Fineshot Photography Update

Nikonians.org, the worldwide Home for Nikon Photographers, where more that 150000 passionate registered Nikonians help and support each other, has today posted details of the forthcoming Nikonians Academy Europe training programme which will commence October 2nd 2010. I am pleased to announce that I will be heading up the first workshops from the new organisation which will kick-off in London. Details of all the workshops can be found here. The Nikonians Academy was formed in 2005 in the USA and the organisation has gained an outstanding reputation for employing the best instructors and delivering the highest quality training to Nikon shooters. Having personally delivered Nikon product training to many hundreds of people over my 13 years at Nikon UK, I can say with my hand on my heart that I have never come across more comprehensive, well-executed and utterly top-notch value-for-money training anywhere else before. What really sets the Nikonians Academy apart from the many other training providers on the market though is the Nikonians Community itself – a massive asset that allows it’s members to learn and share their knowledge and enthusiasm for all things Nikon and Photography. With a vast wealth of articles, forum postings and links, Nikonian members who come on the workshops can continue to expand their horizons. Unlike attending other courses, delegates truly feel that they have somewhere to go to follow-up on their training – whether that be to have something explained that they missed in the workshop or simply to extend their knowledge of a particular feature or setting. As the Nikonians Academy Europe grows, the number and breadth of the course titles and subjects covered will grow. In the USA, there is vast range of one-day, weekend, pro and beginner workshops including many that are “on location” in some of the most beautiful areas of the world. Look out for further postings on this blog as Nikonians Academy Europe expands it’s range of workshops into 2011.

I promised the delegates on the D300 course that I would make my slides and notes available for downloading from this website. Delegates on the Pro DSLR course and the Intro to DSLR course are welcome to download this pdf file also, as much of the material is applicable to you and was referenced in your presentations.

Click here to download file.

Thank you for attending the training. I enjoyed your company very much and I hope you left feeling inspired to take your photography further in the future.

The Burlington Hotel on Upper Leeson Street, Dublin 4, is the venue for a series of four one-day training courses I will deliver on behalf of Nikon UK. The first course on Monday 22nd February will be on the D300, followed by D90, Pro DSLR D700/D3 on the Wednesday and finally an “Intro to DSLR” course on the Thursday. I have received a copy of the presentations and handouts for the courses and have started to work my way through them in readiness to deliver the training. As I do not own a D300 nor a D90, Alex O’Brien of Nikon Pro support has kindly made arrangements to send me over a couple of bodies so that I can re-familiarise myself ahead of visiting Dublin. I have always enjoyed visiting Ireland and find the friendliness and humour of the Irish people to be second-to-none. Nonetheless, it is going to be a challenging few days but I am really looking forward to being back delivering training courses once again. For further details on the courses visit the Nikon Training website.

I have been asked by Lastolite, the world’s leading manufacturer of backgrounds and lighting control systems, to manage their presentation area at Focus on Imaging 2010. I will also do a 45 minute presentation on each of the four days of the show which takes place at the NEC in Birmingham, between the 7th and 10th March. Details of what I will talk about and demonstrate will be posted here shortly. This is an excellent opportunity for me to showcase my portrait and photography skills utilising Nikon DSLR’s and speedlights with Lastolite products such as the Easybox Hotshoe which I have used many times at public demonstrations in the last few years. Please come along to the show and say hello!

It is with great pleasure that I can announce that there is a feature on me and my work in the December/January issue of the Photographer magazine which came through my letterbox this morning! The article comprises a double-page spread of 8 of my images, ranging from portraits of the lovely Katie though to a couple of my Vauxhall pictures and one I made of top golfer Tiger Woods. It’s such an honour to have a slot in this excellent magazine which goes out to the BIPP membership and others in the trade. I hope to be able to get some further copies of the issue and possibly the article itself in pdf format so that I can post it on this site. Watch this space! Thanks to editor Jonathan Briggs and Chris Harper and his team at the BIPP for this. I am absolutely over the moon!

Nikon NPS Roadshow Invite

On Monday I went to the Marriot Hotel in Bristol to attend the D3s Roadshow for NPS members. I saw a few old Nikon friends including Mark Higgins and James Banfield, the latter of which conducted the seminars/demonstrations. I was also most pleased to see Katie Green there too! Katie was modelling for James, looking very beautiful as always. I was keen to try out the highest ISO settings of the new camera and asked Katie if I could take a few snaps of her. Unfortunately, we did not get a chance to set it up properly – the best I could do was photograph her across the room as she was waiting for James to call her up to the front. I have not had a great deal of time to examine the images I made but I have posted one on the site to give you some idea – copy and paste this link; http://www.fineshot.co.uk/katie_D3s_12800_iso.html
In order to fit it on the page I had to crop it to around half it’s size but this file is still impressive. I made other, more controlled tests in the corridor outside the demo room which I will look at and post the results here. A bit disappointed about the “Quiet Shutter” Mode – this works a bit like a Mirror Up function and not the Live View soft frame capture I had hoped for. I cannot see much use for this hand-held as there is no way of seeing what you are capturing. The new 70-200 is everything I hoped it would be i.e. no larger or heavier than the lens it replaces but obviously (hopefully) better from a vignette point of view. I had to rush out in the end so I did not get a chance to ask about the LED video lights James was using? I didn’t pick up a D3s brochure – it looked so cheap and nasty to say the least. I can remember seeing my first Nikon camera brochure in 1976. A thing of beauty it was too! For those of us who could not afford a Nikon, the brochure itself was the next best thing – it really allowed the quality of the camera to come through. The D3x was the first really bad brochure (for their most expensive DSLR and all).  That has obviously started a trend…..