Saturday, January 09, 2010

Red Truck too

I've posted a vertical variant of this pic, but I like this one too, particularly after I changed the tone to much more blue-ish. It looks like a far-off place like Siberia or something, and there's something weird about the light, because the sky with snow-clouds is lit by the town, you can't really tell if it's day or night (it was an hour before sunrise).


It also illustrates how cameras even out light: the picture is lighter than the scene seemed at the time. To make it look like night, I'd have to tone it down:


... Which may be well worth doing if you want the picture to seem like things looked to you, but in this case I prefer the first one, at least aesthetically. Maybe.

BTW, I woudda thunk a BW version of this was pointless, given the lovely color of the truck, but then I used it for an experiment, and it's not bad actually:

7 comments:

emptyspaces said...

How about leaving the truck red with the rest of the shot B&W? Takes a little Photoshop work, but it can look cool somethimes.

Anna said...

What kind of camera is this?

Actually I went out to take snow pics today. And when the sun is kind of not there any more, I can't get nice pics.

Anna said...

Could you give the technical details of this pic ?
Makes me curious.

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

Canon 5D2, 1600 ISO, 35mm F:1.4.
More here.

That is a pretty expensive camera and lens, but you can get similar low-light performance with many of the newer cameras, for example the Pentax K-x.
You can get fast (non-zoom) lenses for it for a reasonable price, for example the 50mm 1.4 lens, I think. A 2.0 lens would also go far.

A wideangle lens is easier to hand-hold with longer shutter times (like 1/30th or 1/60th second).

The snow is a big reflector, I don't think I could hand-hold the camera at night without it.

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

... I looked up the file, that pic was taken at F:3.5 and 1/25th second. (1600 ISO, 35mm lens.)

I'm still mad at Canon and Nikon for not building in stabilization in the camera bodies, many of the best lenses don't have it, and if I'd had it, I could have gained a stop or two for this shoot, would have been nice to have been able to shoot at 1/10th second and F:4.5.

Anna said...

1600, and 3,5 !
I thought 1600 would be much more noisy, and 3,5 much more blurred...
Maybe I have to revise part of my knowledge... :-)

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

Canon 5D2 is ground-breaking in high-ISO quality. But like I said, the newest smaller DSLRs are pretty dang close now.

With a wideangle lens, the depth-of-field is much greater.

For somebody with more patience than me, it might be simpler simply using a tripod.