ISO Insanity

I shot this photo at an outdoor wedding reception last weekend with the D3. It was around 11 at night so it was virtually in the dark. 85mm, f/4.5 at 1/20 with a slow 24-85mm 4.5 at ISO 6400! You can see some noise but i think it would make an acceptable 8x10 print. This is amazing performance - it's like getting another 4 stops of light to work with.

Concrete Face 1

I stumbled upon this late today. Nikon D100, ISO 200, 50mm f/2.5, 1/640s. Lightroom 2 B&W High Contrast conversion.

Backyard Flood - 2008-09-14

A view from my deck - Fishpot Creek runs behind our subdivision, which has a 19 acre overflow basin. You can see in the upper third of the picture that the creek has overflowed its banks and water is rapidly coming toward the houses. The wind knocked over a potted tree and re-arranged lawn furniture. It is still raining as I write.

Mrs Peebles

Mrs Peeples is a Brown Pelican, a rehab bird who lives at the zoo. One of the first shots with the D3 - ISO 640, 180mm f/2.8 @ 1/640. The high ISO performance seems to be as good as advertised - I'll post some higher ISO pics soon.

NiN Concert - End of Show

Cell phone shot from the end of the recent NiN concert. The moire pattern is due to the logo being displayed by an LED screen. In person it looked like a perfectly solid deep red, like the far right. A slower shutter speed would have smooted out the LEDs, but my cell phone has no controls at all :)

NiN Concert - Year Zero Set

I've been out of action for a while because my monitor went kaput, leading to a couple of months of equipment upgrades. This is a cell phone shot from a recent Nine Inch Nails concert that I quite like. I probably have one of the worst cell phone cameras available, but it is occasionally quite handy. The gun-cross was an LED image, so I was a little surprised that it registered.

Deer at Powder Valley

I saw this deer at Powder Valley earlier today (her young fawn was nearby, but I wasn't able to get a shot). This is the first picture I've processed with the new Lightroom 2.0 and my first impressions are good. I used two new features in this photo - post-crop vignette and picture profiles.

The post-crop vignette was really helpful for slightly darkening of the corners. I took the picture with a 50 mm lens and couldn't get close enought to fill the frame with the deer, so had to crop this shot. Before I would have had to launch Photoshop for the corner darkening, but now I can stay within Lightroom.

Picture profiles are the other new feature I used. Both Canon and Nikon have profiles that can be applied to RAW files, such as "landscape" or "portrait". It's still in Beta, but they can now be downloaded from Adobe labs and applied. This one is using Canon's "standard" profile, which ended up having the nicest impact.

The other processing I did in this shot was to de-saturate the greens using the HSL green slider - I think it helps the separate the deer from the background.

Camera data: Canon Digital Rebel, ISO 400, 50 mm lens, f/2.2, 1/125 sec.

Egrets in Cliff Cave Park

Finishing up my series on Cliff Cave Park, here are some egret shots. The flooding makes for great fishing, plus it is a little easier to come up close to them. A lot are there - five or six, at least. These are all hand-held shots with a Canon 300 mm lens and Digital Rebel.

ISO 400, f/5.0, 1/2500 sec.

ISO 400, f/7.1, 1/800 sec.

ISO 400, f/7.1, 1/800 sec.

U.S. Grant Statue and City Hall, 10.5mm Fisheye. No perspective correction.

World's Fair Pavilion in Forest Park using 10.5 fisheye. Corrected verticals in Photoshop using Image Trends Fisheye-Hemi Filter, then corrected perspective using Crop Tool.