Nikon released a Lens Positioning Map, which graphically represents their Nikkor lens lineup. Thom Hogan has a very good analysis on his site about the holes in Nikon’s lens lineup based on this information and what lenses he thinks Nikon will release next to plug these holes.
Nikon's Lens Lineup
The tool itself is written in Flash and depicts lenses by focal lenght (X-axis) and aperture (Y-axis). The lenses themselves are represented by a spot, a bar or a rectangle; depending on whether we are talking about a prime, a zoom with a fixed maximum aperture or a zoom with variable maximum aperture. Filters on top allow you to narrow down the selection.
Please note that the Flash animation only worked on my Windows machine; it did not work in any of my browsers on my Mac despite running the latest version of Flash for MacOSX.
If you are looking for a relatively inexpensive holiday gift for a photographer who uses Adobe Lightroom, LrSaver might be it. It’s a simple program which does one thing – create a screensaver based on your Lightroom catalog.
There are two features I like about LrSaver:
- You can use smart collections, which are based on any combination of metadata, to pick the images for your screensaver.
- LrSaver utilizes your Lightroom cache, not your actual images, for the screen saver. If you have your images on an external drive, you can still use LrSaver even if that drive is not connected.
Availability for Windows and Mac
Price: $9.99 at LrSaver.com
If you are like me, you constantly struggle to make it through the day without running out of battery juice for your iPhone. Sure, external batteries have been around for long, but they were bulky and pricey. Not any longer.
MonoPrice.com, one of my sources for cheap cables, offers a 2200 mAh battery (twice the iPhone’s capacity) for $15. Not only is the capacity on par with or better than other offering, the price is around a quarter of other typical offerings. So there must be a catch, right?
Apparently not. Josh Bancroft got himself a unit and tested it. And gave it two thumbs up. Maybe you should add one to your Holiday wishlist? If so, you should do it quickly – MonoPrice.com posted a note on their site that they are overwhelmed with orders and cannot accept expedited shipping any longer at this time.
Price: $15.23 from MonoPrice.com.
Last night, the winners of the 11th Click-Off competition in Mill Valley were announced. While my entry deservedly did not win the Grand Prize, it did win First Prize in one of the five categories, Unusual Beauty.
Richardson Bay Bridge Pillars and Cross Sections
I took this shot when walking along a small path right alongside Richardson Bay. Initially, I tried to frame the other side of the Bay with the bridge pillars as frames, but it turned out that a shot straight down the bridge pillars was much more interesting. The concentricity (probably more “square-centricity”) of the framing and the difference in how the pillars and cross sections had weathered over time really prompted me to submit this image to the contest.
