Herodotus
"I would be an historian as Herodotus was." – Charles Olson
Atop the Morrison Slide

Nikon D600 with 28mm f/1.8

rich December 24, 2012

I haven’t done a lot of shooting with my D600 yet. I have to admit that my Sony Nex-7 is more likely to be with me on any given day because of its size. The Sony can’t compare with the Nikon when it comes to low-light or wide-angle shooting though. The full-frame sensor on the Nikon is a clear advantage and there are times when it is worth the weight of carrying it.

Here are a few photos from two outings where I chose the Nikon. The first is a hike at Red Rocks during the week of Thanksgiving and the second is a holiday party with low light and fast moving children as subjects. In both cases I chose to use the 28mm f/1.8 lens. The lens was a no-brainer for the hike, being a great landscape lens, but for the holiday party I just wanted to see how it would perform. I figured it would give me a nice wide view of the action and the large file size from the camera would give me plenty of margin to crop, when needed. The downside, of course, is that the wide angle can be unflattering to faces, at least on adults. For children, I actually like the effect.

The following shots, along with the feature image at the top, were all taken in bright sun at f/8 with ISO 100. Nothing to challenge the camera here, except the metering, which seems to be spot-on most of the time. Just some samples to show that this can be a great landscape camera and lens combination:

The following pictures are from the indoor party where I was testing high ISO, so I’ll caption each photo with its technical details:

The D600 is a solid performer and can be worth carrying a little more weight even when the goal is just to get some good snapshots. Sticking to prime lenses helps keep the weight down and my core kit for this camera is based on primes. Next time I’ll review the performance with the 85mm f/1.8 as a portrait lens.

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Photography
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Lisa and Rich on the summit

Tanzania 2012: Kilimanjaro and Safari

rich December 12, 2012

In June Lisa and I went to Tanzania with a group and climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro via the Western Breach and then went on safari. I’m finally getting around to documenting the trip on this site in a series of posts. I am going to post the trip day by day starting with our arrival in Amsterdam to meet our group and depart for Africa. I have many photos from the trip, so I will embed galleries into each post as well. If you would like to see the entire set of photos, you can view them here: Tanzania 2012 Photos

To view all the posts about our Tanzania trip use this link. It will take a while to get them all up here.

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Travel
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A New Direction

rich July 13, 2012

I’m in New Orleans wrapping up a great conference, Bb World 2012. Before the show I alluded to my new new role at Blackboard in Facbook and Twitter posts, but I didn’t want to spoil any of our new product announcements by describing my job. So now that the show is over, it’s time to come clean.

I am now in charge of product marketing for our new cloud services group, a cross-platform development team that will make products that work with other Blackboard platforms. It’s a great group. I’ll be working with some quite talented people, and we’ll be in charge of some of the coolest new products coming out of the company. It’s a bitter-sweet move though, since my team members will remain on the Learn product marketing team and I’ll be on my own as a marketing resource for the time being. They’re a great group of people and I’m glad I’ll still work closely with them in my new role.

We announced our first new product from the cloud team during the company keynote presentation. It’s called xpLor. It’s a cross-platform learning object repository built on open standards and integrated with mulitple learning management systems. It’s so new, that we don’t even have a website I can link to, so stay tuned for more information as I get to work on that.

One final note, this is now the first post on this weblog. I had neglected the site for a long time, and I thought that my new start at work was a good time to clean up my blog as well. Most of the previous posts were cycling routes or tumble-type entries that I’d rather post to twitter. You can probably still find the old posts cached on Google, but I didn’t really see anything worth saving. I’ve given the site a new look and I’m going to try to focus my posts on a balance of professional and personal experiences.

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Work
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