More Smugmug greatness

I mentioned in a post earlier that I had been playing and trying to get my head around integrate all the social media that I seem to be involved with. I have twitter, facebook, blogger and my web site, and to update all of them separately could take hours!

Smugmug, where my site (adamhanlon.com)is hosted have just launched a tool known as smart galleries. By adding keywords to images, it gathers these together in a gallery for you-as virtual images. They also have a "show off" facility that allows you to generate slideshows like the one below automatically!



I've used twitterfeed to gather the feed from this blog, and hopefully to publish it to twitter and facebook.

Zen 100mm dome comparison

I'm using it for close focus wide angle (CFWA) and wide angle macro (WAM) to get round the problems of trying to light things that are very close to the dome port. I'm shooting DX with my D2Xs in a subal Housing and have been using a Tokina 10-17 for some time. I've set the dome up with a 30mm extender, which seems OK, but this may well need additional adjustment.

My first impression of the dome was quite how small it is! When compared with an 8" dome it seems really tiny! It also seems very well made and finished.

In use, for CFWA, with a Kenko 1.4x converter, you can really feel the magnification working! You can get the front of the dome so close to the subject that you really can feel the magnification "pulling" the subject in:




Practically, this means as long as you can physically get the strobes in close enough, that lighting is fairly easy! With dry gloves, the strobes want to be where my hands are! The reduction in distance between the front of the dome and the subject helps with colour and sharpness.

For more general wide angle, I took the following series of shots. These were all shot at 1/60th which may be a bit slow, and I am getting used to the set up-so please don't take them as anything like definitive! The full image looks like this:



I've then taken crops of the left hand bottom corner, and zoomed them to 100%

1/60th at f5



1/60th at f6.3



1/60th at f7.1



1/60th at f8



1/60th at f9



1/60th at f10



Corner sharpness seems to suffer at large apertures!

I'll do some more playing-please note that these aren't definitive.