Irish rugby fans are looking forward to a weekend of spectacular action. The eagerly anticipated Heineken Cup Semi Final between Leinster and Munster takes place in Croke Park on Saturday 2 May, in what is expected to be a world record attendance for a club rugby match. Irish titans Munster and Leinster will lock horns for the right to play in the Heineken Cup final.

The teams will be battling for a place in the finals in Murrayfield, while their fans will be battling to give their team colours dominance in Croke Park and in Dublin city with plenty of flags and banners on display.

There is very little to choose between both packs given recent form, and past form will count for nothing come Saturday’s kick-off.

It’s promising to be a great weekend, and not just because it’s a bank holiday!

Good photographs tend to capture the spirit of subject by showing some of its features more strongly than others. To do this you need to take advantage of the fundamental elements of an image, emphasizing those that are most useful for the interpretation of the subject using composition and lighting.

It delivers a combination of innovative features, robust performance, excellent image quality and a compatibility with Nikon’s DX Nikkor lenses. The D70 incorporates a DX format 6.1-effective megapixel CCD sensor delivering images with excellent sharpness and clarity, and a new advanced system Large Scale Integrated Circuit (LSI) processor ensures images with vivid color, accurate white balance and minimized noise.

The D70 offers a choice of seven Digital Vari-Program modes such as Auto, Portrait, Landscape, Close Up, Sport, Night Landscape and Night Portrait. It also includes four more Exposure Modes, offering more control over the camera settings. These Exposure Modes are Auto Multi Program (P), leaving camera to optimize exposure to suit subject with user control over shutter speed and aperture, Shutter Priority Auto (S) offering user to choose fast shutter speeds to freeze action or slow shutter speeds to suggest motion by blurring moving objects, Aperture Priority Auto (A), offering user to adjust aperture to soften background details, or increase depth of fi eld to bring both the main subject and the background into focus and Manual (M) leaving user with full control over the aperture and shutter speed control.

The Digital Vari-Program modes produce great results with smooth gradations and rich tones even in the most complex shooting conditions. Nikon’s new Dynamic Buffer technology allows the D70 to capture three pictures per second. Additional features such as simultaneous compressed NEF (RAW) and JPEG writing capabilities, and new i-TTL flash compatibility with sync speed of 1/500 second puts the D70 on top within its class.

The menus have been designed to offer quick access to the most often used features. User have a choice of customizing their menu to display simple or advanced options depending on their skill level. A unique help button on the camera temporarily displays a short description for each of the 25 different custom settings featured in the D70.

The built-in speedlight designed to be a part of Nikon’s growing Creative Lighting System, the D70′s built-in speedlight adopts Nikon’s exclusive i-TTL flash control technology. The speedlight automatically pops up and fires when natural lighting is inadequate or to add balanced Fill-Flash when there is strong backlighting. In addition, i-TTL technology improves the accuracy of fill-flash exposure and white balance in a picture, by seamlessly integrating color information gathered from the speedlight’s monitor pre-flash with information from the camera’s 1,005-pixel RGB sensor. The built-in speedlight can also be used in Commander Mode to remotely control a group of multiple wireless SB-600 and/or SB-800 Speedlights.

Nikon D70 features:

• Single-lens refl ex digital camera with interchangeable lenses
• 6.1-Megapixel CCD sensor (up to 3008 x 2000 pixel images)
• Nikon F-mount lenses (with AF coupling and AF contacts)
• Exclusive Nikon 3D-Color Matrix metering
• Autofocus (AF): Instant single-servo AF (AF-S); continuous servo AF (AF-C); predictive focus tracking automatically
  activated according to subject status, Manual (M).
• 5 focusing areas with Single-area AF, dynamic-area AF, dynamic-area AF with closest subject priority
• Auto (TTL white-balance with 1,005 pixels RGB sensor), six manual modes with fine-tuning, preset white balance
• Combined mechanical and CCD electronic shutter (1/8,000 to 30 seconds)
• ISO 200 – 1600 (in steps of 1/ 3 EV)
• TTL flash control by 1,005-pixel RGB sensor
• Continuous drive at 3 frames per second with dynamic buffer
• Instant return with depth-of-fi eld preview
• Digital Vari-Program, Programs
• Noise Reduction circuitry for long exposures
• Compressed RAW and JPEG formats in three quality levels and sizes
• Three color spaces (two sRGB and Adobe sRGB)
• 1.8-inch color LCD with 118,000 pixels and white LED backlight
• Onscreen menu for Playback, Shooting, Custom functions and Setup
• Review with zoomed-playback & pan, histogram and highlights
• CompactFlash I and II, Microdrive memory cards
• NTSC or PAL video playback format
• USB data and control interface
• High capacity EN-EL3 Battery Pack and MH-18 charger

The firm is closing factories in Massachusetts, Mexico and the Netherlands and cutting 450 jobs as the brand synonymous with instant images focuses on ventures such as portable printers for images from mobile phones and digital cameras, televisions and DVD players. The company stopped making instant cameras over the past two years and is now trying to reinvent Polaroid so it lives on for the next 30 to 40 years.

Polaroid failed to embrace the digital technology that has transformed photography, instead sticking to its belief that many photographers who did not want to wait to get pictures developed would hold on to their old Polaroid cameras.
Global sales of traditional camera film have been dropping about 25% to 30% per year and instant film has been falling as fast if not faster.

Polaroid got its start making polarised sunglasses in the 1930s and introduced its first instant camera in 1948. Film packs contained the chemicals for developing images inside the camera, and photos emerged from the camera in less than a minute.
Polaroid’s overall revenue from instant cameras, film and other products peaked in 1991. The company went bankrupt in 2001 and was bought four years later by Minnetonka, Minneapolis-based consumer products company Petters Group Worldwide.

I have been using film cameras and the digital ones too. For me, the most important criteria was the quality of the printed photograph. Film provides superior quality enlargements, even though darkroom printing has all but died out. These days, you can get a high-resolution scan from the original film, and print photos digitally. This process gives you a better quality enlargement than a print from a digital camera. And I am talking about big enlargements here – A2 and larger.

But let’s face it, how many of us will ever print a photo larger than 8×12 inch? Or in fact, how many of us ever print the photos at all? The day of the photo album has passed. Most photos today will only exist as digital files. We share them in emails, on websites, use them as screensavers. For many people the idea printed photo is little more than a novelty.

So what does film has to offer? Not to much. Except the high cost of developing and printing (you have to pay for each exposure, even the bad ones). There is a long delay between taking the photo and seeing the result. And if you want to use your photo for any practical purpose, you will probably have to scan it to turn it into a digital file anyway.

Does this mean the digital photography is better than film? In the modern world demanding speed and convenience, yes. You can take all the photos you like at no cost, and see the results instantly. You don’t have to pay to print photos you don’t want, and you can simply delete your unsuccessful images from your camera.

But that is still far from perfect. You already know that digital files are not as good as film for very big enlargements. And there is more to it. The quality of a digital print is a little flatter than a film print. It may have plenty of colour and detail, but for all its advantages, digital photography lead to compromises in quality.

The solution for this, is editing program. It is not difficult to fix your photos to a standard that is as rich and three dimensional as a film print. So where does all this leave us? Is digital better than film? For your purposes, most likely yes. If you are not going to print large, high quality prints, there is really very little reason to stick with film (other than nostalgia). If you are shopping for a camera, make it a digital and take the time to learn how to use it. Photography (film or gigital) is still about focus, aperture, shutter speed, composition and lighting. The digital vs. film debate means nothing, if your camera is switched to auto all the time. Oh, and get to know your computer…you’re going to need it.