Yeah, space is always the other issue. I take and hold on to a looooot of photos (nearly 10k sitting on my Flickr) and I'm already having to boost my space fairly frequently (which also means boosting the two backup drives I keep). Still though, might be worth it once I learn how to better deal with them.
I have a camera phone of my own for the first time (I know, I know) and it is life changing. We took the ferry from Lewes to Cape May today and the sun, water, and sky were all so changeable and had such a specific, midwinter palette... it was breaking my heart it was so beautiful.
Taken with my iPhone. Not great shots by any margin, but I do love the view from the top of Grouse Mountain.
Some phone-pics from my time gallivanting about NYC last week. A place of rest after eating too many hat doogs Bridges are awesome so it was great to finally see the Brooklyn Bridge in person Empire State Building spire East coast subway tunnels are so different than west coast Occupy Christmas lights
Quick, someone with a better camera go outside and take a picture of the moon hanging out with Jupiter! This is the best I could manage :(
In December, me and some colleagues from work managed to do a "photo-walk" visit to an old hotel that's been closed for about 10 years and is currently waiting to be converted into an office building. It's really a pity. It used to be a 5+ hotel in its golden days. But it was really fun, although we were a bit tired in the end from all the crawling around. We had to take torches to be able to see and some corners really looked like they were taken out of some zombie movie. with dark red suspicious stains and everything. pity I didn't get a good photo of those ones. oh my, need to find some more old hotels now. got addicted :D
My ist*DL stopped working towards the end of last year - regardless of how new the batteries are, when I turn it on the 'replace batteries' icon blinks at me. I suspect that there's actually very little wrong with it - that it's not detecting the voltage of the batteries properly and if I were to put in 2x CR-V3 (instead of 4x AA) then it'd probably work. I haven't tested that theory though, because my dad gave me one of his cameras - an EOS 350D. Bit long in the tooth but it's still a step up from the ist*DL (8 megapixels vs. 6.1, bigger shooting buffer, remote control, seven point AF, more widely available accessories etc.) and ultimately, an SLR is an SLR. I picked up a nifty-fifty at the weekend (which was a nice bit of a boost: the 50mm lense I have for my Pentax is a 35 year old manual lense - it can focus closer than the Canon one and the aperture opens to f1.4 but focussing on the right thing could be a bitch). Unfortunately, my wife is afflicted with bronchitis (not nice when you're pregnant and can't really take much) and my son's asthma is being exacerbated by a bad headcold so it'll be next weekend before I can get out and take any photos :-(
More recent photos from this morning. I may have actually shouted "FUUUUUUUUUUUCK!" out loud upon seeing this. Get out of my goddamn city, you basement-dwelling shitfucks. This is a decent place, not for the likes of you and your ilk. BEGONE! ANONYMOUS GO HOME! (back to your mom's spare room)
So I went to a roller derby bout on Saturday and I enjoyed taking pictures of people around the derby as much as the actual players. Is that totally rude? What is the etiquette of this kind of thing? And then is it even worse to post them in a forum? Mohawk Guy is looking right at me! Banana and a Baby Someone's Very Excited Someone's Getting a Massage
The sky was looking really cool Friday evening on my way home, so I tried to find a good spot to pull over and take pictures. Yes, more highway and powerline pictures, love them.
These aren't that interesting but I'll keep practicing! From about 10pm to 3am From about 9pm to 5am About 90 mins, wish I had more time and a power outlet
MonkeyPunky - they're really cool. I want to do that before the nights start getting too short but it tends to be very cloudy here at night and when it's not, it's fucking freezing. How much light pollution do you have to deal with there? Also, do you have an ND filter on your lense so that you can max out exposure times? Or are you just stopping the aperture right down to f/22 or smaller (it's not like bokeh or tight DOF are a consideration for this type of photography)?
There's actually a lot of light pollution, those pictures were taken at f7.1, I think (maybe 8 but somewhere in there). I don't have any ND filters but should probably buy one, I just have no idea which one. I also processed the images to remove the brownish/redness out of the sky/clouds. I stayed inside out of the cold and left the camera unattended on my back porch for the first two. I didn't realize it but other people have told me i should probably wrap the camera in plastic to prevent moisture collecting on it. Also the images combined as video instead of stacked are here:
So they're multiple exposures combined instead of one single, long exposure? Did you follow a tutorial?
I've read stuff online about creating star trails and I used the time lapse app on the camera (Sony Nex6) to take stills instead of automatically compiling them as a video. Then I used a program from the Mac app store https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/star-trails/id554953233?mt=12 to stack the images. Then another program: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/time-lapse/id451563308?mt=12 to assemble them as a video. The first image is 500ish 15 second exposure images, the second is almost 900 images and the third was around 200. The 3rd one turned out grainier than the others but I thought the settings were identical, maybe not.
Just on the plastic bag thing, if you're using your camera outside for prolonged periods of time, you need to keep it in your (closed) kit bag once you bring it back indoors. A couple of hours to acclimatise and then it'll be fine (you're trying to avoid condensation). I guess the advice about covering it in a plastic bag while you're outside is to protect against unexpected showers or something (?).
It's unlikely you broke anything, especially if the air in your house isn't incredibly humid. I've had a bigger problem with this in the summer when I go from the frigid air of the house to the hot soupy air outside and the inside of my lens gets soaked. The first time it happened I had to let it evaporate overnight and thought the lens was toast, but it worked out (and usually does). In general, though, when moving a lens between temperature extremes it's a good idea to bag it and let it acclimate before getting it out of the bag and using it. Best case you simply can't use the lens when you need to because it's coated in fog, and worst case you ruin the thing.
I just got my DSLR today. My first DSLR, that is. I think I got a good one? I got one that came with a fancy lens, but I figured that any fancy lens that came with a camera was probably actually pretty lame, so I spent $12000 on a lens and some magic beans. Har. No, instead I followed some advice from here and picked up a 50mm/1.8 lens, which, after some playing, is a lot more fun to use than the giant 18-125 mm/4-5.6 thing that came with it, but I figure that it might be swell if I use it a little more, too. Who knows, though. Anyway, I put it on manual and took a few shots. Unfortunately it's raining like a motherfucker outside, so instead of going out there I just took pictures inside my condo. I want to go out so bad, though! A few photos that I've taken. One or two of them might even end up being in my first project for this photography class I'm taking. But probably not. Some cat photos. OF COURSE! (I like that one. He looks like a dick and he's following the rule of thirds.) (I like this last one, but I was squatting down hardcore and didn't use a tripod so it's kinda shaky.)
Have fun with your new camera. And you'll get a lot more use out of that kit lens than you'd think, particularly if you ever want to shoot landscapes or take pictures in an environment where you don't want to risk a more expensive lens. (And just to be a dick like your cat, he's not following the rule of thirds there.)
He's following it on one axis. What can I tell you? He's a cat. Cats aren't followers. You forgot to follow this up with 'Haw haw haw!"
Aaaanyway. Nice shots - the first one of the cat is great and I like the one of the light trails. As Baker says, don't discount your kit lens; you can take some pretty decent photos with those and the zoom can be very handy especially if you wan to experiment with perspective compression and that kind of thing.
Oh, I was mostly kidding about being new camera snobby. Both of the cat photos were actually taken with the kit lens. Though it's got some kind of motor in it or something so I might have to get a new tripod since the one we used for filming isn't quite sturdy enough not to start tilting when I put in the heavy lens.
More fun with time lapse and the star trails stacker! Inspired by that picture/video of the planes leaving some airport, I thought it would be interesting to capture a time lapse sequence of the sky from my work parking lot then run it through the star trails stacker. So about 90 minutes of images at one image every 5 seconds produced this: Cropped out the cars passing by, limited the frames stacked to just frames with planes: Closer crop of the ghostly planes: Fun stuff!
B&H (a great camera shop) is selling discount Nikon lenses via Woot. There are some decent deals in there: http://deals.woot.com/deals/details...enses-nikkor-af-s-ed-vr-18-different-lenses#1
Here are five of the eight* photos I submitted for my first class project. I have enough of the board game photos that I can post a couple over in the board game thread and not be reposting. So woohoo. *Five only because two are intentionally bad to demonstrate an extreme ISO photo and the last is a boudoir photo of my wife. Well. No. Not really. OR IS IT?!
An underexposed squirrel. Dark and cloudy day... I probably should have used 1/60 instead of 1/125. As you can tell this is my first attempt to graduate from a point & shoot camera to one with manual settings.
Some fun with snow photos and negative processing: And then some from just going around the city. And finally... It's a great name for a band...
