I woke up the other morning and the Airstream was covered in dew. I really like this little window anyway, and so I took a picture, and processed it in Color Efex Pro (which I've been playing with quite a bit recently, trying to get the hang of it).

This shot is from a walk with the family the night I got home and opened the new D800. I literally hadn't taken the time to do anything but put a battery in and put the 24-70 f/2.8 on before running out the door with the family.

The local city college has been undergoing renovations, and this building hasn't gotten the benefit of those changes. There's a swimming pool on the left, but it's been filled in with dirt. The flood lights were off, but the buildings are lit with creepy (sodium vapor?) lights, casting an eerie glow over the scene. I steadied the D800 on a wall and did the best I could to get a reasonably sharp shot at 1/6 sec. at f/5.6 and ISO 6400. I took this version into Nik Color Efex Pro and used Pro Contrast, Detail Extractor and Cross Processing (to enhance the creepy glow to better reflect what the scene looked like to me).

Another shot taken while goofing around with the new camera at work, this time in the parking garage. Also another drastic crop, which still results in a large file. Edited in Silver Efex, and the graininess is from that. Originally shot at ISO 3200, the original's noise is remarkably low.

I bought a Nikon D800 a couple of weeks ago, and haven't really had much of a chance to put it through its paces or see what it can really do. So, walking to lunch today with my bag, I saw these trees that are finally exhibiting fall color, and shot some. This is no great work of art or anything, but the detail this camera gets is truly astounding.

I accidentally shot this at ISO 200, despite the obvious abundance of light, mostly because I'm used to ISO 200 being the base of my previous camera, the D700; the D800's is 100. That said, I couldn't see any penalty for doing so; the image is noise-free as far as I can tell. In fact, this is a crop of well over half the frame I shot, and it still has more pixels than the full frame of the D700. So far, it's a very impressive camera.

More to come, obviously.

I've been using an iPad mini instead of my third-generation iPad for the past few days. I'm no stranger to the seven-ish-inch form factor, having a Nexus 7. I like the size more than I expected to, based on my experience with the full-sized iPad. I've frequently wished that my iPad was actually a little bigger, wishing its screen was more of the size of a comic book. Instead, Apple decided to go the other way and make a small one.

The first impression the iPad mini makes is “it’s light”. In fact, after days of use, the light weight is my favorite aspect of it. Sure, the smaller overall dimensions are occassionally nice but, in general, I find that I am better served by the more generously endowed model.

For larger tablets, in terms of aspect ratio, I’m very much in favor of the 4:3 ratio versus the longer 16:9-10 of the competition. In the seven-inch size category, I find this to be less emphatically true, but I still appreciate that Apple stuck with it for the “mini”.

The screen is by far the biggest let-down of the iPad mini. Most reviews I've seen have let the mini off the hook far too easily in this regard. Text on the mini is far blurrier than I expected, even in comparison to the Nexus 7, let alone a Retina iPad. The Nexus 7 has marginally higher resolution but, in concert with its slightly smaller size, the sharpness of the Nexus is clearly superior. Additionally, my iPad mini has a blue color cast compared to my iPad 2, third-generation iPad, and the Nexus 7. The iPad mini has been described as a smaller iPad 2, and there's a lot of truth to that, but I was surprised to find that the mini looked blurrier in practice than my iPad 2. Overall, the screen is the biggest thing holding the iPad mini back (no pun intended).

One bright spot with regards to the screen was reading magazines on it. I thought that the smaller iPad with a low resolution screen would really make the magazine reading experience bad, with complicated layouts that rely on small stylized text. Reading several magazines, including the most recent (and excellently re-implemented) Esquire magazine, was a real pleasure. Comic books were decidedly inferior, especially compared to Comixology's HD versions, which are presented only on high-resolution devices like a Retina Display. Still, I did enjoy the weight difference when reading for an extended period of time.

As an aside for those who enjoy photography and the associated gear, when the ThinkTank Retrospective 5 came out, I decided it was (as most photo bags are) almost perfect. I wrote to the company and asked for a Retrospective 6: a bag exactly like the 5, but with just enough extra capacity to carry an iPad. ThinkTank went a little too far and came up instead with the Retrospective 7, which accommodates an iPad or an 11-inch MacBook Air. It's too big, heavy, and close to the Retrospective 10 for my tastes. The Retrospective 5 can accommodate the iPad mini in its front pocket, making this by far the best reason for me to desire one: it allows me to use my favorite bag I don't carry. That I own the 5, 7, and 10 tells you how much I love these bags, even though none of them is "just right".

From the hardware front, the screen is the only thing that favors the Nexus 7, other than the price differential. The apps and iOS itself, as expected, work very well on the mini. The software ecosystem is alone enough reason to own the iPad mini ahead of the Nexus 7, in my opinion, but that gap is narrowing with each release of Android.

So, in summary, the weight of the iPad mini is the star. Once I went back to my full-sized iPad, it was like I'd been wearing clothes that were ever-so-slightly too small and I had been walking around without eyeglasses, where I really could have used them. I found that what I really want isn't a small iPad (unless it's to go out with a small photo bag), but a lighter, full-sized iPad.

Postscript

I also have had the chance to use the fourth-generation iPad, albeit in much more limited fashion. I had one on order for myself, but ordered one for testing at work, which arrived first. (Mine hadn't arrived because it was an LTE model, which don't ship until later in November.)

Bottom line: it's faster, but I decided that it wasn't different enough from the third-generation, and I canceled my order. It would be a great update, a no-brainer really, if you own an iPad 2 or older.