David_Buzzard

I used to calibrate my monitors about once a year, and there was hardly ever a change between them. I upgraded to Mac's with Retina monitors which didn't support my old Spyder, so I haven't calibrated the monitors on them, and haven't had any issues with colour or density.

Life is way too short to be using Nikon software. It's slow, dated, and has a terrible user interface. Do yourself a favour and get the Adobe photo package, which is Photoshop and Lightroom for US$ 10 per month. Adobe will send you upgrades as part of the package. Most of my work is done with Photoshop, but for larger jobs, Lightroom is great. If the D810 aren't opening in LR, you probably need to upgrade the software. It's probably a version that's older than the D810 model, so it's not recognizing the files.

I travel across the US border from Canada all the time, and my advice is not tell them anything unless they ask you directly. If they do ask about your gear, tell them you're an avid amateur photographer on holiday. Unless you're bringing a case of studio lighting, I'd be very surprised if they questioned that. I live in a resort town and I see tourists walking around town with Nikon D5's and other high end gear as that as a working pro I would never be able to afford. As a pro, I get asked if I'm bringing equipment into the US for work, and my standard answer is that I'm just using the gear to take personal photos, and I've never had an issue with that. Never, ever, lie to them at the border. If you get found out, they can make your life really miserable in a very short period of time. As mentioned above, a lot of cities and parks require location permits, and some cities might require you to get a business licence. I've heard all kinds of stories about cops barging into wedding portrait sessions and demanding to see location permits, so check to make sure you're up on that.

Can't log on my Mac running Safari 10.1. Firefox works.

You've got a ton of digital noise and processing. My guess is that you're editing JPG files and getting built up compression artifacts. You should always shoot in RAW, and make sure the long exposure noise reduction is turned on. You can also make panoramas (I think) and HDR images in Lightroom that keeps them in the RAW format, which I think works a lot better. You're also getting some flaring around the light sources. Sigma's make pretty good lenses, so maybe it might be a not so great quality filter, or even one that's got a lot of wear on it.

It's all going freelance, it's the gig economy.

I have the X-Pro1, which has the same sensor as the XT1, along with the 18-55mm zoom. I really like it, and find that I keep it on hand all the time. My normal working cameras are the Nikon D3 and D800, so the X-Pro1 feels like a ping pong ball in comparison. You take a bit of a hit going from a full frame to a APS sensor, especially in low light, but it's fine for most things. The little 18-55mm is a surprisingly nice lens. It's well made and solid, and the image quality is pretty good. It's kind of slow for low light, but it's not really a deal breaker. They may have upgraded the sensor's in the newer cameras, but I find that the latitude in RAW files is much less than the Nikon's (especially the D800). If you under-expose it, you've basically lost the shadow detail. The sensor doesn't have an anti-aliasing filter on it, so the files are natively really sharp. Turn the in-camera sharpening right down to -2, then apply unsharp masking in post. Also, I find most of the film pre-sets and the neutral setting to be way too contrasty. The only way to really tone it down is to pick the film negative pre-set, which is kind of weird work around.

I've had a load of photos in QC for two weeks. Normally they go through in a day or two.

Monopods are great for heavy lenses, as long as you only need to pan them side to side and not up or down. That's why you see them with sports photographers on the sidelines football and baseball games. The ones with feet are doubly useless because they really don't go side to side very well.

Is it just those photos where you're getting it, or is it on all the photos you take with the camera? If it's just that set of photos, it's probably some kind of random lens refraction. If it's on all your photos, then it's probably time send it in to get the sensor checked.

I was in South Africa in 2015 and found it was cheaper to get a study aluminum tripod in South Africa than it was to pay for the extra baggage weight fee to bring one with me. I picked one up for less than $100 USD, which I ended up giving it away to a local photographer when I left. It actually worked pretty well, are it is in a thunderstorm in Kruger Park.

I noticed that, the vector graphics box confused me. Still those shots are illustrations.

Adobe Lightroom has a mobile version, but I've never used it. You could probably keyword your images on that. Personally, I'd be packing a laptop for that work.

My feeling is that you have a RF image with an editorial only restriction, that's going to really restrict your sales, so better to just leave them as RM images. You have to have signed legal permission to use someone or their property in an advertising photo.

Those are illustrations, not photos, so I think you're in the wrong category. Alamy has a category for illustrations, but from the dialog box, they require vector graphics for them, not JPG files, so you're probably going to need a program like Adobe Illustrator.