Malweth’s Metablog

This past weekend we went to the Edaville Railroad near Plymouth, MA. The place is fairly small - the drive being the small railroad that takes you around Cranberry bogs to see lots of Christmas lights (a sort of luminescent-topiary). It’s well worth taking the train after dark (I don’t see the draw during daylight nor year-round).

The food stands were expensive, but very high quality (I had a chocolate apple). This was probably my best picture from the outing. (95mm 1/160s @ f/8 ISO 200). The Depth of Field (DoF) was better in the chocolate apple picture (linked above) (50mm 1/200s @ f/3.5 ISO 200) but this one had better pattern and depth (endless-looking-ness).

The lights were also interesting subjects:

The castle (50mm 1/100s @ f/1.8 ISO 400) was my favorite lights shot. The goal here was to capture these using a 50mm prime (f/1.8) on a moving train! These were at ISO 400, but more was required to get the pure black background and more pinpointed lights. Keeping the standard EV of -0.3 or -0.7 results in a longer exposure (easier to blur) and too-bright lights which bled too much, also making a fuzzy visage. The ones that came out well were all at EV -1.7 (Aperture Priority mode).

The one thing I did like was the diffusion effect caused by the train. A warm train in < 50 degree weather means foggy windows! This allowed the lights to bleed somewhat, but in a more organic (not over-bright) way. This picture had the perfect amount... (where I shot through the windows made a big difference)!

Finally, one interesting effect I had: A longer exposure that had a tree passing by (50mm 1/3s @ f/1.8 ISO 400 EV -0.3):

Merry Christmas!

Meghan & Dan’s wedding went perfectly this weekend! The rain held off until we were on the road home Sunday, and the day of the wedding was sunny! My flickr has all the images from the rehearsal dinner up, but I’m still working on the wedding photos.

Weddings are very hard to photograph well. The reception site was beautiful, but when you have a canopied deck looking out over a sunny harbor, the people are quite dark (or the water is over exposed). Once the sun goes down, there’s no light left for photos! It was even worse inside - the dance floor had no lights, so it was all flash photography (I hate built-in flash)… Of course this had no bearing on the actual event!! Aside from my photography everything went beautifully!

Another photo-trouble was the moon. It was certainly big enough to fit into some pictures… but a 50mm (or slightly more or less) focal length makes the moon (giant to our eyes) look tiny. It’s very hard to get far enough away for 200mm to get the whole view:

My best picture of the church:

5D Pinhole

Originally uploaded by dmmaus.

I should really make my first blog related to my own photography, but this was too good to pass up!

The Canon 5D is a very nice digital camera. Without a lens it costs just shy of $3000. A Pinhole camera is essentially film (or a digital image sensor) with a tiny pinhole instead of a lens. This gives an amazingly good picture for the “price” because the camera is typically free (plus the cost of film). The picture always comes out very blurry, though! Apparently a number of people like to emulate the pinhole camera using their expensive digital SLR bodies… so the $3000 pinhole camera has been created!

This blog will probably be image rich as things get rolling (and probably some really bad images, too…)

I’ve decided to take up photography - I’ve got lots of moving subjects (the dog previously, and now my crazy kid) and I’d love to learn technical photography too! I’ve also got Greg interested in it… we may photoshoot around Rhode Island to get some practice (plus his wife says he can’t upgrade to a DSLR until he’s used the advanced P+S extensively).

I’ve sold some “play” stock that I invested when I was working for Lucent (not in Lucent stock, thankfully) and have ordered a Nikon D50 Kit that comes with the Nikkor 18-55mm DX lens. It comes with a $50 e-gift-card (special this week only), so I’ll also be ordering some protecting filters (UV filters that are essentially glass condoms), a holster, and the Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 prime lens. Overall, it sounds like a good starter kit (the Zoom may be a Christmas present if I can convince Christy of it).

As a point of reference, my current photos are being archived at:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/malweth

Flickr is an awesome website, and I’ve gone pro because it’s so cheap ($25/yr) and because it’s such a sweet service! Only my best pictures will be going up there, but it’s a good point of reference because I’ve already put up some digital images from my Kodak P+S (or is that PoS?)

It’s going to be fun… hope you’re looking forward to some (initially) terrible pictures! (I’ll be sure to throw in my GOOD pictures, too… when they start flooding in ;).