As mentioned earlier, this is anodized black aluminum and weighs 2.6 pounds.  It has 2 types of feet, spiked and rubber depending on your needs.  It can get as low as 1.9 inches off the ground and fully extended it is 16.9 inches without a ball head attached. Folded it is 12.9 inches tall. It is completely field strippable meaning you can take it apart to clean it or change the feet very easily.  It has a load capacity of 50 pounds although the manufacturer claims it can hold more.   It has no center column and costs $375 USD.

The Gitzo 3320 BS is also a black anodized aluminum tripod and weighs 3 pounds.  It has rubber feet and has minimum height of 3 inches off the ground and maximum height of 13 inches without a ball head mounted.  Folded it is 11 inches high and has a load capacity of 39 pounds.  It has no center column and has Gitzo G-Lock system on the legs.  It costs$ 374.99 USD

So, having compared these by specs. the choice for me was the TP-243 from Really Right Stuff. The main selling pint for me was the fact that the RRS Ground Pod is field strippable for change in terrain and grip ability with the feet and secondly the maximum height of 16.9 inches. When attaching a ball head, the height seemed more natural and I did not have to crouch as much to see the viewfinder. Both are excellent and would serve the purpose of getting down low, but it really boils sown to what your needs are and what application you will be using it with.

HDR is something that photographers have all sorts of opinions on.  I personally like HDR but I am still working on perfecting the realistic look trying to capture what I saw looking at that with my eyes.  I used to just run the pictures through my HDR program and consider it done.  As I learn more from watching photographers who are really good at it like +Trey Ratcliff, +RC Concepcion and +Klaus Herrmann, I realize that there is a lot more to processing and HDR image to get a realistic look that just plugging it into the software.  The above shot is a 3 frame HDR of Saint Marys Cathedral choir loft.

I really liked the repetitive patterns in the shot with the beams and the chairs.  I was taken by the stained glass, which honestly,  I don’t think I did justice to.  Perhaps a 5 frame may have been better?  Like I said, HDR is a work in progress and it is different for everyone on how they decide to use this tool.  For processing, I took this into Photoshop CS6 and used content aware to repair damage to the ceiling as you will see in the photos below, unsharp mask, dodge and burn, curves adjustment and vibrance after running it through HDR Efex Pro to get my baseline.  I am constantly playing with the settings to find what I liked and I know looking at this shot with the amount of stops involved I needed to do and HDR.  Below are the 3 shots I used to comprise the final image above.  Your thoughts and discussion are always welcome.

I decided to start simple and focus on the American Mourning Dove.  This is one of the most common birds across North America found in all fifty states and regions of Canada.  Getting that really shallow DOF where the subject pops off the print and you have no distracting backgrounds is a must in wildlife photography.  I knew from researching this bird that it is a ground dweller and prefers to feed on the ground rather that from a feeder.  I thought this is good, I can get some good shots without distracting things in the frame, but alas, not as easy as you would think.   As I mentioned earlier, having the subjects ignore you and realize you are not a threat is the key to getting these types of shots, but it takes patience and getting down low.  Depending on the species, this acceptance can take very little time or hours.  In my case, it took about 1/2 hour for the doves to come in and feel as if I was not a threat.

So now the birds realize that I am not a threat, how to get close to get the shot?  A long lens would be the obvious choice, but what if you cannot afford the big expensive glass?  This can be done with shorter lenses and in fact Moose Peterson has an entire class he is teaching dedicated to just such a thing.  Find out about his course by clicking here: Short Lens Wildlife Photography Course.   Getting closer with shorter lenses obviously takes practice and the right equipment.  These photos were taken on a RRS Ground Tripod with a 70-200mm VRII while in the seated position.  I still need a lot of practice, but the fun part is the actual practice.  I will be attempting more shots with a panning plate once I get used to it, so their is more to come …

Gear:

Nikon D3s
70-200  VRII
RRS Ground Pod
Lexar Digital UDMA 600x Film

There are many sites that allow you to share your photographs and promote your brand. Let’s examine how we can use social media to reach existing communities.

Many communities have formed and continue to form online. Some of these communities are professional networks, some discuss simple day to day photographic shots. Online communities are continually forming and they are using many social media tools to discuss topics and learn from each other. As a marketer, many of the participants in these communities may also be good customer candidates. If you are able to build a relationship with your community, marketing and sales opportunities will come with it. So in some ways, the birth of social media has makes it easier for us to find potential customers, listen to their needs and perhaps use social media and other tools to reach out to them. Working to build true relationships with like minded community members, you can have success.

Search doesn’t have to happen at Google.com. Many web-based services like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and del.ici.ous have search boxes of their own. As the web continues to move to “real-time”, search will become the predominate method of finding “status” and “presence.” While blog posts aren’t going away, the searcher wants to find out what is happening right now, hence Facebook’s recent redesign to more of a newsy interface and of course, Twitter.
Social media places on the web are by their nature conversational. People are talking. They were talking before but the information wasn’t being stored for all to see. Now it is and that information can be a powerful market research tool. Whether you are looking at blogs, watching already existing communities or searching on various social media platforms people are talking – about what they love and about what they hate. This information acts as real time market research and can be invaluable in all aspects of your marketing and business planning. And if you hear something worth commenting on, join the conversation and reach out to the existing community. The two way communication is a great research vehicle as well.

Types of social media are diverse. These are the most popular, but certainly not all inclusive. These are however ones that you definitely need to be using while marketing your brand and promoting community relationships.

Google+
Linked in
Twitter
Facebook
500px
Pinterest
Smugmug
Flickr

Consider the time commitment when choosing your social networks. You don’t need to use all of them to build a community of like minded people, but if you do, it can be somewhat time consuming. Most of if not all of these can be automated and updated from your website or your blog with plug-ins either using WordPress, Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop.

In closing, social media is by far the most efficient way to interact with potential clients, professionals and communities to promote, learn and market your brand.

I knew that I wanted to get the starburst effect with the coach lights flanking the garage and the porch light, so I stopped down to f/22 as my starting point and fired away.  I was pretty happy with the results.  The f/22 aperture resulted in about a 13 second exposure to capture the above shot.  Not satisfied, I changed the aperture to f/18 and did 7 frame HDR just to see what I would get.  I used Photomatix this time to assemble to shots.

The resulting HDR gave me more of the night sky which was kinda cool in the final shot.  I turned the porch light off for this one because it was so bright and really changed the overall look of the photo when doing the HDR.   I wanted a darker look to the photo that emphasized the lighting, and with the porch light on, the photo looked a little washed out and the starburst effect was not showing up as clearly.

Images captured with Nikon D3s, 24-70mm on LexarUDMA digital film.