Pixel peeper or photographer?

Happy New Year a few hours early, or if you read this after midnight December 31st, 20112, Happy New Year for real!  Let me take a moment befeore I get into some thoughts to thank you so much for coming to the Pilgrim’s Chronicles and spending a few minutes of your time with me!  I also want to thank all ofyou that comment or shoot me emails, it is a great encouragement and I do genuinly appreciate ydour efforts!

So I was having a  phone conversation with Mike Moats today and some really interesting things came up in the conversation, I would like to share the most important things with you!  If you are not familiar with Mike, and I am sure you are, he is one of the countries best close-up shooters, in my opinion!  Go to www.tinylandscapes.com/ 

After a trip to his website I think you will join me in a deep appreciation for his work!  What I appreciate even more is that Mike is one of those kinds of people I really like, he is a straight shooter.  Mike doesn’t pretend to know stuff he doesn’t know, and he does know a lot, but he is honest and forth right with his students and friends.  We were discussing how many people feel they have to own much more expensive equipment that they really need.  We both agreed that there are pros with very serious need for a lot of the high end gear, but that most of the people that just shoot for the shear pleasure of it, can do great work with a lot less.  The particular thing we were talking about was just how incredible the Nikon D7000 is, and how capable it is of producing stellar work!

This whole conversation grew out of mistake I made.  The other day I visited a antique shop, actually tow of them in my hometown that I’ve been wanting to shoot some images in.  The owners were kind of enough to let me roam around Alley Stuff, and McBurney’s Design Center to just have a little fun, and boy did I have fun!  I will share some of my favorites in a minute!  I decided to keep it simple and shoot everything with a D7000 and the 85mm Micro Nikkor f3.5 lens.   I did use a tripod and a wireless release and then went hunting, so before I finish the story here are some of my favorite images!

So to finish the story, I told Mike that when I examined the shots above , especially the one at the very top I thought I detected just a little noise, which I have not found the be present in anything I shot with the D7000 in the past.   When I checked the EXIF data, I found that they were all made at a ridiculously high ISO, (1600)!!   Wow, my mistake!  The more I looked at the files, I didn’t think it hurt things that much at all!  We both got as good laugh out of it and vowed in 2013 to be alot less of a pixel peeper.  Actually Mike and I are not peepers at all, we are proud to say we are photogprahers, we use cameras, not to just test them, but to make images!!

Happy shooting in 2013!

the pilgrim