Marketing Begins At Home

Since this seems to be turning into a meme…  Here are the tools I use to get me through the day:

• Apple MacBook Pro -  What can I say? Without it I’d be lost amidst the stormy seas of the Interwebs. Not to mention I can get online anywhere and I’m working. Or playing.

• Nikon D80 - This is the digital camera that convinced me that digital could be as good and as satisfying as traditional dark room work. A big huge thank you to Tom and the rest of the team at MWW who put this puppy in my hands and helped me out when things went wonky. The “Picture This” outreach was a blogger program done right.  Now about the D300….

• Adobe Photoshop / Bridge CS3 - Like Josh, I’ve made the jump to working purely in RAW format.  Bridge and Photoshop make the workflow issues easy. I’m still trying to figure out how Aperture works into all of this - frankly I like it’s controls better than Lightroom. But we’ll see how it all goes.

• WordPress - The only blogging platform that matters.

• Apple iPhone - AKA the God Phone.

• Vonage - Still the easiest to set up and operate. I still don’t understand why Verizon charges my wife so much to call her friend in France. Maybe they haven’t heard…

• M-Audio MicroTrack  Portable Recorder -A neat little handheld audio recorder for podcasts or just grabbing ambient sound. I don’t use it as often as I should.

• FlipCam - I have to admit, it really belongs to the Boy Genius but I love this little guy.

• Sangean Super 909 / Radio Shack DS 398 - As modified by the good folks at Radio Labs.  There’s still a lot to listen to on the ShortWave bands and this radio will pull it all in. Add the SONY AN-LP1 portable antenna (only available in Japan) and you are good for listening to the World.

• Technics SL-1200 MK2 Turntable - AKA The Wheels of Steel. ’nuff said.

• Timbuk2 Blogger Bag -  Yes. I know what I said long ago. But this bag just rocks. It fits pretty much everything I need to get my working on and with room to spare. And it fits under the seat on airplanes.

OK. Enough gadget lust for today. What’s in your bag?

DSC_0096.JPG, originally uploaded by david parmet.

One week with the D80, 192 shots later… some early thoughts.

What’s bugging me…

Exposure - I’m fairly sure my D70s was underexposing. And I’m pretty sure the D80 overexposes. In technical terms, it’s exposing for the shadows, which it should, but without the Blessed Voice of Saint Ansel whispering in my ear, the camera’s exposure system is blowing out the hightlights. At least in extreme cases. So for what it’s worth, I’ve been setting exposure compensation to -0.7 and most everything comes out fine. Your mileage may vary.

Interface - Why oh why did they move the buttons around and change the arrows to press when reviewing pictures in the LCD screen? Oh well, progress I suppose.

What’s to love…

Everything else - Color is much richer and sharper than with the D70s. The LCD screen is HEUGE and bright. Special modes, like the black and white mode (see picture above) really work, unlike with most digital cameras. Whatever the little elves in the file buffer are doing, they should keep doing it because this camera is fast, almost as fast as a film camera.

In short, this camera almost makes me want to sell my film cameras. Almost. Which is saying alot.