using a manual focus lens…I think.” You are kidding me?

I took this photo a while back, and though the photo itself does not really say all that much, the editing really brought out a different perspective. It was really just a test shot to play with my circ-polar filter and how the wet surfaces showed up. Back in the computer, I briefly played around with it in my raw image editor, UFRaw, and a very different image began to appear.