I have been shooting interiors for real estate for over nine years, so here is what I suggest:

First of all, 18mm on your d3200 will not be wide enough, especially when dealing with smaller rooms. The effective focal length is 27mm on your DX 3200, nowhere near wide enough for many interiors. I've been using a Tamron 17-35 on my full frame D3, and sometimes the 17mm is not wide enough. I just recently spent the money on Nikon's 14-24, which helps tremendously.

I also have a d5100 which I use sometimes on jobs with Nikon's 10-24mm lens. But since you are trying so save some money, the alternatives from Tamron, Sigma, or Tokino suggested by those here will probably work just as well. The effective focal length will be roughly 15-35, which is a good range for real estate photography.

Almost as important as the lens, however, is a good flash. Do NOT use your camera's built-in flash for interior photography. First of all it isn't powerful enough. Second, when using a wide-angle lens you will get a shadow on the bottom of many of your pictures from the lens. You need a separate flash. I have been using Nikon's SB-800, but Yongnuo makes some good, less expensive flashes. I also highly recommend using a diffuser. The one that came with my SB-800 has been great.

Finally, if you haven't already, purchase Adobe Lightroom and get to know it. Lightroom will be your best friend when processing real estate images. You'll need Photoshop from time to time, but 95% of all the post production I do is in Lightroom.

I have found a few articles about the event, but the whole thing still seems pretty fishy to me. It seems fake for a few reasons:

The car at the beginning starts exactly the same as when it drives away later. It isn't coming around the corner, it looks like it had backed up there and then drove into the driveway.

Was the homeowner sitting in his garage with his gun in his lap waiting for the assailants? Because that is the only possible way he could have responded so quickly to the attack.

There are actually two different versions of the video as well, one which the attackers all get in the car when they flee, and the one you have here where three of them run away. Also, the sounds of the gunshots are completely different in the two versions of the video.

Perhaps the videos were edited before being released to the public.

If this was a real attack, there is a lot that is being left unsaid, such as why was this house attacked, in broad daylight, by four such heavily armed men?

Finally, one of the news sources I found said the homeowner used a handgun to fight them off, not an assault weapon. So that pretty much makes the whole point of this posting moot. A man using a handgun was able to drive off four heavily armed men, one of which had an assault weapon. He didn't need an assault weapon of his own to protect his home.

I have no desire to get into the gun control debate, but I will comment on the video. It is completely staged. It is not a new report, even though it pretends to be one. It's not even a very good fake.

If you want the shot of the people in that exact spot, but want to avoid the dappled effect, I think your best bet would be to reshoot it on a cloudy day. That will even out the shadows.

Household income is hardly the only measure of how the economy is doing, and it is usually the last thing to improve after recovering from a recession. In the last four years the economy has been gaining jobs, not bleeding them away like was happening in 2008. The housing market is improving. We have no major industries which are either going into bankruptcy, like the auto industry did in 2008-2009, nor are we providing bailouts to the financial companies like we did in 2008. I would consider all of these things improvements economically speaking.

Great post! I am so tired of those who vote Republican calling those of us who didn't "people who want stuff". I live in NJ, the state which almost always receives back from the federal government the least amount of money compared to what we pay in. I have never been on welfare or unemployment, but I still proudly voted for President Obama in both elections.

To those who keep saying that the country has been in terrible shape over the last four years and will only get worse, please explain what you mean. From my point of view, the last four years were far better than the previous eight. The country did not start any new wars in those four years and we have ended one of the ones we were already in, with a timeline to end the other one. Instead of plunging into a recession the economy has been recovering from the worst financial crisis since the 1930s.

Yes, the national debt is bad and has gotten worse since the president took office. But much of the reason it got worse was to pay for the wars we were already in, and another part of the reason was to keep the recession from becoming a depression. But when taxes are raised on the people who can very easily afford it, and some of the tax loopholes are closed on the mega-corporations that also can easily afford it, the debt will begin to go down. Even more importantly, as the economy improves and more and more people return to the workforce, their taxes will lower the debt even more.

Personally, I used to vote solely Republican in elections. I stopped doing so because I feel the Republican Party has become too radicalized, too religious, too pro-business, at the expense of the actual individuals in this country.


Dana Milbank
Opinion Writer
The Confederacy of Takers

President Obama’s opponents have unwittingly come up with a brilliant plan to avoid the “fiscal cliff.” They want to secede from the union.

If Obama were serious about being a good steward of the nation’s finances, he’d let them.

The White House, in one of those astro-turf efforts that make people feel warm about small-d democracy, launched a “We the People” program on its Web site last year, allowing Americans to petition their government for a redress of grievances. Any petition that receives 25,000 or more signatures within 30 days is promised a response (though not necessarily a favorable one) from the Obama administration.

And so a large number of patriotic Americans, mostly from states won by Mitt Romney last week, have petitioned the White House to let them secede. They should be careful about what they wish for. It would be excellent financial news for those of us left behind if Obama were to grant a number of the rebel states their wish “to withdraw from the United States and create [their] own NEW government” (the petitions emphasize “new” by capitalizing it).

Red states receive, on average, far more from the federal government in expenditures than they pay in taxes. The balance is the opposite in blue states. The secession petitions, therefore, give the opportunity to create what would be, in a fiscal sense, a far more perfect union.

Among those states with large numbers of petitioners asking out: Louisiana (more than 28,000 signatures at midday Tuesday), which gets about $1.45 in federal largess for every $1 it pays in taxes; Alabama (more than 20,000 signatures), which takes $1.71 for every $1 it puts in; South Carolina (26,000), which takes $1.38 for its dollar; and Missouri (22,000), which takes $1.29 for its dollar.

Since the effort gained attention this week, copycats in all but a few states have joined the petition drive. To be fair, White House officials could refuse the secession petitions of states Obama won, such as New York (which gets only 79 cents on its tax dollar), Michigan (85 cents) and Colorado (79 cents).

What would be left is a Confederacy of Takers, including relatively poor states such as Alaska, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas and Mississippi. One of the few would-be Confederacy members that pays more than it receives is Texas, which because of oil money is roughly break-even at 94 cents of benefits for its tax dollar. (The statistics, from an analysis of tax and revenue data by the nonpartisan Tax Foundation, were published in 2006, but the broad pattern doesn’t vary much over time.)

Depending on how aggressive a fiscal hawk he wishes to be, Obama could also try to offload onto the Confederacy of the Takers North and South Dakota and Montana ($1.73, $1.49 and $1.58 in benefits, respectively), but this would probably only work if Canada agreed to allow overflight rights for American aircraft to reach the West Coast states of Washington, Oregon and California (88 cents, 97 cents and 79 cents on their tax dollars, respectively).

Possibly, the new United States would need to negotiate certain protectorates in the Confederacy — Austin, New Orleans, South Florida and the like — the way the British did in Hong Kong. Then there is the awkward matter of what the breakaway nation would do to its poor.

But once the handout states left the union (and took with them a proportionate share of the federal debt), the rest of the country could enjoy lower taxes and the high level of government service typical of the Northeast, the Great Lakes and the West Coast.

There would also be non-financial benefits. Tampa’s Central Command, now caught up in the David Petraeus sex scandal, would be the new nation’s problem. And the exit of several Southern representatives from Congress would give Democrats a solid governing majority.

Of course, secession isn’t as easy or as painless as an electronic petition, and Obama couldn’t offer a redress of these petitioners’ grievances even if he wanted to. Nor should he want to: The Union of the Makers would be fiscally healthy but spiritually poor without the Confederacy of the Takers.

Yet would-be rebels from the red states should keep in mind during the coming budget battle that those who are most ardent about cutting government spending tend to come from parts of the country that most rely on it.

Twitter: @milbank[/quote]

It's a pretty long drive from Cherry Hill, probably close to two hours if the traffic cooperates. Potentially quite a bit longer if it does not.

I'm in Morris County, so I will do my best to come to one of your meetings. When is the April Open House going to be?

This is a fun topic! Here are some from NJ. I have to see if I can find something in spring.

This is a fun topic! Here are some from NJ. I have to see if I can find something in spring.

India Brook, Mendham, NJ, Autumn 2009


Chester Gristmill, Chester NJ, Winter


Chester Farm, Chester NJ, Summer

Sunsets are probably my favorite subject for photography. Here are some from here in NJ.

Here is a great website that will tell you all the astronomical data you might need concerning sunrise, sunset, moonrise, moonset, moon phases etc.: http://www.sunrisesunset.com/predefined.asp

It will let you print all the info you might want for a month so you can plan ahead.

On this particular night the moon came up 3 hrs after the sunset. It was roughly 2.5 hrs later from the night before. 4 nights before the full moon you could see the moon while it was still light out. I always thought it was like the sun, like a minute difference from day to day---boy was I wrong!! Obviously the local weather channel in Mpls doesn't know either because I contacted them and they were off by an hour and a half. When you use a tripod, VR can have detrimental effects because the system may try to adjust for movement that isn't actually occurring. This recommendation assumes that the tripod is "Locked Down" so that the camera is immovable........[/quote]

In 2000 I went to London with my soon-to-be fiancée. I had with me a new Nikon Coolpix 900S. The second day of the trip we went to the Tower of London. We got out at a Metro stop that overlooked the Tower. There was a short circular wall atop the hill, and I stood on top of it to get a better look. When I hopped down my foot landed in an angled drainage ring which ran around the inside of the wall. My ankle twisted underneath me and down I went. My camera was around my neck, and it hit the concrete ground hard.

The result was a very badly sprained ankle and a broken camera. I could barely walk the rest of the trip, but worse was I could take no pictures!

Absolutely fantastic!

It must have been tough to give them up. That was originally my intent (to give them to a rehabilitator) but fate intervened and I ended up raising them myself. They are pretty much full grown now, and will not go near any other people, but they will still come up to me and let me pet them.

Here's my entry. The couple shown here are me and a raccoon I fostered over the summer.