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Between my current fevered speculations, which are intended to develop a plausible hypothesis about what is really wrong with Obama and his political flubs and miscues of the past 2 years; and some mind-bending reading about current events that I intend to comment on soon, I'm now ready for some west and welaxation. West and welaxation! That's right. So here's a nice-ish photo I shot last night from the back door of the garage.
I made the image on my mighty Nikon D700 using a Nikkor 24mm prime lens opened up to f/2.8 and with an exposure of 1/40th of a second (hand-held). Of interest to old-school photographers, I set the ISO to 6400---16 times faster than the old Kodak workhorse fast film, Tri-X. I didn't even bother to correct for visual noise, which would plague most digital images made at this speed on lesser cameras.
This picture astounds me in terms of how capable this camera is of capturing high-quality images in low light. The key light was a mercury vapor security light that inflicts itself on my property from the alley. I did very little postprocessing, just tinkering a little with the white balance to reduce the red/magenta tint of the light source, then applying the Adobe Bridge vignetting tool in the RAW processor to eliminate the "irising" effect at the corners of the frame, which is inherent to most wide-angle lenses.
I was amused by this sight last night because the patio looked all set up to host a conclave dedicated to booze and cigars, with the only obstacle being about 4 inches of highly packable snow covering everything. By afternoon today, incidentally, we had about 10 inches on the ground here in my small city on a swamp.
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/12/3/is_wikileaks_julian_assange_a_hero
ReplyDeleteDo not read the Medusa's love poems directly -- use a mirror. But also know, the other two Gorgon sisters are forever immortal.
In Oswald Spengleristic Winter Caesarism, here in beautiful downtown Faustian Land, the accu-weather forecast suggests appropriate seasonal attire.
Mr. (Wyndham) Roberts
Dude, C'mon. Use your imagination. Snowy winter scenes like that need to be frigid blueish moonglo. Make it look cold. Need to look at it and feel it.
ReplyDeleteNice shot though.
Mr. Roberts: I thought you were deceased. (Assuming outlanders don't understand that remark, I'll share that it's an inside joke for Champaign-Urbana citizens of a certain age.) And consarn it: sometimes your poetic sensibilities are more abstruse than a bucketful of quantum polka dots. I'll promote that link to a top level, though.
ReplyDeleteAnon: what I was going for in this shot was a neutral white balance to replicate the visual impression the scene first made on me when I opened the garage door. It's a challenge because the key light (not shown in the frame) had a strong green tinge to it (so probably not a mercury vapor lamp after all); correcting for the green introduced red-orange. My other goal was to show how bright it was back there while preserving a sense of night.