Sunday, May 9, 2010

F70EXR - Another Dark and Rainy Night

I met Karen at her office before heading downtown for a comedy show the other night. Great show by the way. Absolute Comedy, if you’re ever in Ottawa.

Her office is in a bit of a hippie neighborhood, which makes for some interesting people and some very interesting buildings. The small parking area next to her building has a wall on its other side on which someone went to town with the paint. A very nice mural, although I admit that I cannot see the significance of the three sections.

But here they are in a row. Shot with the F70EXR hand held. Processed with a little help from the new ACR6, CS5 and Topaz 4, all of which will eventually be mini-reviewed on this blog.

DSCF4396_wall[1]

DSCF4397_wall[1]

DSCF4398_wall[1]

Of course, when we got back to the parking lot the wall was no longer visible in this way.

I got home later and looked up to see a plane flying towards me. It was to fly right over my house on its landing path. We get that when the wind is just right. So I thought I would try my panning overhead. Not so good :-)

DSCF4399_pan_airplane[1]

If I stretch the exposure like crazy, you can sort of see impressions of the wings … but the image looks like crap.

It started to rain at that point and I turned my attention to the beautiful yellow tulips that insist on growing in my garden every year, despite a total lack of attention to their health. I tried many shots with flash (there is no hope whatsoever of getting a decent shot hand held with a compact at night) and out of at least 15 images, this is the one I thought was ok. Not great, but ok.

DSCF4403_night_tulip[1]

The issue, of course, is the use of direct flash. DIrect flash never looks all that good (exception, appropriately used ring flash), but it is all you have with a compact unless you set up some off board SB26 flashes on slave + delay mode. But that’s way too much work for this kind of shooting and it was raining :-)

To handle the direct flash, all you can do is work with the contrast and brightness until you minimize its effect. As I did here.

Carrying your compact everywhere affords a lot of opportunity for interesting shots. I keep the cam on the settings I recommend – P mode, auto ISO 1600, DR400, M4:3 (or M3:2) and I was able to get these shots with no real thought to the exposures. I set my cam for magnify mode when it displays the image that is shot, so I can clearly see if I am getting focus and if I am blowing highlights.

For the former, I actually had to put the AF assist lamp on, which made a huge difference. For the latter, you play with compensation. I ended up at –1EV to hold the highlights. Never be afraid to underexpose to hold highlights. These cams have a lot of latitude (decent quality of pixels) so you can raise the exposure without getting undue noise.

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