Dream Tomorrow, Live Today, Cherish Yesterday

Lighting up the Skyline

Leica M9

Seattle's skyline got enhanced last year with the addition of this huge ferris wheel. It's fun during the day, but it's a nighttime when it really, ahem, shines!

Fun Friday - Cliche but I don't care

Sony NEX-7, f/5, 1/40, iso 1600

Even at ten pm Wintry night, there are plenty of folks at Pike's Place taking pictures and having a good time. How great is it living here? Pretty great!

Shakes + Fries

Canon 5D Mark II, 70-200mm F/4.0L, F/4.0, 1/4th, iso 3200

Here is another image from the "Sactown drive at night" evening I mentioned in Monday's post.  I like how that lower neon looks like some kind of crazy lowrider cheetah. Pretty colors and movement in this one.

Hot Italian

Canon 5D Mark II, 70-200 F/4.0L, f/4.0, 1/250, iso 3200

After a week of mountain men and flying around, let's switch gears, shall we?

About a month ago, a friend and I needed to go to downtown Sacramento for a book launch party. I convinced him to do the driving, so that after the party we could try for some "on the fly" photography downtown, from a moving car, something I have never done before.

It was really a kick! Very dark obviously.  Sometimes getting an autofocus lock, mostly just focusing manually. Catching what I could while we were driving, sometimes while stopped in traffic. You have to think fast about your composition, it lasts seconds or less.

This one was my favorite, but I have others that are interesting too.

Maybe I'll put up a few more if I get some good feedback?

Downtown Sactown

Usually here on the blog I'll want to vary the subject matter each day.  Today though, I'm going to follow on with yesterday's post, where I was in downtown Sacramento shooting some recognizable landmarks at night.  The bridge shot from yesterday was kind of a spur of the minute thing as I was walking to get into position to take this shot:

Sacramento Icon

Canon 1D mk III, 16-35 f2.8, f7.1, .8/sec, iso 320

Between modern photography equipment and the City of Sacramento, getting this shot isn't as hard as you might imagine.  The city nicely provides a huge dock that allowed me to get down on the water, and they light up the bridge so nicely, don't you think?  It really does look like this in person.

I had my sturdy Manfrotto tripod of course - you can't do this work without a tripod.  I picked the f-stop I wanted, f7.1 in this case, and did a quick meter reading.  Given that I was on a floating dock (albeit huge and sturdy), I wanted an exposure time of 2 seconds or less.  So I just bumped the iso (which is sensor "sensitivity") until I got that shutter speed.  Then you depress the shutter and let the camera do the work.

Then I looked at the image on the camera, where I had "overexposed" areas set to blink.  So you can tell at a glance that portions of the picture will be overexposed.  In a photo editing program like Photoshop or Lightroom, you can recover from underexposure (too dark) but not over exposure (too light).

Given that I had overexposure, I used something called exposure compensation, which basically overrides the camera's internal meter, until I had a shot with no overexposure.  Since I was in aperture priority mode, the compensation sped up the shutter, with a final speed of .8 of a second.  The amount of exposure compensation was minus 1 2/3 of a stop.  I don't know if it sounds difficult, but it really isn't that hard.

You can read more about the bridge on wikipedia.  And click on the jump link below to see another very famous Sacramento landmark.

When it Clicks

A local company needed some shots of Sacramento landmarks - at night.  So we headed down there last night, to shoot the capital building and the Tower bridge.  Hoo boy.

Canon 1D mk III, 16-35 f2.8, f14, 3.2 seconds, iso 320

There's another great photography book I have called "The Moment it Clicks," and that's what this photo reminds me of.  I got all set up with the tripod, framed the shot how I wanted.  I was shooting on a three second delay, to minimize any camera movement due to pressing the shutter.

You see the bright light streaks on the right, and then the yellow straight lines above them?

Right after I squeezed the shutter a giant tour bus roared up to a stop right there.  The camera exposed the area with and without the bus, and capture it's moving lights.  You couldn't do this again in a year of trying.

Click on the jump link below for a couple more treatments of this image.