Saturday, December 6, 2008
On Friday evening the weather forecasters in the DC area began to forecast the chance for some light snow on Saturday afternoon. I crossed my fingers hoping that I would be able to snap a few shots of the Maryland Men's Soccer team competing in snowshowers.
Unfortunately Mother Nature didn't cooperate.
None-the-less, the weather was a decent overcast and that made for a relatively painless exposure. When the light varies it can be difficult to properly adjust exposure. Additionally, changing your white balance can be a problem. You could rely on auto white-balance settings but those sometimes don't work too well.
This was my first soccer game in awhile where I've shot with 2 bodies and I didn't quite know what to expect. Last season I shot with 2 bodies but this year I've just used the D3 with the 400mm lens. At times I've felt too long and have wished I had a second body for shorter glass. Today there were a bunch of opportunities to get some shots on shorter glass and I took advantage of them whenever I could.
However, in post processing I found that I might've selected one of the shots rather than very many. I shot with both cameras set to f/4, ISO 1000 and around 1/1000th of a second shutter. f/4 at 70mm doesn't offer very good isolation against the background so I should've considered going closer to f/3.2 or even f/2.8 for the shorter glass so that I could improve the isolation of my subject.
I had a bit of an equipment blip today while working with the bodies. The power on one of the D3 was a bit flaky and would go out several times. I've seen this before on this body and I'm considering sending it in for service or repair. The battery is fully charged but all of the sudden power will go out on the body and the low-battery icon will blink. I turn off the camera and turn it back on and it works.
I swapped batteries and the problem persisted on the same body, which leads me to believe it's a problem in the contacts between the battery and the body. When I shoot landscape I didn't have a problem. But when I rotated the camera counter-clockwise and shot vertical I had a problem. Maybe I'll try rotating clockwise so the battery is on top and see how that goes...
Last night I reorganized some of the filesystems on my server at home. I have a 650GB RAID-1 mirror on my fileserver and I've used 65GB for pictures. Music, Movies, and TV Shows occupies another 160GB, and my active files chew up around 10GB. On top of that I have the OS and that occupies some amount of real estate. What it all boils down to is: I'm running low on internal storage.
I've used external storage as mirrors for a few years now and it has proven to be reliable. I disconnected my 3 external USB drives from being directly connected to my fileserver so that I could run them through a hub and connect even more external drives. I'm going to allocate more space on the RAID to my imagery and offload TV Shows, Movies, and Music onto an external drive which I'll mirror elsewhere. Lastly, I picked up a 1TB Western Digital USB hard drive for around $139 last night on NewEgg.
Keeping all my photos safe and sound is really important. Hopefully with the hub and the new external hard drive coming I'll free up some space for increasing my image library.
Dave Lovell wrote an article on Maryland's win over Creighton and posted it over on the DC Sports Box along with a photo gallery.
