New Sigma lens and "Stacked Plates"

After painfully doing a lot of "homework" and speaking to some who have some great experience(thanks Dick M.) on various telephoto lenses for DSLRs including all of the "third party" glasses like Tamron, Sigma and Tokina, as well as most of the Nikons I have made my mind up and will soon be getting the Sigma APO 70-300mm for my D80.


Shooting mostly with the Nikkor 18-135mm f/3.5 - 5.6 kit that came with my camera and I am very happy with it for the most part excluding with the wider end (18mm) in which it does get a little "dirty" but again, it does a great job for a kit.


Dick McGowan also shoots some with a Sigma and you can see some of his pictures here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/stackedplates/

He has taken some incredible pictures including some great stormscape shots like the one below of the Hill City "Mothership" also shot with a Sigma lens!


Copyright Dick McGowan (please contact him for copyright usage at: http://www.tornadolive.com/)


For the price and quality, (as you can see from above) Sigma seems to have great products that produce great results. This is why I am going to choose the Sigma brand in the future.
I plan on posting some new pics as soon as I can which include a few HDR shots.

Some new/old pics

Just got done batch processing a few photos....some are "new" and some go all the way back to 2005. Most of these were shot while I was still using the Nikon D50 of course I have upgraded since then to the D80 and I am looking at possibly upgrading to the D300 or even the D3.

PLEASE NOTE: ALL PICTURES ARE COPYRIGHT PROTECTED AND WATERMARKED.
PLEASE DO NOT STEAL MY PHOTOS! IF YOU WOULD LIKE ONE JUST SEND MEAN E-MAIL!

HDR photography: the good, the bad, definitely not ugly!

Below are a couple of shots in raw with my Nikon D80. The first pic I adjusted the curves and levels in photoshop CS3. The second shot is the same as the first only bracketed by 0.7 to 1.3.
I took a total of 6 shots and used photoshop CS3 HDR format to bring all photos together. I then adjusted the curves to what I thought looked good. After saving my 32 bit file to a 16 bit tiff, I then brought it down to an 8 bit jpeg and what you see is what you get.
I purposely did not "edit" the images much simply because I wanted to see what kind of results I would get by just doing the basics.....simply amazing in my book!!!! HDR is the way to go if you have the time and equipment to bracket properly.

Before



After


As you can see, I did not even clean up the artifacts but the HDR is an amazingly better picture.
while most of us chasers chase run and gun style which would make HDR photography very difficult, there are a few who actually take the time to set up equipment and such. For those that do, HDR is a "new" option that will take storm photography to the next level.
If you have not tried out this new style of photography.....give it a chance.... I think you will love it, Iknow I do and I plan on doing it more and more.

More Pictures

With no real weather so to speak, I have been shooting more and more pictures trying my off camera flash at different angles with and without my light kit. This picture of my wifes rose plant was taken in my backyard with the flash unit. Nikon D-80 f/ 5.6 1/100, ISO 100 with spot meter on.

Possible Tornadoes and swimming pools!

Later today looks like it could get interesting in Nebraska with a few tornadoes possible. Latest model runs(WRF, GFS) are painting some "decent" shear in the order of 25-35kts in this area with CAPE values EXTREME (4000-5000j/kg) per the WRF as seen below.
It also looks like the area from Northern KS to ND will remain active for the next few days as the front slides South. I would not be surprised to see a few reports of tornadoes with such instability. Right about now I am wishing I was already up there and it seems like I think that same thought every year about this time...something about the end of the season blues I think.
Much like trying to squeeze the very last drop of toothpaste out of the tube, that seems to me what my mind is trying to tell me to do. I think thats kinda what every chaser is dealing with these last few weeks and it sucks! The only good things about the end of the season is that every year I find myself shooting more pictures and spending the quality time with the family that they missed so much while I was on the road. Some of that quality time latley was spent putting the pool up. I have posted about it just recently and said I would post some pictures of the kids in the pool when time allowed so:

Nikon D-80 f/ 5.6 at 1/250 ISO 100



Nikon D-80 f/5.6 at 1/60 ISO 100, 85 A warming filter and circular polarizer

Severe weather and flooding!

Finally had a chance to pull the Nikon out tonight an take a few pics of some severe storms that rolled through the Tulsa area tonight. I have not really had a chance to shoot anything due to the tours but tonight I had a few hours to kill and the storms made for a few good pics with all the lightning. I shot the above pic in RAW mode with my Nikon D-80 and an 18-135mm NikKor lense, I love the camera but seldom get to use it enough. The lense is okay but much like any tele it gets a little "dirty" when its wide open at 18mm and it pays to shoot in raw.
The storms(MCS) that went through the area dumped quite a bit of rain with a few places recording almost 5 inches! I plan on going out later today to see if there is any good flooding going on with hopes that I will find something isolated and not anything like what they had in Kansas or around the Springfield area a few days ago.