Chris Casciano’s Place Name Here

Often the goal of a new technology or new feature for an exiting technology is to lead a silent existence while making the owner’s life easier. Rather then being in your face forcing you to notice it, or worse, not working as intended and doubly frustrating the device’s owner it hums merrily along unnoticed.

I’ve been shooting steadily with the Nikon D90 dSLR since November of 2008. It struck me only last week in part because I was shooting some sky photos — which are notorious for making dust apparent — that in all that time I hadn’t had to do a manual sensor cleaning like I had often with my previous camera. The built in sensor shake/cleaning that Nikon has added to some of its recent camera bodies, and that triggers automatically each time the camera turns off or on, just works.

Last week I had the pleasure of attending an evening talk followed by a full day workshop by wildlife and landscape photographer Moose Peterson. The event was hosted by Adorama and Nikon.

Presentation Night – All About Food & Sex!

Thursday night at Adorama’s workshop space on Moose gave a nice presentation both on his photographic passions — shooting endangered wildlife and other little critters on the west coast — as well as some instruction on his compositional technique and working with light and your environment. Moose has been shooting for 30-some-odd years and shared with the group his top tip for getting close to animals in the wild

In my inbox this morning was an ad by Nikon touting the latest consumer digital cameras from their Coolpix line. While I’m not in the market for a little camera [my Fujifilm F30 is still working like a champ] I thought I’d poke around their web site and see which cameras offered GPS, WiFi and what other wiz bang features were being touted. I was struck by the lengths and features packed into these little machines to try and help your grandmas around the world get the right photo of their grandkids, automatically!

After reading Moose Peterson’s blog post on the Nikon GP-1 GPS Device I need to correct a bit of misinformation from my earlier post Nikon D80 To D90 Upgrade First Impressions.

There I lamented the fact that you could only plug in the Nikon MC-DC2 remote cord, or the GPS unit, but in fact the GPS unit has a remote plug in is so you can daisy chain the two devices. Also in the blog post, Moose mentions the GP-1 includes a clip to attach it to your camera strap instead of the hot shoe leaving the hot shoe free for flash usage.

Though I’ll continue using my off camera geologger for now, with these two options the GP-1 design looks much better and it will be an alternative I’ll consider should the time come that I want to change up my system.

After a long fight that started when I handled the Nikon D90 Digital SLR camera at the PDN PhotoPlus Expo in October I finally lost my battle against the upgrade bug and bought one to replace my 2 year old Nikon D80. I had been on the fence about the upgrade being worth it. I knew the D90 would be a great camera, but my D80 doesn’t yet feel like yesterday’s technology and I wasn’t convinced the newer body given my expectedly light use of big bang features like video would pay off for me.