Great news! Finally moved to Full frame. Got the much talked about Nikon D3. Very soon added it with Nikon 50mm f/1.4G. Stunning sharp images. Still retained D300 as a standby body.

Click on the image to see the beauty up close..
(Got the image from Nikonusa.com, they own the copy right for this image)

Lowlight performance of this combo is just amazing. Even at ISO 5000 also, the images are super sharp and clean.

Bought my D3 & 50mm f/1.4G from www.adorama.com. Excellent people.

For low light photos with the above combo, check out this link - 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/raghu-gollapalli/sets/72157637248457803/

Portrait professional !

This is a beautiful software. I got the 10.x first. They had a free upgrade offer to 11. I can vouch for it. Instead of spending hours smoothing the skin, applying lipstick, whitening teeth, all you have to do is - open the image in PP. That's all. It will offer to make the needed changes, click ok and voila! your photo looks completely 'photoshopped' in just seconds. Try it. You will love it.

http://www.portraitprofessional.com/


It looks like they have renamed it portrait pro. Oh by the way, I used their download option.

I just used my photo as an example -

Move into Speedlites - Yongnuo Mantra

Having gotten tired of the home studio that I bought a while ago (that still works like a charm), I wanted to try out the cheap and best Yongnuo 560 flash after reading rave reviews on Amazon.com. After I ordered it, it came to me in like 3-5days. I also ordered the RF602 (transmitter + receiver combo) so that I can enjoy off camera flash. The results have been  unbelievable!

Here are the product links -
http://www.amazon.com/YN-560-Speedlight-Flash-Canon-Nikon/dp/B004GZLFHM/ref=sr_1_1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1320038259&sr=1-1
+
http://www.amazon.com/Yongnuo-Wireless-Trigger-Receiver-Shutter/dp/B0042TYNJ4/ref=sr_1_1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1320040596&sr=1-1

All you have to keep in mind is that if you shoot in manual mode with shutter speed = 1/60 & f/7.1, you get the best results.

Very Impressive! At around 60 dollars you can't go wrong.

Too much photography..

Welcome to you!
I know, I know. There is nothing like too much photography! I have been doing many things in photography of late. But mostly I have been doing it on flickr (http://www.flickr.com/photos/raghu-gollapalli/) as there is no memory limit (literally). I can upload upto 300mb per month. But here it is 1gb for good. In fact I have been uploading every day one image.

Since too much has been happening, I will list them in chronological order.

Thanks for stopping by :-)

Several new photos uploaded into my flickr page

Check them out on - http://www.flickr.com/photos/raghu-gollapalli

Feel free to leave your comments there..

Large Format prints

Hello All Again,
It has been several months since I posted. That doesn't, as mentioned before, mean that I haven't been clicking. When I invited some of my friends and colleagues for photo shoots, I decided to make posters for them. I tried a couple of places - some advertisements in ebay offering each poster 16X20 for 10 bucks, costco around 14 bucks (good quality) before finally settling for www.shortrunposters.com after seeing their ad in photography magazine.

I got 18X24 posters for around 2 dollars each!! The quality, I would say, was good. Nowadays many stores like walgreens also have poster services.

You can try any of these..

Home Photo Studio !!!

Studio 3 Lights Softbox Plus Backdrop Stands Kit! NEW! 600W - $360

 (This is my colleague & Friend Masato)

I bought a home photo studio -  a full fledged package at an amazing price - $360 - can you imagine? This is all it takes to set up a studio - perhaps in your garage or one of your rooms.  I love the results! I never knew the soft boxes transform the results so much - in combination with Photo shop. I dragged in a couple of my friends and colleagues for photo shoots after my family got tired of posing for hundreds of photos :-( The results were, as expected, very impressive.

Here are the details -

Brand: Aiki Photo (never heard of it before)

---

This New system has 3 Three 200w/s strobe lights, at GN 150 feet at ASA 100:

It features: Built-in reflector and power cable. Remote slave sensor (For cordless strobe Slave effectiveness 33 feet. Sync voltage 6-9V Stepless 1/8 to Full power setting options. 75W Halogen Modeling light. Recharge readylight. Two-way fixing stand adapter. Built in umbrella holder. Easily changeable fuse holder. Fast recycle time:1-3 seconds. 5600K color temperature.

One Backdrop Stands kit included:

High quality background stand with 3 section cross bar, 4 section stands.
Cross bar junction tension Adjustable.
Suitable for both paper and fabric backgrounds.
Assembles in minutes without tools.
Collapses down into an 27" long package.
Supports backgrounds up to 90" wide.
Maximum stand height is 90".
(copied and pasted from the craigslist ad)

You can search for this brand on amazon & ebay and of course on craigslist!