Very quick update

Apologies for not continuing my product photography series in a timely fashion — I'm working on moving the backend of the blog over to Wordpress, and there are a few technical things to clear up before I can do that. Namely this involves having a unified theme through the blog and gallery halves of the website. I've also spent about half of the last month visiting family out of state.

Getting this all in order will take a day or two longer, and then I'll have the next post in my product photo series up posthaste.

A little busy

Apologies for the total lack of posts this month. It's been a slightly hellish past few weeks and I've barely even picked up the camera. I am working on something big as well, which I'll probably start posting soon.

Under construction

I'm doing some renovations to my blog and gallery. In case you happen to visit while I'm experimenting and things look really broken or just plain gross, this is why -- it's only temporary.

Broken pictures

Many many many of the photos in my blog posts will be dead links for a little bit.  I'm reorganizing my galleries into a more logical, easy to browse structure.  For example, instead of one gallery of ALL bees and wasps, I'm just going to have a sub-gallery for all the hymenoptera, and then different galleries for each different type.  But it means breaking the links to almost everything I move around, so apologies for that.

Ad switching

I've decided to remove Adsense from the site. It was simply too intrusive, and often completely misunderstood the content of a post. The last straw was the original title of my earlier post of a green metallic bee; they're also called sweat bees, so the site was plastered with ads for sweat disorder treatments. Not only would I not expect anyone to come to this site for that kind of information, I personally wouldn't return to a photography site advertising that... I know I could probably take the time to filter out all but photography-related ads, but in the end it wasn't worth it for me.

My secondary goal of this website is still to offset a portion of my photography costs, so I've replaced the old ads with Amazon links. If you purchase something through the links on this site, I'll earn a small referral fee. On the sidebar is a list of items I personally would use and recommend (and most of them are used to create the content on this site), and there's a general Amazon search box as well. From time to time I may include a referral link to a piece of gear I review or at least talk about here. I'll never do this for anything I personally wouldn't buy or recommend -- the purpose of the ads is to support the site, not the other way around.

Your attention please...

I've begun consolidating this blog with my Smugmug site. The old hampsonphoto.blogspot.com address will now forward you to blog.michaelhampson.com, and I'll be working on integrating the two more tightly over the next few days.

This is pretty exciting. I'm looking forward to having my own personal gallery.

Under construction

I'm experimenting with Smugmug for the next week or two to see how well it works for me. In the meantime I'm hacking and slashing at the blog to get the two integrated. So apologies in advanced for the messy, Borg-like monster it may be at random points for the next few days...

Incidentally, if you're thinking about signing up for Smugmug, I have a referral code that helps us both out a bit: oooeqJkEQhv5Q
That's good for $5 off your first year, and would give me a small discount as well.

I am returned

I am back from my trip, with 2 gigs of photos to sort through -- having already culled the obvious ones while shooting -- so I'll have some new work online very soon. I did some birdfeeder ambush photography, where I set up my tripod about ten feet from my mom's feeder and waited for birds. As it turns out, the Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 Macro USM is an excellent, useful lens for many things, but bird photography is not really one of them. But it's my longest lens, except for the 28-105mm, which isn't really as sharp. (I do need to sit down and really compare them at 100mm though -- the Macro loses some if its sharpness as you focus closer to infinity, and while I'm sure it's still the winner, I wonder by how much.)

Most excitingly, I ordered a Canon 40D. This will be a big step up from the Rebel XT I'm shooting with now -- better high ISO performance, better construction and ergonomics, Live View, increased dynamic range, and better autofocus are all going to be extremely useful. Adorama, and B&H for that matter, are both closed for Passover, so I have to wait a week or two, but I don't mind. I wasn't expecting to be able to afford the upgrade for a year or two, so I can definitely wait a week.

I was considering the 50D as well, but decided against it for two main reasons. First, it'd be another $300, and as much as I'd wish otherwise, that put it out of my price range. Second, I wasn't convinced from the various reviews I've read and sample images I've seen that it's worth the extra money. I expect it will take a long time before I'm looking to do things that the 40D can't do, but I was not, ultimately, convinced that it would be any longer with the 50D.

My images are done transferring off the camera, so I am off to review and start some post-processing. We shall see what comes of it.

Comment troubles and Strobist

For some reason, Blogger isn't letting me comment on my own posts. Curious. But I do appreciate the ones I've gotten so far.

And for some actual photo content, check out the latest post on Strobist, about a photo shoot done in the Large Hadron Collider. Strobist has done more than practically any other resource to improve my photography in the past year, and every post is required reading, but this one involved Physics, so go read!

Hello!

Welcome to my brand spanking new photo blog.

But Michael, you say, you already have a blog and a Flickr. So what's the point of this?

Well, mainly, my goal with Natural Philosopher is to talk about my interest in science. I could talk about photography there, but frankly, since I've found I'm rather reluctant to talk about what I do in a public forum, it would turn into a de facto photo blog. A separate photo blog will also let me tweak the design to show off my photos a little better.

I do expect there to be some crosstalk between the two. I like nature photography. I do macro work of leaves and shells and things. I expect there's a way to post on both blogs at once, or otherwise link between the two.

So I have some ideas about how I want to use this space. I have plans. My ambitious goal, which I will tell you in the hopes that you will shame me into keeping to it, is to have a new post every day, even if it's just a picture.

I'll start that in just a bit.