Dean Allman Photography

Scenes from Rome, Florence, Siena, Pisa, and Venice

Scenes from Rome, Florence, Siena, Pisa, and Venice now on the website. Slideshow below:

Perhaps I Was Too Harsh

Got word from Amazon last night that my D7000 order will ship in the next two days. Looks like the back-orders are finally being filled. Too cool!

Amazon Playing Games with D7000 Orders?

I put in an order at Amazon for a D7000 (body only) on October 28th. The price for the camera was $1,199.00. The latest update from Amazon is that the order will not be fullfilled until after December 25th.

Yet today (December 1st, 2010 that is), if you go on Amazon's web site you'll see the D7000 body only in stock and ready to ship for $1,499.00. These are things that make you go hmmmmm. You'll note that Amazon is selling this through Photoworld, probably one of their affiliate members. And Photoworld has marked up the price as they are aware of how high demand is for this camera.

Nonetheless it is bad PR for Amazon to do this and they should have thought twice before letting this go up. While I am tempted to cancel the order and go to B&H, all that would mean is that I would drop to the end of the queue at B&H and end up waiting longer for the camera than if I simply stay with Amazon. I'm busy with other projects and don't need the camera right now, either. However, it will make me think twice about ordering from them in the future. It leaves the feeling that they are not being straight with their customers about their order fullfillment process.

Update - Amazon notified me last night that the order will now be filled and I can expect the D7000 next week. Now that is too cool.

California Gallery Opens on the Website

A new gallery of images from photoshoots in California is now open on the website. Below is a slideshow of images from the gallery:

Photo Marketing - Flickr Schmikr

I deleted nearly all of my photos from Flickr today. I will just use it for snapshots and family photos from this point forward. I can't really come up with a good rationale for keeping good images up there. When Flickr originally started it grew extremely fast and became the favored new way for sharing photos. It was unique and novel at the time, and showed some promise in terms of developing a community of users dedicated to digital photography in the new Web 2.0 world.

Then Yahoo bought them. They might as well have sent the app to Siberia. Just as when AOL bought MapQuest (and all new development ceased, only to watch as they were supplanted by Google Maps) all development ceased on Flickr, and Yahoo watched as Facebook and Twitter ate their lunch. The Flickr experience today is basically the same as it was 2 even 3 years ago. Why they would not want to introduce an ecommerce piece to their platform is anyone's guess. On Facebook you can create a page for your business and then grow a community of people interested in your work using social networking . Facebook is business -friendly, where Flickr is a place where amateurs can post their photos, and that's about it.

The only person I have seen who has been able to utilze Flickr to grow his business and presence online is David Hobby of Strobist fame. David uses Strobist to post photos that illustrate some of the issues he discusses in his blog posts, and has quite a following of active readers who post comments and critique their photos. That is an educational function that fits in with David's philosophy of creating an ecosystem to market his work. He is highly successful and in this sense Flickr is an essential  piece of what he offers.

But for those of us marketing prints in a variety of formats it's a dead-end. They offer one style of Flash slideshow that hasn't changed since it was implemented. Users have to dig deep to get it activated. The user interface is awkward and difficult to administer. They allow visitors to "tag" your photos wth little boxes that reveal a comment when you mouseover them, thus creating a maintenance issue if users post comments that are not in tune with the message you are trying to convey. They offer a limited series of statistics that don't really give you much usable information. And there is no provision for any ecommerce whatsoever. If you want to sell your prints online you need another service, which means you just duplicate your uploads elsewhere.

The only advantage is perhaps an ability to become known via word of mouth, but I would bet that you need to become known first in other ways. Don't depend on Flickr to do that for you. As a result I see no real business case for using this service, even if it is free or has some additional features at a nominal fee. So, in the immortal words of Samuel Goldwyn, Flickr: "Include me out!".

Alaska Slideshow Mania

I'm continuing to migrate to the new gallery software - which is just a customized version of Zenfolio - and today I finished the Alaska Gallery. Zenfolio offers a nifty little tool to create embeddable slide shows for posting on blogs or Facebook, so just for fun here is the Alaska Gallery that was completed today. You get a better display on the website, so if you are so inclined check it out at http://galleries.deanallman.com

 

Chatter on Nikon Rumors on New Nikon Pro Models in 2011

Nikon Rumors has a very interesting post this week speculating on 3 new Nikon pro models in the development pipeline. The rumors were stimulated by a purported release of a book about a Nikon D800 that is to be published in March of 2011. The D800 is to be a replacement for the D700 and is to come with a new 24mp sensor, 1080p vid, new autofocus system and the same noise performance as the D700. If true, the latter would be a notable technical achievement, as to date we haven't seen that type of performance from a 24 mp sensor. The camera is slotted to compete with the Canon 5D Mark II.

The second camera is the replacement for the D3s. The new D4, or so the rumor goes, will come in with a 16mp sensor, 11 fps, and full 1080p HD. I imagine they will tack on a few more bells and whistles, as the upgrade here works out to 4 additional megapixels and full HD over the 720p in the D3s. The D3 series and below though has always targeted faster shooting speed over resolution, so this continues that trend.

The replacement for the D3x will come much later, and it is rumored that it will have a 36mp sensor, which will allow Nikon to maintain this line's position in the market as an entry-level medium format camera. I must say that I get brilliantly detailed images from my D3X when I make enlargements as big as 40 x 60, so I will have to be really convinced that the additional megapixels will give me a real benefit in terms of image quality before I would trade in the D3x on a successor. If the rumored 36mp sensor is true, then that will trigger the filtering down of higher resolution sensors to the rest of the Nikon camera lineup.

All of this is simple speculation, and great fun to chat about. The most intriguing camera of the 3 is the D800, as it marries the best features from the current D3s (high ISO) with a 24mp sensor, resolution that is currently only offered in the D3x. It will be very interesting to see how Nikon prices this camera. B&H has the Canon 5D Mark II at $2,499. If we are in that range this camera would likely become the top seller in the Nikon pro lineup. A similarly priced D800 would also trigger some pricing battles, so this could be a lot of fun. I guess we'll all have to stay tuned and see how this shakes out.

Gallery E-Commerce Feature Debuts

The galleries on deanallman.com have undergone an extensive revamp. Visitors can now view individual images or a full-screen slideshow of images, as well as purchase any individual image in a variety of sizes and formats. Visitors can order an image as a print, have it framed and/or matted, or displayed on a canvas wrap. You can also make your own calendar using any set of images from the extensive online portfolio. You can even order coffee mugs with any image emblazoned on the side. I am starting off with a revamped Colorado gallery that includes new images captured during the recent glorious aspen viewing season. The old image galleries have been taken down. The new gallery feature requires that images have to be revamped, so I will be going through my portfolio and reformatting the images over the next few weeks. I'll announce new galleries as they come online through Twitter and Facebook.

Nikon D7000 - Camera Lust Redux

I was pretty satisfied with my current camera configuration until Nikon announced the 16 mp D7000 this week. I currently have a D3X, which I use for landscapes and portraits, a D700 that I love for it's high ISO and all-around versatility, and a D300 for telephoto work (I love the 1.5 multiplier that you get with the DX sensor). But the D7000 now has me seriously considering putting the D300 on eBay.

Of the 3 camera bodies, I use the D300 the least. The D7000 though offers me expanded opportunities for shooting. One can argue about whether we truly need video in an SLR, but the D7000 delivers 1080p vid with continuous focussing. You are in a fairly sophisticated camcorder realm there. I have been wanting to do some combo-photo video documentaries after seeing such work on the New York Times website, and this camera would make that so much easier to do.

The D7000 is also smaller and a tad bit lighter than the D300, which makes it a good travel camera. You get all of the benefits of the DX sensor format, plus a higher resolution and a slightly higher ISO than the D300. The D300 still has a better focussing system, but not by much -  51 AF points vs 39 for the D7000. Going over the specs listed on dpreview it sure looks, on paper, like a much more feature-packed camera. The only thing that causes me to pause is wondering what Nikon will deliver in the successor to the D300s. If we get this kind of stuff at the lower end, what can we expect in the higher performace models?

When I bought my D3X, I told myself that's it, I won't have to buy another camera body. I have got all photo scenarios covered. Well this just blew the lid on that one. Helloooo eBay!

 

Refine Edge in Photoshop CS5 is Just Too Cool

I have been having all kinds of fun lately scanning old family photos and working with digitized versions of old home movies. And it is funny, but as I get into a particular photo I start to see things that I wish were different. And through the magic of Photoshop, and most especially the greatly improved Refine Edge feature, they can be. Below is a photo of my parents that was taken in 1965. I can remember when this photo was taken. The church my folks belonged to was photographing the membership for inclusion in a photo member directory (this was a big deal in 1965), and all of us sat for this series of photos. For years this photo sat in a picture frame on a desk in my folk's home, so the original color was pretty well faded 45 years later.

The image is in pretty good shape and I got a real decent scan. When I opened it up in Photoshop I had some minor dust and scratches to zap out with the Clone tool. I used a Curves layer and a Brightness/Contrast  adjustment layer to improve contrast (I know, a little unorthodox to use both, but it worked and saved a lot of time). Since the color was pretty well washed out I just decided to make this a black and white image, and used a Black and White Adjustment layer to take care of that piece. So far, so good.

But the part I didn't like about this image was this cheesie striped background. That may have worked in 1965 but I felt it detracted from the overall image in 2010, and it had to go. So the next step was to make a selection of my parents, and then fill in the background with something more suitable.

And this was where the Refine Edge improvements just rocked. I'm not going to go into the details of the Refine Edge upgrade here. I'll just point you to the first thing I did: view this excellent instructional vid that Photoshop CS5 referred me to:

And below you can see the result! I played with a couple of different backgrounds and finally settled on a grey to white gradient, which really looks nice and helps to draw the viewers's eye more to my folks and less to the background. It's as if the photographer used a go-bo'ed light on the background behind my folks, something he definitely did not do. He did do a good job of lighting my folks though, and once we tamed down the background, the image just sparkled.

 

We can do so much now with old images to give them the polish and sheen that they deserve, and make our memories just shine. If you are interested in doing this with your family photographs or home movies just let me know. I can help you do this with a personalized approach. Feel free to contact me at info@deanallman.com for further assistance.