Photography while driving at night

I've been thinking about doing this for years.
These shots are from my drive from Everett to Issaquah at 4am last Thursday. At first I had the tripod in the backseat so I could get the dashboard lights in the frame. I pulled over at the first exit to check the lcd and decided to move it to the front seat to get the lights to fill more of the frame.
It's hard to set up a tripod in the backseat. The front two legs were half extended to the floor and the third leg was horizontal and short to hit the back of the seat. Next time I'll use a small tripod.
In the front seat it was similar but the legs didn't have room to spread out very wide so it would lean and fall over when I took corners too fast.
Before I left the parking lot I determined what exposure I wanted with some test shots. When it was in the back seat I couldn't see the lcd and wasn't tempted to think about it. I just hit the button on the cable release whenever I saw something interesting. When I moved it to the front I checked the exposure a lot at first and changed the settings (yes, while driving, no, it wasn't very smart). It's good to know the equipment well enough to do that without really looking.
I did plenty of cropping, instead of zooming. And changed the colors by changing the white balance.

Tips on shooting from the car at night:
Use a short tripod.
Clean the windows, and fix the cracks.
Cover the dashboard in black to avoid reflections in the windshield or shoot out a side window.
Overhead signs are the best.
Tunnels are great.
Have someone else drive while you shoot.
Use small apertures and wide angles.






See the rest of the photos HERE

---

Winter in Issaquah- 2008

I spent a couple hours walking around at night (between midnight and 5am) in the rare Issaquah snow trying to stay awake. More comments under each photo...

I got 'lucky' and had a car trip the lights during a 10 sec exposure, but not show up in the photo.

The neighbors appear to have moved away and left a light on.

Someone trying to get out of the parking lot.

My version of a self-portrait.

A treacherous looking path.

The view down Dogwood St. from Newport Way.

I swear I've lived here for years and never seen that sign.

Someone put a collar on that streelight to keep it from shining in their windows. I thought it made a nice spot light on the street for another self-portrait. And then I thought it looked better in mostly red.

In the middle of the night an 8 sec exposure shows quite a bit. But white stuff on the ground and in the sky helps too.

Lights on the roof melting snow.

This tree is huge. I have no idea how they got all those lights up there. I was tempted to sit on the bench for this photo.

Metal sculpture horse across from the theater.

The old train station under an almost dramatic sky.

Sidewalk lights at the hatchery are interesting.

A 15 second exposure just before dawn at the fish hatchery.

---

Part 4: Canon 50D sRAW Noise and High ISO test

This sRAW thing is fascinating.

I can't reproduce sRAW results from full RAW files. Not even close. I wish I could though.

On the left is a 50D RAW file at ISO 1600, 200mm f/2.8.
On the right is a 50D sRAW2 file at ISO 3200, 400mm f/5.6 (200mm @ f/2.8 + EF-2x)
Both were cropped to the middle 600 pixels with no resizing necessary.

I thought the higher ISO and EF-2x should have ruined the one on the right, but sRAW overcame that. I'll have to try that test again with smaller apertures to be sure.

It seems to me that sRAW should be valuable to bird photographers who can't get very close to small birds in low light and wonder if they should crop a raw file or use an extender and trade the stop or two of light for higher ISOs. And indoor or night sports photographers where high ISOs and fast shutter speeds are necessary and will either crop use the extenders and don't need huge prints anyway.

sRAW is NOT for saving space on a memory card. The files are extremely bloated for their small resolution. And they don't relieve the buffer much at all. Probably because sRAW is generated from the RAW file, but that would slow the camera down (and it doesn't)?

I now tend to use sRAW1 when at ISO 6400 and sRAW2 when at ISO 12800.

Here's an example of an indoor low light sports photo. sRAW2, ISO 12800, 1/1000, f/2.5, 85mm, cropped not resized. Exposed to the right, corrected and heavily processed in Lightroom.

---

Part 3: Canon 50D sRAW Noise and High ISO Test

I shot three sets of black frames for these comparisons. I went from ISO 1600 to 12800 for RAW, sRAW1, and sRAW2. I cropped all photos to 200x200 pixels then resized 200%.

1st set: exposure +4 (max) in Lightroom.
2nd set: exposure 0 + Lightroom noise reduction at 100 (max).
3rd set: exposure at -1.5 with noise reduction at 100 again.

The first set is totally exaggerated and not very useful.
In the second, it looks like ISO 3200 on the 50D is fine and 6400 might be useful.
The 3rd is a good example of how I try to use high ISOs; overexpose by a stop or two and darken in Lightroom. In this 3rd example I'd say 6400 is fine and 12800 might be useful.

sRAW modes seem to improve the sharpness and decrease the noise (more testing to do). I was expecting to see more of a difference between sRAW1 and sRAW2.

---

Lake Dorothy - Backpacking

C and I got away for the weekend to Lake Dorothy. The weather was perfect, the hike was relatively easy, and the food was delicious. We drove down what has to be the best maintained 9 miles of gravel road I've ever seen to the trail head. 15 minutes into the hike we crossed a photogenic bridge where a few rivers seem to meet. Then we climbed stairs for an hour to get to the lake. We went to the far side of the lake, about 2 miles, to set up our tent. Then I walked around in the freezing water while C read a book on the shore. I think we both fell asleep on the rocks and C claims I snored once, but I don't believe it. After we wore ourselves out relaxing we ate dinner and went to bed.
I was shocked how many people bring inflatable rafts and paddle around on the lake. I was only a little jealous because there are many small islands in the middle of the lake that look like fun.
On the way out we stopped at the bridge near the trail head and C read some more while I took hordes of pictures and went swimming. The rocks are mostly flat and slippery but I couldn't seem to slide very well. I definitely want to go back and shoot those low falls with a tripod sometime.







CLICK HERE TO SEE MORE PICTURES FROM OUR LAKE DOROTHY TRIP

---

Christmas Dinner 2007

C and I went to Marc & Heidi's on Christmas Day. They have two really cute kids and two fabulously friendly cats. Purvis is grey, and Cooper is orange. C says her arm is sore from carrying Isadora around. It snowed an inch or two while we were there so we were all excited. I spent a lot of time shooting the cats.



See the rest of the pictures here.

---

The Wind

A couple weeks ago the wind picked up around here. It made for some dramatic weather shots. I drove across the I-90 bridge after work and then took a picture of what I'd just driven through. I had driven as close as I could to the side where the waves were and got hit twice by water washing over the side. It was sweet. While I stood there the sun broke through and I had about 5 minutes to shoot those beams of light over Beacon Hill. Exposing correctly was a challenge. And it took some heavy processing to get them to look like what I saw.

---

Victoria, BC

C and I have lived around Seattle for about 7 years and have been wanting to visit Victoria, BC the whole time. We finally made it there over Labor Day weekend, 2007. We took the Victoria Clipper in the morning, experienced the Butchart Gardens and the fireworks. The Gatsby mansion is a really convenient and confusing place to stay. The Titanic exhibit and movie at the museum were pretty good. Getting home on the clipper that broke down was a disaster that we kept saying could have been worse.

Victoria is a tourist town, we saw and did all we needed to in 2 days and 1 night. It was nice, but we have no urge to go back anytime soon. We think we spent half our time waiting in lines. But we did pick the busiest weekend of the year.

The Gatsby Mansion is across the street from the ferry terminal. And we managed to check in as early as our boat arrived, which was great. It took us awhile to find where to check in though. There are at least 4 buildings that make up the mansion and they all look like the wrong one, because two of them have restaurants in the way. Several times a day we'd walk past the inside tables, then the bar, and then the outside tables to get to the street. I know a king sized bed is equivalent to two doubles side by side, but it's kind of lame when your king bed is literally just that. I also thought it was funny that our room had a full kitchen but no dishes or equipment to make it even slightly useful.

The Gatsby recommends a fish 'n chips place around the corner so we went there because we were in the mood and starving. The propaganda also mentioned a friendly harbor seal, but I didn't think we'd be that lucky. After sitting in a line to order for a half hour, and then another half hour line to pick it up, we did get to see the chubby seal with a blue eye.

Butchart is brilliant and absolutely disappointing at the same time. The flowers are so unusual and lovely I could shoot them for years. The gardens as a whole are awesome too. But there are always so many people around it's impossible to get a decent picture of any larger area without hordes of people in it. And everything but the solid pathways are roped off. So only the close up shots of flowers look good. The fireworks were strange. They had a wide area along the ground to work with so they used it all. Things were lighting up, and launching from, all over the place. That was the cool part. The very not-cool part was the whole thing choreographed to some Disney movie soundtrack, Aladdin I think. Had I not been occupied with shooting the fireworks, I would have left and been annoyed.

The brunch at the Gatsby was ok. The brunch sign that was draped across the main building looked really ghetto and made me laugh.

Next we were off to the museum to see the Titanic exhibit. I love how the IMAX film used a fisheye lens on the Russian scientist most of the time. For a film about a real tragedy, it was quite funny. The movie was good and so was the exhibit, but by the end I was falling apart like I'd been shopping for a whole hour! My back was killing me, my neck was tired, and my feet hurt. I didn't even have a camera bag!

Then we strolled through Beacon Hill park. It started out trashy, then turned into a lovely Butchart-like garden, but with a petting zoo. I didn't go in, but I admit I wanted to. We got some great pictures of each other amongst the flowers there.

We then walked around the city to find the shopping mall areas. We rode the escalator to the top of a nice one and talked ourselves out of buying anything because the exchange rate is about 1:1 right now, which is not very encouraging. So we strolled along the water front and found some greek food and gave up waiting on a mini donut machine that had broken down while the owner chatted away with some friends.

We checked into the clipper an hour and a half early because we got relatively bad seats on the way up because we were only an hour early. We found out later our boarding group for the trip back had already been determined back in Seattle when we checked in the first time. At about the time everyone on the boat realizes we're late leaving the dock, they announced that one of the engines won't start. And it never did. They sent another boat up from Seattle to get us. We eventually got home around 3:30AM the next day. But they did give us free sodas, so I had quite a few dr. peppers to comfort me in my misery. :)






Click here to see a ton of pictures from our trip!

---

Lensbabies Creative Apertures

I got a Lensbaby a year or two ago and use it occasionally. I like it because it's weird. Then I found the Creative Aperture Kit. It came with a heart, a star, and 5 blanks with instructions to make your own. I finally went to the craft store this evening and punched out 3 more.
It's really hard to do because these punches were designed for paper, not thick plastic apertures. Since the apertures are smaller than the punch I had to tape it to a piece of paper, facing the correct direction, then mark the middle with a pencil, and start the punch upside down so I could see the mark through the bottom. I wonder how these pictures would look if the "hole" wasn't centered?
Anyway, I found that the more complicated the design/number of edges the harder it is to punch through.
I think the butterfly looks cool. It was also the easiest to punch.

Digicam in Kirkland

I was around the Kirkland waterfront one evening when the light got pretty sweet. All I had on me was the new digicam and I wondered if I could pull of some half decent pictures with it. I did process these in Lightroom, but not too much.
Using the macro function does a nice job of blurring the background. It'd be hard to use that on people portraits though.
These were my favorites from that half hour with the digicam...