Everything within Reason

I started out with a Nikon D100, and grew to a Nikon D300 in those 5 years. The Nikon D200 was in my possession only about 6 months or so. Man, the noise on that body was humongous.

The Lightroom library shows me that I started (semi-serious) with photography about 5 years ago. 2005 was a bit of a slow year though.

It seems that the number of photo’s I make grows exponentially.

Adobe Lightroom Folders

At this rate, my Drobo wil run out of space in about a month or so

Been experimenting the last couple of days with off-camera flash. Not entirely to my satisfaction, but learning every second more and more about (studio) flashing.

At the moment I have a Nikon SB-600 which is nice, but two (or more) would be a lot nicer (Photography Acquisition Syndrome, anyone???). Also some stands, claps etc. would be nice. Getting a flash off the floor (or cases) and into the air requires a lot of ingenuity.

This way, the gear-wish-list keeps growing and growing. Oh man, that Nikon 200-400mm f/4 lens is not getting closer this way….

Ordered a Phottix remote trigger set Tetra 1 x triger 2 x reciever kit last night for a couple of bucks (due tomorrow from Arend Handelsonderneming). About time that I started to get more familiar with creative off-camera flashing….. Did I say ‘creative’ and ‘I’?

A good time to start with some self portraits to get used to the lighting….. So expect som creepy pictures here and on my flickr page.

…. Or so they say (mirror).

UPDATE: AlphaConsole seems to be offline (permanent??) AlliedWalet (with one L in wallet) is still operational though.
The links to AlphaConsole will remain, but visit them @ your own risk. The mirror links point to screenshots and are therefor safe.

The fraud allegations are most likely the result of this posting.

Let’s try to debunk these so-called allegations..

Fake articles

What’s fake? I know that some of my articles are well read, and according to some quite helpful. Some are not read at all (my personal postings mostly).

You may leave a reference to a ‘fake’ article in the comments.

PayPal button

Hosting a website costs money, especially If you run them without ads (as I do). So in order to compensate this (or at least try) I have a donate button. Most donations (an average of 2 euros a month) come through my CA certificate upload tool. A free service people can use to upload a certificate to a mobile phone.

Donating money is optional, not mandatory. It’s just a way of showing your appreciation for the things I do. Besides that, what’s shameful about having a donate button anyway?

Warez sites

This one puzzled me a bit, since I don’t deliberately place links to warez sites on my websites. It seems that some of the old scammer links in this posting are used to redirect people to ad pages, porno-related websites, and quite possibly warez sites. Since I don’t own those domains I have no control of what happens when you visit them.

If you think that one of the links on this website is directing you to an inappropriate website, please notify me by mail or by leaving a comment on this blog.

If you’re in the market for some serious gaming and looking for the best price on a Playstation 3 or Nintendo Wii, you might wanna consider NOT to buy at AlphaConsole.com (mirror).

UPDATE: AlphaConsole seems to be offline (permanent??) AlliedWalet (with one L in wallet) is still operational though is offline as well.
The links to AlphaConsole will remain, but visit them @ your own risk. The mirror links point to screenshots and are therefor safe.

The following reflects my own personal opinion on the webshop AlphaConsole.com. Do with it as you pleases…

First impressions:
Nothing wrong with the site itself. Their pop-up assistant guy is annoying as hell…..

LOL: “False rumours! Our site has no direct or indirect relation with the site named Panama export”
Strange, I get the same accessdenied.php (THIS SITE IS CLOSED, PLEASE CONTACT BY EMAIL.) error on both websites. Thankfully, TOR provides a solution in these cases :). Also, the layout, testimonials etc. are almost identical. So someone is being naughty ;).

LOL2: “Fraud Alert” (mirror)

Whois database information:
Alphaconsole.com
Updated Date: 17-mar-2009
Creation Date: 17-mar-2009
Expiration Date: 17-mar-2010

Further investigations:
No mention of alphaconsole on resellerratings.com

The testimonials:
Reading through them leaves me with the following feeling;
they have all been censored or written by the same person…. And why censor testimonials if they’re all good. A real testimonial page also has less enthusiastic reviews. They’re just too good to be true.

From the FAQ:
Q: Why your prices are lower than your competitors?
A: Most of the products which go to Europe by cargo pass from the Panama Canal. We are the Capital of the International Transportation. We don’t have any shipping costs. Furthermore, we don’t have any IMPORT or EXPORT taxes in Panama so we don’t pay any taxes. Our products are tax free. We pre-order and stock large amount of items, that guarantees us to benefit from the lowest prices.

Total bullshit. Buying abroad means importing products into your own country. Which means local taxes. No matter which capital they are. Shipping things across the globe costs money.

Q: Will I pay any taxes and import duties when I will receive my order?
A: You will receive your order from one of our stocks located in USA, Canada or Europe so you won’t pay any tax. We will also ship your package as a gift so there is no chance for you to pay any tax when you receive your product.

Sent packages as gifts also means that the insurance on those shipments are low. Much lower than your average console. You buy a €400 console, they send it as a gift. Things go wrong ((un)intentionally), and you get €10 or so from the insurance. Guess where the other €390 ends up.
Even if they ship from a EU-based location; The free transfer of goods in the EU doesn’t mean free transport. This undermines their initial answer with the ‘Capital of International Transportation’… which is in Panama and not in Europe. So the free shipping statement is dodgy.

Q: Which payment methods do you accept?
A: You can pay by credit card or bank transfer.

Bank transfer (whistles going off all around me). And let me guess, when you try to pay by credit card, the systems goes haywire. All you’re left with is a money transfer (which is a synonymous to ‘gone forever’). Since the frontpage mentions “Order today and lock in our newly discounted rates. These prices are temporary and will expire without notice” you’ll be tempted, or talked into the bank transfer…….

alphaconsole error

A little test confirmed my suspicion, and I love it when I’m right….
You’ll get a E404 error and you need to make a call to the aphaconsole.com shop. I won’t do that, since I have no idea of what the costs of the call is gonna be. >€10 per minute are common in these situations, which is also easy money.

https notification

The order page says that placing of the order is done via a https link, but the form on the page gets submitted to placeorder.php. No https anywhere in sight.

If you ask me: A COMPLETE SCAM!!

But hey, that’s just my personal opinion……

UPDATE: it seems that they have some IP filtering in place, since my home IP isn’t allowed access to their website (THIS SITE IS CLOSED, PLEASE CONTACT BY EMAIL.). Guess they noticed me and my little blog. Thankfully, there’s TOR to keep investigating :D.
Yet another reason why anonymity is necessary in the Internet.

UPDATE 2: Payment interface seems to be ‘working’. You get redirected to AlliedWalet.com (note the spelling error in WaLLet). After a brief redirect, you go back to alphaconsole.com where you get a No CreditCard Payment possible error, and a wiretransfer is the only thing that remains for you to loose all the money you transfer (screenshot). Read more…

Last Tuesday we had the ‘Digital Presentation Night’ on our local camera club. I expected that most of the members would ‘just’ bring photos. Therefore I decided to do something different.

I like black&white photos, so I made a small presentation showing the original photo (unedited) and the final (B&W) result. The responds was actually better than expected.

The original presentaion (created with Adobe Lightroom) can be viewed here (flash-required).

Metallica @ Ahoy

Last Monday I visited the Metallica Death Magnetic Tour concert in Ahoy, Rotterdam (NL). A relatively small establishment for a rock band like Metallica, but great for the fans (if you got tickets), since the podium was centered in the middle of the arena. So everyone was relatively close to the stage.

I brought my Lumix LX3 for this occasion (since I won’t be allowed entrance with my D300 + 70-200mm lens). This was the first time I brought a (P&S) camera to a concert, so I had no idea of what to expect of the quality.
I must say that I did try several settings, but the iA (Intelligent Auto) mode left me with the best images. Downside is that this mode produces only JPEG’s and no RAW files. The A, P, S and M modes are too susceptible to the light changes (over- or underexposed, or just blurry images), and the light conditions change a lot (almost every second).

The movie-mode of the camera performs relatively well. Extremely bright lights results in vertical lines across the movie. The audio is not that good, but hey… it’s a digital still camera with filming capabilities.

The only downside of the camera was (and still is) that it lacked zooming to 400 or 600mm :).

The photographic results can be seen on my flickr page.

We had a presentation of a local photo journalist this evening on our camera club. It was to hear what his job was about. But after hearing his story, and seeing some of his portfolio I decided to stick with my current career. I’m just not that type of a photographer. I like shooting what ever I want, and not what someone else wants. I guess I would be a terrible wedding photographer :).

Thankfully not everyone likes the same thing, otherwise it would be a boring (grey) world.

During the break I had a little conversation about the photos taken by the National Geographic photographers (which is also a form of photo journalisme). That it might be nice to do those kind of photo shoots.
But if you’ve seen the National Geographics  ‘The Photographers’ DVD you might change your mind on that as well :). It’s not as romantic as you might think.

This is the final version which I presented during the cutlery results evening. One of the local camera club assignments.

Twins

More photos on my flickr page.

Most things, if not everything, are stored on digital media nowadays. Parts of your life are registered on your hard disks, CD’s, and DVD’s. But what if one of those fail? Do you have a backup?

Backing up to optical media (like CD and DVD) is cheap, but with cheap also comes questionable quality. Will those files you’ve backed up two years ago still open? I don’t know, and I don’t care actually. I back everything up to external drives. A 500GB drives is cheaper than a spindle of DVD’s matching the storage capacity, and a harddisk is faster and can be reused if nessecary. Another drawback of DVD’s is that they have a relatively small capacity. I would need tons of DVD’s just to backup my photos. Read more…