I have received my Nikon D300s on August 29 and am very pleased with the tests I have done so far. My everyday's camera is a D200 and I have shot several times with a D300 and a D700. I knew I would find quite a big difference with the D200, especially in high iso.

Right after opening the box, I must say that the beast is really impressive. It is not much bigger than the D200 but it has a studier feeling. A few minutes after mounting my 17-55 f/2.8 on the D300s, I did a few test shots and then another set of photos in the evening during a family dinner.

I have been a DSLR (Nikon) user for several years now and I really like the power and customization I can get with pro / semi-pro modern cameras and lenses. Unfortunately, this kind of equipment cannot be taken everywhere. More often than not, I have wished I had with me a powerful but lightweight digital camera. That wish has made me search for the perfect small digital camera, but I haven't found it yet.

Then came Apple's iPhone 3GS. Ok, the iPhone is NOT a good example of powerful camera. But the iPhone it has a great advantage:

I am now affering high quality prints from my photoblog.

Thanks to Fotomoto, a new printing service, visitors can purchase premium quality prints of my photos in a simple and professionnal manner.

The PixyBlog platform has a search facility that helps people find photos on photoblogs.

Is it important to have a search function on a photoblog? Some photobloggers might think it is not important. After all, a photoblog is only a way to show some photos and that might be enough...I personnaly think it is very important. Why?

This is my first tip about PixyBlog.

What's PixyBlog ? PixyBlog is a great photoblogging platform and community. I already talked about PixyBlog in previous posts.

PixyBlog's platform is well designed and very powerful. One of the nice particularities of PixyBlog is that it integrates a scripting language, NVelocity, which gives users a very powerful tool for customizing their photoblogs.

As promised in my last post, I am going to explain the technical part of my recent photoblog migration, which was also described on PixyBlog's website. I know that many users of OneReaction Photoblog (the software I used to run my photoblog) are not software developers. Thus, the following post might be a bit too technical for them. I apologize for that. Software developers (even those who don't care about photoblogs) who want to know more about LINQ to SQL and see some real code in action might be interested by this article.

Hello,

This post is about the migration of my photoblog from my own server, using OneReaction Photoblog software, to Pixyblog, a new photoblog hosting platform and community.

A bit of history: back in 2004 when I started to look for a good photoblogging software, I choose OneReaction Photoblog, which was the only photoblogging software running on the Microsoft ASP.NET platform. Developped by Ryan Pardue, OneReaction Photoblog was originally working with an XML back-end and then with an SQL Server database. It had many interesting and original features. One of these features was a companion Windows application, called OneReactionSendTo which allowed users to post photos without having to log on the web site.

I am almost converted to using Adobe Photoshop Lightroom version 2 (LR2) as my main photo management software, after using (with some frustrations) iView Media Pro (now Microsoft Expression Media) since 2005. One of the problems in LR2 that I discovered while exporting some photos is that pre-existing keywords (ie keyword created with a previous version of Lightroom or imported by it from already tagged files) are not exported with the photos during an export process. As explained in Adobe's tech support page, you have the choice of either editing each and every keyword and checking its export options or, more easily, download and install the script that Adobe has released (see previous link).

I chose the later solution and it worked perfectly (much easier than manually editing around 500 keywords!).

I upgraded this blog to GraffitiCMS version 1.1. without any major problem. But unfortunately, the migration procedure as indicated on Telligent's website doesn't mention that the web.config file is overwritten during the migation process and that the database provider is reset to the default one, which in my case isn't the one I am using. This, unfortunately, made this website down for about fifteen minutes...until I discovered and fixed the problem.

It might be subjective, but I think the site is running a little bit faster than before.

This post is a follow-up of my previous one concerning the FAT 32 formatting of hard drives bigger than 32 GB under Windows.

For those who think I'm speaking hebrew here, let me explain briefly :