June 2008 Archives

Well, it's true: Nikon announced the D700 today. It's rather close on the heels of the D300 and D3 releases (both less than a year old), but in terms of price points: it makes enough sense.

The D700 is said to be priced at about $2999 (it always seems ridiculous to say "about" and then provide such a specific number, but it's a safe way to wriggle out of "hey, you said it would be some round number!"). For about $1400 less, you've got the D300 (my rig) and for $2000 more, you've got the D3.

Based on DPReview's hands-on preview, it looks to be a pretty excellent camera.

• full-frame sensor, but still takes DX lenses
• self-cleaning sensor (hooray!)
• almost the same size as the D300
• fits the accessories (battery grip, batteries) from the D300

Possibly the best news is that it doesn't go on sale in time for Christmas, it goes on sale in time for summer! (:

It's definitely going to be hard to resist. Woo!

About a month ago, Boston.com fired up a new photo blog, The Big Picture.

With regular news stories, you rarely get very large photos. Very wide columns of text are difficult to read, so if photos are embedded in an article, they're typically medium-ish (say, 500 pixels or so). If there's a separate photo player, the photos still aren't "oh my goodness"-big.

Well, The Big Picture is all about "oh my goodness"-big. Each entry features an enormous collection of photos from a given topic, e.g. the latest space shuttle launch. We're all so used to seeing those medium-ish photos that these huge photos is a reminder of how powerful photos can really be.

I've been touring a handful of publishing systems and so far MovableType is the only one to install and work the way I expected it to.

Okay, that's not entirely fair. WordPress installed quite nicely, but I managed to forget my administrative password and the password recovery is failing me entirely. It generates just 1 key, but when I hit it, it tells me it's an invalid key. Pff!

I got ExpressionEngine installed, but even though everything is up and running, er.. none of the posts I created are actually, y'know, publishing. So that's helpful.

What's all this then? I've tried (and failed) to have and maintain blogs before but they were always unfocused and sort of about everything. This go 'round, I have but 2 subjects in mind: CSS and photography. Heh.

CSS (and HTML and JavaScript and other web-authoring awesomeness) is how I make my living and photography is how I live. (Whew, that was cheeseball, I know; but it had to be said. Just so you know, I'm a big dork and corny jokes will almost always make me laugh and I will almost always go for it. (: )

So sometimes I will go turbo-geek on you and wax philosophic about some CSS technique or another and sometimes I'll post photos / photography techniques / awesome photos that I stumble on to, etc.

Really it comes down to this: I like sharing. So here goes! (: