Thursday, December 3, 2009

Week 31, Day 224, December 3, 2009, In Case of Emergency


Tonight was the second monthly meeting of the Groton Photo Club.  We began by a discussion about night time shooting, and then proceeded to walk through the town taking photographs.  It's a great time of year because many of the Christmas decorations are up.  I think that people in town must wonder what's going on as about 15 people were walking down Main Street taking photos at 8:00 PM at night.  (Our Main Street is very small, it's about a 1/2 mile long with no traffic lights.)

As I was walking along I spotted this old fire alarm on the side of the Fire Station.  The lighting, colors, and shadows caught my eye.  I stopped and took a few photographs.  I think I might return here some day, and try some more.

Lessons Learned:
  • I think that I have more of a difficult time figuring out point and shoot cameras than I do SLR.  Several people in the club had point and shoot, and I had a difficult time figuring out what the different settings do.  We're encouraging people to bring their owner's manuals for next time.
  • Once again I made the mistake of setting an ISO of 1600 for one photo, and forgetting to turn it back when I had the tripod.  I think the newer cameras are better at this in that they display the ISO on the LCD.  Mine doesn't.  grrrrr.
Photo details: Exposure time 1/60 sec, Aperture f/1.8, ISO 800, Focal Length 50 mm, 35 mm equivalent focal length 82mm, Lens Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II, hand held.

4 comments:

Rune Eide said...

We have all done that one - even when the ISO is showing :-)

I hope one day to buoy a fast standard lens for this kind of thing.

Nicki said...

This is very cool, Steve. I was looking for things like this that were not holiday lights but those lights kept getting in my mind.

The Gilje Crew said...

I love the light and composition of this shot!

I too have made the mistake of forgetting to change my ISO, it's definitely caused some problems in the editing process before. Ahhh the things we learn. Thank goodness you're doing it every day, probably helps you remember better for next time.

Rune Eide said...

Thank you for the comment! I used Photomatrix Pro with a bit of PS CS3 for touch-up. However, I have heard of a HDR-program that does not give such extreme and obvious "HDR-effecs", but I can't remember the name!