My wonderful wife!

With several weddings and bunch of portrait sessions lately, I've not had the chance to blog as much as I'd like to, but I did want to post a quick note and say how much I love my wife, Jill! I sure "married up"! We moved back to my native Asheville 5 years ago today. And I asked her to marry me two days later! It's been an amazing 5 years here in Asheville to say the least... I shifted my photography business towards covering weddings (and thank goodness I did.. I love them!) and she's now the Associate Registrar at A-B Tech. We had a lovely Holiday here this year so far. I worked quite a bit, but fortunately, again, my wife is so great and understanding.... and very giving. As some of you friends, family, and loyal blog readers know, I have a love for wristwatches and for decades I've been compiling a list of fine watches I'd like to add to my watch garage. Christmas came a couple of days early for me this year... my lovely wife gave me this fabulous watch, topping the list: a 2007 Cartier Roadster Chronograph XL.

Sweet Baby Alana

I recently had the awesome privilege of photographing a beautiful 14 day old baby and her equally beautiful parents in their home. Baby Alana is an exquisitely gorgeous newborn, and was wonderfully alert. I cannot wait to photograph her over the course of the next year. We have scheduled 5 additional sessions, and I am looking forward to every one.

This is the beautiful sight that greeted me when I arrived at the Smith household. I adore a sleeping baby.



My favorite part about these sessions is capturing family interaction. Rich and Heather are amazing parents already, and their love for their new little one comes through strongly in these images.







And finally, my favorite shot from the session. If only I could take credit for Baby Alana's hysterical expression... it's so perfect!



Congratulations on bringing such an adorable little one into the world, Rich and Heather.

-amber

Goodness! It's about time!

I'm finally and officially announcing the next McWorkshop!!

It's been overdue for several weeks and I just haven't had the time to get this posted. I must have had a million emails asking when the next workshop would be, and even though I had the dates set and several people already signed up, I just couldn't seem to get to the computer with enough spare time to update the site and get it released. We'll be announcing more exciting details and specifics soon, like more sponsors, speakers, contest prizes, and more!

Hurry! Seating is already going fast and there's a special early-bird rate that you surely won't want to miss!

Check it out here: www.rockstarweddingphotographer.com

The dates: February 25-29th, 2008

Nikon D3 vs. Nikon D2X vs. Canon 5D vs. Nikon D200 vs. Canon Mark III

Ok, here's another little game we played! We all love to compare the noise levels at different ISO ratings. So, I've already compared the D2X to the new D3... and, well, there really is no comparison there. So I thought I'd take it up a notch. I asked Jeremy to bring in his Canon 5D, Amber to bring her Nikon D200 as she was in town shooting with me at my wedding yesterday (on a side note, the D3 performed remarkably at the wedding and I'm excited to share pictures very soon... and by the way, I never shot any LESS than 1600 ISO!!), and I asked my friend Parker to come over and bring his new Canon Mark III. Now we're talking! Let's see how they turned out...

Here's the basic shot, with the detail shots being 100% crops.



Again, I'm not some scientific scrutinizer here, but these tests are still fairly controlled. All are out-of-the-camera jpeg images using sRGB color space, auto white balance, on a tripod, all at f-1,8 at 50mm on a fixed-focal-length lens, in manual mode, with matrix metering. We let the cameras center the meter needle, which is what determined the shutter speed. All we did was change the ISO, then the shutter speed accordingly.

Immediately we can see that the D3's white balance is truer than that of the D2X. And obviously the noise levels are absurd... the D3 at 25,600 ISO rivals the D2X at only 3200! Dramatic difference.

When compared to the Canon 5D, the Canon holds its own well. The Canon's 3200 seems to be a bit better than the D3's 6400, but not by much. In the lateral ISO comparisons, we've concluded the D3 wins by a little bit. So if you're trying to decide between the two, and ISO is your only concern, the 5D does well for being about half the price of the D3. Having said that, the D3 soars past the 5d in other areas like its 11 frames per second to the 5D's 3, and the 5D has 9 focus points and the D3 has 51.

The D200 has been a great camera for those that have owned them and it's typically agreed upon that even the less expensive D200 excelled in noise handling over its big brother, the D2X. So now, how does the new D3 compare to the D200. (Incidentally, Nikon's new D300 is even better than the D200. I've shot with a D300, but not very much, and we didn't have one available for today's tests). We can see right off that the auto white balance of the D200 was quite different than that of the D3 (and all the others for that matter).

Now, dollar for dollar, the Canon Mark III and the D3 are much closer- with the Mark III being only about $500 less than the D3. And of the test cameras, the Mark III is the only one that has an ISO setting higher than 3200 with which to compare the D3, at 6400.

And one last one, hand held, with some skin tones (thanks, Amber! You should be a hand model).

The Mark III and 5D did very well in our noise level tests. Parker even commented that he liked the noise pattern on the Mark III better than the D3's lack there of. The D2X and D200 faired in the 3rd-place tie range, we thought, but it was close. But we all agreed that as far as noise handling goes, the D3 is, by far, the strongest performer. Let me know what you think!

It's here! The newest Nikon flagship... the D3!

MORE IMAGES ADDED, see bottom of post! I'm so stoked! I just received my new Nikon D3 camera and 14-24mm f2.8 lens tonight! I'll be posting more of a detailed review soon, but I'm very impressed so far with many of its features. The white balance, for one, seems to be great just set to Auto... haven't had time to try anything other than that yet. It's heavy too... weighing in at 2.7lbs without battery or cards, it's heavier than it 2.4lb predecessor, the D2X. More to come...

I have a beautiful indoor wedding this weekend and I can't wait to try it out in a real-world scenario, but in the meantime, here are a few preliminary test shots....hardly scientific tests, but you get the idea. I'll be comparing my D2X in some of them.

All of these were hand-held (not easy at some of those slow shutter speeds) jpegs straight out of the camera with auto WB and default settings. The only light source in the room was the one candle in the first series and one desk lamp in the next group. I thought that there would be no better subject for my initial tests than the Nikon FM that my dad gave me when I was 8 years old!

This image was taken tonight outside of my studio. It was quite dark, to the point of my not being able to make out the outline of the cars passing on the street with my naked eye. This first image is straight out of the camera, and the second one is... also straight out of the camera? Yep. You might be asking yourself, 'say what?', but indeed they're both out of the camera, both the same exposure, and both untouched in any image processing software. The second image is using the camera's D-Lighting function. I'm not sure if it's a practical option for common use, but it's interesting nonetheless.

A full-resolution version of the D-Lighting image can be downloaded by clicking here.