Avi Revivo

Archive for June, 2009

After an extensive research I bought the Sigma 70mm f/2.8 Macro for my wife because she needed a macro lens for food photography for her blog – room for dessert.

Surprisingly, this lens went under the radar and I hardly see it mentioned in any forums or blogs I read. Why is it surprising? because this lens is sharp as a razor already from f/2.8, lightweight compared to the Nikkor 70-200 f/2.8 and much smaller. The contrast is brilliant and colors are on the spot. The only drawback is that it have a screw driver focus mechanism so it can be a little noisy and it is not as fast as the newer sonic motors. With the DX factor on my D300 I have an excellent 105mm f/2.8 lens for variety of uses – portraits, street and macro photography. Hell, this lens even won 2 awards! it has been awarded best product 2007-2008 by EISA and was judged Best Expert Lens by the TIPA organization, and received the 2007 TIPA award.

To prove my point, I took the lens today for a short trip to the Tel-Aviv port where, luckly, there was an event where artists painted tables that are intended for sale and all profits are donated to charity.

If by any chance your not familier already with the amazing blog – “The Big Picture“, now is the time:

“The Big Picture is a photo blog for the Boston Globe/boston.com, entries are posted every Monday, Wednesday and Friday by Alan Taylor. Inspired by publications like Life Magazine (of old), National Geographic, and online experiences like MSNBC.com’s Picture Stories galleries and Brian Storm’s MediaStorm, The Big Picture is intended to highlight high-quality, amazing imagery – with a focus on current events, lesser-known stories and, well, just about anything that comes across the wire that looks really interesting.”

Hi All! Its been awhile! We (me and my wife Miri) had a great time in our vacation in Argentina & Chile. Even though we returned in the end of March, I did not write any posts until now for mainly 2 reasons. First of all, i got a new position at work which took a couple of bites from my spare time. Second of all, I took too many photos! I returned from the trip with thousands of photos and as of yet, I did not have the time to sit and post process them. Hopefully I will get to it soon enough but I assume it will take a while and perhaps I should give up on waiting for me to have the time to post process all of them and just focus on the best and share them with you.

Luckily I have friends who love photography as well and keep me updated with interesting stuff related to photography. A good friend of mine, Nathan, sent me a link to the following HDR tutorial from a famous travel photography blog named Stuck in Custom. Nathan asked me to give it a go and share my experience, so I did. Most of the images below are made from a single RAW file and were made by following the guidelines and using the tools mentioned in the tutorial. I included both the before and after. It’s a lot of fun! I suggest you try it!

All of the images below are from our trip. I went a bit too far with the HDR effect but that was the style I was looking for. It can be easily done in a much more subtle way!