End of the Nikon D90 Camera Body?

I just read that the Nikon D90 body has been listed as discontinued on the Nikon Japanese website. I went to the site and let Google translate it, but I don't see the discontinuation notice--but I'm probably just not seeing the correct page. I'm guessing that the body is being phased out in favor of the Nikon D7000, a 16.2mp camera that is about two years newer than the D90. Still, the D90 is a great camera and if it's discontinued it might be a good time to look for bargain prices. By the way, I saw the news on the Photography Bay blog--a very fun and interesting blog.

Watching Pete Seeger Listen...

It's been kind of fun the past few weeks illustrating the update of my exposure book (Exposure Photo Workshop: Develop Your Digital Photography Talent) because I've had to go through a lot of older files looking for specific types of images--like concert shots. I found some great shots of Sonny Rollins (see previous posting) and a few other performers and the other night came across a folder full of shots of Pete Seeger in concert. The Seeger shots were taken at a concert during his "Pete Seeger at 89" concert tour about three years ago; the concert was produced by my friend Walter Wagoner as a benefit for the noncommercial FM station WPKN where I have done a show for more than 20 years.

Pete was joined that night by several guest performers, including his grandson Tao Rodriguez-Seeger and Guy Davis and I have a number of nice shots of Pete singing alone and with some of these other musicians. My favorite shots though are the ones where Pete is sitting at the back of the stage listening to the others perform. The look on his face--an expression of just utter enjoyment and total concentration--is wonderful. During the entire concert, more than two hours long, I don't think Pete ever took this expression off of his face. He was obviously having a great time. And as much as I tried to keep a photographic eye on the others when they were performing, I found my attention drifting back to this master singer and storyteller who, even at 89 years old, was still enjoying the stories and the songs and no doubt still learning new tricks from performers less than half his age. Perhaps that intense desire to learn and to enjoy life is what has placed him among the greatest folk singers in history. He could not have known it that night, but his enjoyment at being inspired entered my camera and gave me so much more than mere concert shots.

At a concert once in Tennessee, I told Pete that the area in front of the stage was too packed for me to shoot, and asked him if he minded if I sat on the backstage steps and shot from there. He said, "Why don't you just sit on the stage and shoot from there?" And so I did. That show was held in a tent and the tent was just a few feet (literally a few feet) away from some railroad tracks. During the show Pete sang "Freight Train" a song by the great songwriter Elizabeth Cotten who--amazingly enough--once worked as a housekeeper for Pete Seeger's parents (and who lived to the age of 102--so apparently there is something healthy about singing folks songs). I don't recall if it was during the show or just as it ended, but a freight train went by while the tent was still packed and it was almost as if it were on cue. The whistle blew, the wheels rumbled and Elizabeth Cotten's song came to life. When you hang around people with magic in their souls, magic things happen. Twice now that has happened when I was lucky enough to be around Pete Seeger.

Photo notes: I shot this photo with a Nikon D90 camera with a 70-300mm Nikkor zoom lens. Exposure was 1/50 second at f/5.6 and the white balance was set to tungsten, ISO 1600. I converted the photo to black and white in Photoshop CS3 and then toned it using the b&w conversion tool.

Back to the Future: Multiple Exposure Mode

As much as I love digital cameras, in some ways I miss the unexpected and the unknown results of just doing strange things with my old SLR film cameras. In those days we'd use all kinds of little tricks to get creative images--like smearing petroleum jelly on a skylight filter to get soft focus (easier now to just call up the Gaussian blur filter in Photoshop) or holding a colorful piece of cellophane in front of the lens to get offbeat colors (much easier now in editing). One of my favorite things to do was to shoot two or more exposures on the same frame of film--just to see what kind of strange visual concoctions might pop up. Combining a shot of a sunset with a bold silhouette was a favorite double-exposure subject, of course, as was shooting a portrait of a friend and then shooting a distinct texture, like a rock surface. You can do the same thing incredibly easily in Photoshop, of course, by layering several images together, but to me it doesn't have the same experimental quality of not knowing what you were getting in the camera until you had the film processed. There was just something magic in not knowing what you might get--the lack of control was fun.

That's why I was happy when I bought my Nikon D90 12.3MP Digital SLR Camera (Body Only)to find that it had multiple exposure capability. Yippee! Back to the future! Using the feature is, to be honest, a little bit bogus--it involves going to the menu system and setting up the multiple-exposure (how many shots on one frame) which takes time. And it seems like you have to do it after each exposure series. There is probably a custom setting so that you can leave it in multiple-exposure mode, but so far I haven't gone looking for it. Of course, with my first SLR cameras, I actually had to physically rewind the film after each exposure to put another exposure on top of it, so that was certainly no easier! But I am glad to see the feature coming back to cameras. You may have the feature and not even know it, so take the time to look at your manual's index (you kept your manual, didn't you?) and see if there is a multiple-exposure feature.

I shot the photo here in my garden last summer on one of the first days that I tried the feature. All that I did was to set the camera up to take two exposures on one frame, then took one shot of a bed of zinnias and another of a bed of marigolds. The camera took care of underexposing each frame (by one stop, I'm guessing) so that when they were combined, they wouldn't be overexposed--something you had to consider in film exposures, too.

Perhaps it's a longing for my misspent youth, but I love finding features like this in digital cameras. Pretty soon there is going to be a built-in petroleum jelly effect and won't I be waxing happy!

Simple Solution for Creating Soft Flash

One of the problems of using on-camera flash to photograph people indoors is that the light is very harsh and direct causing a ton of problems with glaring highlights and deep shadows. I shot this portrait, for example, of a woman at her desk for a local oil-delivery company. Because it's a busy office and the spaces are tight, there was no room (or time) to set up a big umbrellas or softbox. Instead, I used a Nikon SB800 on-camera flash (mounted on a Nikon D90 body) and used a Lumiquest Pocket Bouncer attached to the flash to soften the light. By bouncing the light into the plastic diffuser (the flash is aimed up into it rather that directly at the subject), it creates a much larger reflective surface for the flash to bounce off of and so softens the light--remember: the larger the diffuser, the softer the light.  As you can see in this shot, there are no really dark shadows of the woman behind here as there would be with direct on-camera flash and the lighting on her face is soft and even.

The Pocket Bouncer is just a triangular white piece of plastic that attaches to your flash (by Velcro or a strap) that softens the light without diminishing the power noticeably. But why read about it, why not let the inventor, Quest Couch (how's that for a cool name?) demonstrate it in the video below:

Visit Your Sewage Treament Plant

OK, I'm kidding. But that's exactly where I shot this photo--at a stream near a local sewage treatment plant. And I had no idea this pretty stream was there.

I was out last week on my second day of testing my new D90 and decided to drive down to a small park on the shore of the Housatonic River, just a few miles from home. The river was pretty boring but there were some nice tall phragmites (river grasses) growing near the edge of the parking lot and so I drove over to take a look. Much to my surprise I found this pretty stream behind the tall grasses. The light was fading fast, but I was able to pop off a few dozen different exposures hoping to get a nice flow of water over the rocks. I shot this frame at 1/15 second at f/10 with a 70-300mm Nikkor lens.

Here's the weird thing: I couldn't see the stream clearly from on foot, but from the high window of my Ford van I had a clear view--so the best shots were all made from inside my car. I just rolled up a sweater and laid it across the door frame and was able to shoot fairly long exposures without any camera jiggle.

Anyway, the most interesting part of the shots for me was that I had no idea this stream was there and I go to this park a lot. I never saw the stream before. The stream is, I think, where water (hopefully clean and treated) flows from the sewage treatment plant into the Housatonic River (a fairly big river--probably a half-mile wide in some places). So, you never know where you'll find a good stream to shoot--just don't look too carefully for the source of the stream.

Test Drive Your New Cameras

While I was finishing the new book, I knew I would have no time to play with a new camera (plus, it was freezing out and I hate cold weather), but I wanted a Nikon D90 and so I got impatient and ordered it anyway. Other than taking out the manual and reading it (always read your manual!), it mostly sat in the corner of my office taunting me. Or maybe it was just reminding me that there was a reward at the end of a hellish winter of writing.

Last weekend I got my reward. I took the D90 out into the field for the first time to get to know it better. In the coming weeks and months I'll probably talk a lot about the camera because it takes time to get to know a new body and this one seems to have a ton of really fun features. So far my favorite feature is the three-inch LCD. It's huge and the most fun LCD I've ever looked at. For the first day though I was dismayed that it seemed way too bright--I could hardly see detail in the highlights. So I went back to the manual and, duh, I found the menu item that lets you adjust the brightness of the LCD (up to three steps darker or three steps lighter) and dimmed it down by two settings. Now it looks pretty normal, but it's still tough getting used to seeing such a huge image looking back at you.

The first shots I took with the camera were of some kite sailors on Long Island Sound (a few miles from where I live) at sunset. It was a tough subject to throw at a camera the first time out--bright sunset, dark clouds, an action subject, contrasty water, etc. And I think the camera did pretty well. I only made some minor adjustments to this image and those were for color, not exposure. I am seeing more noise than I'd like to see (at ISO 200 where it should be noise free) but it might just be that I was shooting in a very dim setting. We'll see. All the reviews I've read say that noise is just not an issue with this camera. So hopefully this week as it warms up, I'll go shooting in "normal" daylight and see how the camera handles.

I'm pretty psyched to have a new toy to play with and hope this camera lives up to its expectations and to the great reviews I've read. I will say that using the camera is a dream--the menus are totally simple to follow and they are beautifully designed. Also, the camera has "Live View" a feature that lets you compose on the LCD--something a lot of DSLR cameras can't do. I'll write more about that feature soon.

So, my advice to you if you're getting a new camera this summer is don't wait until you're going to shoot something important like a graduation or a vacation: get the camera out of the box, read the manual and do some heavy-duty test shooting. Hey, it's all free. I shot 100 photos in the first two days.