Dan (Muzikman03) texts:

"I just cleaned a D3 sensor. I almost had to re-clean it because of all my drool."

ROFL!!! True dat, true dat...

=Matt=

Well, I managed to do it again! I shot an event with my cameras out of sync. I've got two flippin' sweet Nikon DSLRs with a way-cool "world time" menu, and somehow I managed to switch only my D300 to east coast time, while leaving my D200 on pacific time. And I was so proud of myself for getting in the habit of synchronizing my cameras down to the very second once every week or two! As amazingly convenient as it is to shoot with two cameras at once, and as critical as it is to have a backup camera, period, sometimes I loathe having to deal with the drawbacks of multiple bodies...

A 3 hour time discrepancy can be DEVASTATING to your image organization, let me tell you... That'll put your reception photos all jumbled up with your ceremony photos, and you'll want to shoot yourself just THINKING about how long it'll take you to manually organize it all.

Well, with 2,600+ images, I told myself there had to be a better way. So, after hunting around on the internet, I started finding programs that can indeed adjust the "time stamp" in an image file's metadata. Then I discovered that many of them were for Windows only, so I started over searching for Mac compatible programs. After a few programs promised being able to edit the time stamp but could not be recognized by Bridge CS3, I discovered that Lightroom is supposed to be able to do this! Sweet! Well, somehow () my PC's clock is "stuck" in May of '07, so I still have some trial period left. I transferred everything to my PC, "imported" (boo) all my D200 images into Lightroom, transferred them BACK to my Mac and viewed them with Bridge CS3, only to discover that the time stamp had gone totally berserk. Some images were still an hour behind where they should be, some were now an hour ahead. Hmm, I guess the initial beta / trial version of LR had a couple bugs?

After burning a half-day on all that fruitless frustration, I decided to just clutter my Mac with the latest version of LR, and downloaded the 30 day trial. Luckily, it WORKED! I still had to go through a whole bunch of import/export nonsense, but it was totally worth it. Since my D200 and D300 WERE INDEED synchronized down to the very second, and I had simply forgotten to tell my D200 it was on the East Coast, the images fell into perfect place once I added 3 hours.

What a relief!

I'm sure there are some of you out there who already knew that LR could do this. Please don't laugh too hard! Or, even if you do, I'll be okay because I know there are also people out there who haven't even shot with two cameras at once and given any thought to this kind of a problem... Oh, the drama of being a professional photographer! But, my clients pay to have the job done right, and as a professional I need to be able to overcome ANY obstacle, right?

Moral of the story: I guess Lightroom is good for something! I just WISH that Adobe would break down and offer a version of Lightroom that doesn't require importing, or a version of Bridge that has the small features like this, the ability to edit a time stamp. As much as I joke about hating it, LR is a great program with some strong advantages, and I hope that future versions of LR (or BR) bring me closer to workflow nirvana!

Until next time,

=Matt=

PS: Check my main blog (link at the top of the page) for images from this gorgeous Black Rock Mountain (GA) wedding! More coming soon!

Well, here goes nothing! I'm about to do something that all laptop owners ought to do every few years- replace my hard drive! Laptop hard drives take so much abuse, being bumped around and moved all over the place, and nowadays people leave them on for days / weeks on end... My laptop hard drive is a good ~2 years old, and I have really abused it both physically and workload-related...

Some people's philosophy is "if it ain't broke, don't fix it!" and there is indeed merit to this- I've obviously proven that my current HD is very reliable, and its a potential risk to replace a "perfectly good" hard drive with a brand new one that COULD be a lemon. However I'm more of the belief that "good things never last", and indeed all hard drives DO fail eventually, it's just a matter of when. So I replace hard drives, just in case they're actually a ticking time bomb and I don't even know it.

Now, all you computer savvy bloggers out there who maybe built your first PC when you were in kindergarden and know WAY more than I do about hard drives and failure rates and statistics etc. might say I'm a little too paranoid. Well, I don't know much about computers, indeed, I just know that my data, especially truly priceless images, are very very important to me. I may have a bit of that apple mentality of "just throw a lot of money at something, and it'll be okay..." but I guess that's the price I pay for simplicity and peace of mind. I'm a camera geek, not a computer geek.

So, the next time I come online and blog, I'll be running on a 120 gig, 7200 RPM / 8MB cache 2.5" drive. I would have gotten the 160 gig but it was $60 more for 40 more gigs, and I was already paying a bit of a premium buying it in-store as opposed to on NewEgg.com.

If this all works out, I guess this means I'm pretty much sticking with my little black Macbook, instead of upgrading to a Macbook Pro like I wanted to. That's okay, I saw the new 24" iMac while I was at the store and oooh, I totally want one of those now!!!

Alright, see you on the other side!
=Matt=

[EDIT] Works great so far! (~5 days) I've been loading lots of data onto the new drive, downloading many gigs of images to it, etc. etc. and it runs fine. Not sure I notice any speed improvement over the previous 5400 RMP versus the new 7200 RPM, but I haven't focused on it, either...

The drive, for those who asked, is a Fujitsu, the exact same brand of drive that came OUT of the macbook, ironically.

Now to see if this drive can stand the test of time!

Okay, everybody knows that most all Nikon DSLR's can command Nikon flashes wirelessly, this is as old news as the ~4 year old D70... And, this control has come a long way, now with the D300 being able to trigger a flash and fire an image with almost no delay, not to mention the ability to control two different groups of wireless flashes separately, in TTL if you want, while dialing in compensation from the camera. Woohoo!

But what you may not know, and what I didn't realize until a few days ago, is that the semi-useless CANON pop-up flashes as well as ANY other camera flash, including point-and-shoot cameras, are all capable of a similar function. All you need is a NIKON SB800 flash!

You see, there is a wireless remote mode / setting on the SB800 called "SU4". I thought that mode required you to attach a little receiver to the hotshoe of the flash to make it compatible with other brand commanders, but actually it works the opposite way- SU4 mode allows the SB800 alone to be wirelessly commanded by ANYTHING. Even when Canon DSLR's do their little autofocus strobe thing, the SB800 blazes away too! (And blinds you if you're not expecting it...)

You can only use the flash in fully manual M mode, or the ghetto-auto A mode, not TTL. But still, you CAN set as many different remotes as you want, and as long as they're in the infra-red line of sight of the commanding pop-up flash on your Canon, Pentax, Sony, Olympus, etc. camera body, you're going to get some crazy-good lighting! The pop-up flash can be left in TTL mode, where it belongs. It doesn't even know that there are other flashes out there that are about to go off!

I recommend that you get your SB800 from Adorama or B&H, by the way... Or KEH.com if you want used, of course...

Good luck and take care!

=Matt=