I think I finally fell asleep around 9 this morning, woke up around 2 PM.  Sitting around, doing a little bit of this and that, my mind is a little on the dull side today.  I was going to go to Mong Kok and back to Sim City for some stuff but just couldn’t be arsed to get dressed and drag myself out of the house.  Dinner home tonight, a movie or two, get some more work done.  Exciting stuff, eh?

I was talking with someone last night and he said that the contrast seems off in my studio shots and asked about my monitor calibration, suggesting I might want to try the hardware route instead of doing it by eye.  Here’s a web site that provides a very nice online calibration tool.  Here and here are two looks at hardware calibration tools.  So, yeah, maybe get out to Mong Kok and find out what’s available in Hong Kong and for how much.  I also told my friend that I had the picture control set to Vivid on the D300 and he said he thinks that works well for landscapes but not for skin tones.  Well, it’s a never ending process, isn’t it, learning this stuff and then internalizing it so it becomes second nature.

Anyway, here are two very different shots taken with my new 24-70mm lens.  Neither is anything special as a photograph, just testing out the lens.

This first, taken on a cloudy day, my neighbor’s yard and his dog.  The point of this?  By all means, click to view the full size photo and feel free to zoom in – the bricks, the steps, the flower bushes.  To my old and tired eyes, this lens appears really sharp.  (70mm, ISO 200, f/5.0, 1/100 sec – and I know it would probably be sharper still if I backed off a bit from 70mm and and went with f/8 or f/11, right?  But still I’m really happy with this.)  Actually, the full sized shot on my computer is 4288×2848 and looks amazing for what it is, but a “full sized JPG” file is 12 meg, so I’ve just uploaded this hence the reduced shot here at only 1024×688 – hopefully the detail comes across.

Something a little different, a place many of you know, same lens, handheld, 38mm, ISO 800, f/5.0, 1/160th of a second:

Probably could have reduced some of the noise a bit by shooting at ISO 400 – actually I did shoot a few at that speed, but not from this angle.  But again, zoom in on this, you can see the details on the metal struts holding the sign together.  Think I wanna go back with a tripod and shoot a longer exposure at 200 ISO and compare the results.

Both shots from RAW, tweaked slightly in Lightroom (hey, I like saturated colors).

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