hackinSTACK

I had an hour to burn this evening and so I did something I’ve been meaning to do for awhile. I had been wanting to get some good architecture pictures of the downtown area at night…

Boy, did I learn a lot in an hour! I took close to 60 pictures and these four are the only ones that I thought were even close to being decent. In my defense, It was the first *real* time of taking the new Nikon D40x out, so I had a lot I needed to re-learn and a great deal that I didn’t realize I had forgotten. So I came away a little disappointed in the quality, but hey - at least it was a learning experience. Hopefully I can look back on these someday and see how far I have come though.

In the meantime, you can click on the image to view the full album on Picasa and enjoy a little piece of the greatness I call home in downtown Chicago.

I made a DIY softbox tonight to practice some macro photography with. The idea is not original to me, but I got it off an excellent post at the Strobist website. My example is not the greatest in the world, but it worked fairly well for a first attempt.

Here is a picture of the box itself…

You can end up getting some pretty impressive shots with a little patience and twiddling of camera settings…. Except foolish me didn’t save them… next time I will be more prepared… it was about 1am at this point though…

Santa came early to the Chicago area this year… He dropped me off a Nikon D40x Digital SLR with the 50mm/1.8 Nikkor lens… Thank you Santa…

So far I’m *very* impressed with this thing. (I know it is probably a sin to take a photo of this with my iPhone, but whatever…) It takes excellent pictures with the lens, giving a good depth of field to the images. It should be excellent for portrait photos or anything close with a varied background. I can’t wait to get out and play with it some more.