Incredibly busy week at work.  Plus on Wednesday I managed to get the Nikon D800.  Learning this camera has been taking up almost all of my free time as there is a bit of a learning curve, even coming from the D700 as I am.  However, I have been posting almost daily updates on Spike’s Photos about my progress with it.  So check it out if that’s the sort of thing that interests you or if you just want to see some nice pictures.

BTW, my Nikon D700 body is now for sale, including the MB-D10 battery grip and 5 batteries.  Drop me a line if interested.

Well, my new iPad arrived today.  On removing it from the box, I felt that the slight differences in thickness and weight were virtually unnoticeable.  I have to confess that at first I didn’t see a huge difference in the display at first.  With a little bit of research and common sense, I quickly realized that I had been exporting my photos at a size of 1600 x 1200 and this size wasn’t taking advantage of the increased screen resolution on the new tablet.

Once home, I went back into Lightroom and started exporting photos with a larger size – I’d seen 2048 X 2048 as the recommended size.  Once I hit 50, I went to sync these higher res photos with my iPad and discovered that the bulk of them weren’t syncing. Out of 50, perhaps 10 made it over.  I deleted the photos and started over again, watching more carefully this time.  iTunes indicated it was going to transfer 50 photos and each time it got to the 11th, it would simply say that the sync was completed, no error messages.

I searched through Apple’s support forum and found that at least several people were reporting a similar issue.  For many of them, what worked was this:

• Delete photos from iPad
• Delete “iPod Photo Cache” folder from computer
• Reboot iPad
• Sync again

But that wasn’t working for everyone and it didn’t work for me.  Finally I had a thought.  When I did the export, the size was 2048 X 2048 and I’d set the resolution at 200 pixels per cm.  I dropped the resolution setting down to 150 pixels, exported again, synced – and this time it worked like a charm, all of the photos synced.

Now, with higher res photos loaded, I compared the same images side by side, iPad 2 vs. “new iPad.”  Yep.  The difference was huge and unsubtle.  Color. Detail.  Contrast.  You name it.  Gorgeous.

Nha Trang is pitched as the top beach resort town in Vietnam.  It’s a 50 minute flight from Saigon and we decided to give it a try.  Unfortunately, we never had beach weather the entire time we were there but I found this laid back town so charming that I could easily have spent another week there waiting for the sky to turn blue.  While the beach may not be the kind of pristine white sand that you’d find in Boracay, it’s very well maintained, including a narrow strip of park that runs along the entire length, several kilometers of outdoor art, sculpted trees and bushes, peaceful places to sit.

The tourist section of the town stretches back for two blocks from the beach and is filled with travel agents, salons, t-shirt shops, restaurants and bars that are clearly aimed at a foreign crowd.  Aside from the selection of western restaurants, all of the Vietnamese ones had large sections of western food on their menus.  There’s a very small night market and a lot of outdoor coffee shops as well.  Russians clearly make up a large percentage of tourists here and you’ll see signs and menus in Russian as well as encountering plenty of Vietnamese who appear to be fluent in Russian.  There are some islands right off the shore including one that has a resort and theme park called Vinpearl which can be reached by boat or by cable car.  I decided to give it a pass.

Our first day and night was spent walking around this touristy part of town.  For our second day, with the skies still gray, we did a spa day.  There’s a famous spa just outside of town.  We decided to live it up so we went for a VIP package for two.  This included a private room (with bed, double-sized jacuzzi, TV and other amenities), a swim in their hot springs pool, mud baths, herbal jacuzzi, 90 minutes massage, a host of salon options, lunch, transport to and from the hotel – all of which came out to about US$150 for the two of us and we were there for about 6 hours.

The drive to and from the spa gave us an idea of the rest of the town and on the third day we decided to explore some of that area.  We started with the Po Nagar Towers, which date back to the 8th century.  If you’ve been to Angkor Wat, this ain’t much – but it’s okay enough I suppose.

You do get a great view of the city from here.

We went walking in search of food, preferably banh mi, but we came to this corner place selling Banh Xeo – Vietnamese crepes or pancakes, in this case stuffed with fresh squid and veggies, with lots of greens served on the side of course.

Walking a bit more, we came upon a place where they were charcoal grilling pork chops in the street.  They smelled so good, we couldn’t resist.

A bit more walking and we came upon two small temples, side by side.  I went into the courtyard of each to take pictures.  At the second one, they motioned for me to wait while someone ran around to the back and opened up the temple so I could see inside.

Meanwhile my gf found this cart where a woman was putting pieces of banana into sticky rice, wrapping the whole thing up in banana leaves, grilling it and serving the result with condensed milk.  Yum.

Just US$1 and seriously nice.  After that, we went to one of the town’s two main markets, Dam Market.

Some shopping and, yeah, some more eating, at this very tourist-friendly banh mi cart that let you mix and match from more than a dozen different kinds of meat and sausage:

Dinner (yes, we had room for more food!) our last night in town was around this area:

I really enjoyed Nha Trang and would gladly return.  I’ll leave you with some photos of some of the people we encountered there:

Oh, before I take off, just wanted to share with you some photos from a photo shoot I did this weekend with Chris B, the musician and tireless promoter of indie music in Hong Kong via Underground, GBOB and other great work.  Here’s a sample shot:

To see the full-sized version of this photo and many more, click on over to Spike’s Photos.

Hey, for those of you who might be interested to see photos taken with the new Fuji X10, I’ve been posting a lot of them over at my second home, Spike’s Photos.  And even if you could care less about this particular camera, I think I’ve been getting some great shots with it that you might want to see.  Some examples:

Yes, they’re small and no, you can’t click on them to see the full-sized versions.  That’s because I’d really appreciate it if you’d check out Spike’s Photos and maybe even add it to your RSS reader and maybe even like the Spike’s Photos page on Facebook.  Thanks!

Yes, I got it.  And yes, so far I really love it, with just minor quibbles.  Here’s a few test shots, full automatic mode, JPG, minor editing only.

ISO 400, f2.8, 1/80th sec.

ISO 400, f2.2, 1/90th second

Yes, the combination of orange hair, purple shirt, red boots ….

So Lightroom can’t handle the RAW format from this camera yet, which is a bit of a bummer.  And the optical viewfinder has some issues.  But aside from that so far this is shaping up as an amazing little camera.

More to see and more to come over at Spike’s Photos.

Saw this band last night performing at Xperience Live.  Very unusual and enjoyable.

Click on over to Spike’s Photos to see more (and larger) pictures and find out just what made them so unusual.

An ad for a Canon Pixma printer in this week’s issue of HK Magazine has this image of Kyoto’s famed Kinakuji Temple.

I know that millions of people have photographed this temple.  While it’s a reconstruction, it’s beautiful. I compared the photo in the ad to one of the pictures I took there two years ago.

Okay, they went for shallower depth of field, so that the tree in the foreground is all distractingly fuzzy.  And they had a day with a bluer sky than I did.  But even so ……

(Okay, probably the above is unfair and self-aggrandizing.  Guilty.)

As you know, while in Vegas I did a helicopter tour over the Grand Canyon, Hoover Dam and Lake Mead.  For my first time in a helicopter, it was exciting and memorable and I think I brought back some terrific pictures.

Obviously the photos above are just thumbnails.  You can see the full sized photos and read all about my tour at the blog post over at Spike’s Photos and see a whole lot more pictures on the Spike’s Photos Gallery page.  I hope you’ll take a look at leave a comment or two.

My Las Vegas pictures are up over at Spike’s Photos.  I had time to walk around the strip one afternoon and two evenings.  And I also got to take a helicopter tour of the strip, Hoover Dam, Lake Mead and the Grand Canyon.  My Vegas pics are finished, the rest will follow in a few days.

Here are a few sample pics, small size:

To see them full-size and the rest of the album, please check the blog entry and the Gallery page over at Spike’s Photos.