One of my dream lenses has been upgraded to a version 2 – the Nikkor 200-400mm f/4 VRII is brand new and weighs in at about $6999. I am drooling already. Will I ever own this lens? Probably not – I really don’t photograph enough events or sporting events that would use this lens. And this wouldn’t be very good for indoor sporting events because you want to have an f/2.8 to try and freeze the action with a 1/1000 of a second shutter speed.

I can see using a really long lens for models or fashion because you can make the person look thinner with the compression available with really long lenses (one reason you don’t photograph models with a wide angle lenses). And you get the really blurry backgrounds behind the subject.

AF-S Nikkor 200–400mm f/4G ED VR II

So, yeah, the lens isn’t practical but it is really cool. It would be perfect for outdoor sporting events. All you would ever need for outdoor football would be a 70-200mm and the 200-400mm lens. And with improving ISO capabilities on these camera bodies this lens may soon work for indoor sports photography.

And this lens doesn’t have a Canon counterpart. And Nikon is the king of zoom lenses (Canon is the king of prime lenses.)

Finally! Here is an example of a lighting setup I used with 3 studio lights on location. I am using Alien Bees for my lights with an Alien Bee’s Vagabond battery pack for portable power. I am use the CyberSync transmitter and receivers. These are Alien Bee 800s which are fairly powerful. But lately I have been craving more power so I can truly overpower the sun. Maybe White Lightings would be cool. But if I had the money for it I might someday get the Elinchrom Quadra RX.

But for now this set up works pretty well. I was able to get about 150 shots with 3 lights on one battery before the battery started to show signs of weakness. That is when I came in and used just one Alien Bee on the battery and I used 2 Nikon SB-800s attached to the CyberSync receivers. And that worked pretty well for the rest of the shoot. So in about 3 hours we got about 250+ shots. Not to bad. It is expensive? Not as expensive as a ProPhoto or all Elinchrom setup. So it will work for most people who want to have some power.

Alien Bees Studio Lighting on the Utah Salt Flats

I am using a boom arm with a c-stand so I can get light in front of and above the subject without the light poll being in my way. I am also using ankle weights to weight down the light stands so they don’t fall over. I don’t want to lose a flash head to wind.

It has been raining and raining for the past 3 days. At least it isn’t snowing.

Tomorrow there is going to be the annual Walk MS in Salt Lake City, Utah and I will be going to help photograph the event. It should be fun and hopefully not wet. Last time I was caught in an all day event in the rain I was prepared enough with plastic trash bags. They kept the equipment safe in the rain but damn it was difficult to photograph.

So I have my eye on the Think Tank Photo Hydrophobia. It helps protect your camera gear in the rain while letting you access the buttons and controls and continue to photograph. This is on my Amazon.com wishlist and so hopefully I will buy it soon. And I will review it once I do.

There are versions that will even support the big lenses at 600mm! All I will need is the one for my 70-200mm.

As for that rain day last year, I was surprised to see how many photographers were not even protecting their cameras in the rain – I was passing out plastic garbage bags to them and encouraging them to keep their gear safe.

If you are a digital photographer you probably have a website. I have a few sites and it is pretty smart to know if people are visiting those websites? I want to know if I am blogging and posting updates in vain!

For a while I have been using Google Analytics – and I will continue to use it since it is free and it is pretty informative. Google seems to be the king of all web knowledge. However, I learned about another service called Woopra. It offers real-time statistics. I signed up for free – and depending on how much traffic you have to your website the service is free.

Here is a screen shot of the application. I could see what city people were visiting from – as it was happening.

Woopra

That is just so cool. And hopefully this will provide information on when is the best time to blog? Should I post things on Saturdays and Sundays? Or should I wait till Mondays?

And I am using the free Woopra plugin for WordPress. I did have to use some HTML code for one of my websites – for some reason the WordPress plugin didn’t work on davidphotographytips.com. But once I added the code to the footer things worked great.

Right now I can see that my daviddanielsphotography.com website has had visitors from the US, Spain, Canada and even Saudi Arabia.

And hopefully knowing this information will help encourage me to blog more and be more effective in my website strategy.

I have finally caved in and purchase a Hoodman Loupe – and like a lot of people I want to know why I waited so long to buy one. Maybe it is because what it does is so simple and the price seems pretty dang pricey. The Hoodman Loupe is placed over the LCD screen of your digital camera so you can see the screen if you are outside in bright sunlight.

It took me a while to figure out how to get the Hoodman Loupe to focus properly. You twist the eyepiece till things come into focus. At first the twisting felt like I was going to break it – it was so tight. But once I got it going focusing was easy. And I won’t have to focus again, unless my vision changes.

$79 sounds like a lot of money – but I imagine you could do this with an empty toilet paper cardboard roll. And with how often I photograph outdoors this will definitely make things easier to know when things are exposed properly and if focus is sharp.