Photographic evening

On one of the few nice evenings of this record wet July, I was at a party where several of us with DSLR cameras ended up trading techniques and talking shop.

I’ve been playing around with high dynamic range (HDR) programs recently, so took some bracketed shots to have some raw material. Everything was glistening from the recent showers and the early evening light and calm water made ideal conditions for what I wanted. Mind you, the setting is always pretty spectacular.

Moffat Lake from the bridge. ©2009, Eric Fletcher

The image above was made from a single RAW file shot at 1/350 at f8.0 with ISO200 from my Nikon D300 camera with the 18-200mm lens set wide at 20mm. I used Nikon ViewNX to save 3 TIF files with different exposures: as shot, –1 and +1. I then used PhotoMatix Pro 3 to create the HDR image.

Bonfire: natural light at ISO3200. ©2009, Eric Fletcher

I’d been reading a lot about noise at high ISO settings, so thought I’d test it out. For the bonfire shot above, the camera was on a tripod, and taken at 1/15 sec at f3.8 with ISO3200. I expected a lot more noise.

Light painting: Wayne with wings. ©2009, Eric Fletcher

The other fun stuff was light painting instigated by Marc Gaudet. I’d been impressed with some of his earlier shots (featured  here on his web site), so was eager to try it with him and learn some more techniques. He set it up so the subject would sit at the picnic table, and Marcio Melo would stand behind to“paint” with a bright white LED light. Marcio would step aside when he had completed what he had in mind, then Marc would fire his flash to illuminate the subject.

Here’s my 30 second exposure of Wayne with wings.

All-in-all a fun and stimulating evening. Of course I later needed to winnow down the several gigabytes of image files to something manageable!