Ah what a difference the right gear makes... and to think that I actually forgot about ISO the entire night. :)  

 

Great night out on the town. 

Cold walk. First MN snow this year. 

 

An offhand picture that I took when I went out tonight. Turned out to be the best. 

Mississippi river bank at sunset 

coal storage at the U of MN 

 

 

I like the soft look of the grass. 

 

 

The northern lights came out last night. They are totally AMAZING. The way they dance back and forth, the colors changing, fading and popping is one of the most amazing things I have ever seen. They are better then any fireworks show I have seen, it is kind of spooky because everything is totally silent. Very cool, if you every get a chance to go north (along the Canadian border or higher) make sure to look to the sky every once in awhile, because it is truly worth the time.
 

 

 

 

 

Here is another one from tonight. The clouds are blured because they moved while the shutter was open. This would be one of those situations were a fast lens would come in really handy. mmm f1. Oh I guess I should say that all of the clouds are the orange/yellow color because of all of the "security" lighting that is around where I live. Despite studys that show lighting does little or nothing to help security, insurance companys require it for insurance. So the rest of us get screwed with light pollution.
 

I got the call today! My D70 got in. When I picked it up I grabbed a $30 tripod. I was going to go a little nicer for my first, but decided for $30 I can give it a shot and if I don't like it I will not have wasted that much money. This is one of the shots that I liked a bit from the 10 mins that I spent outside. One of the things that I now am made very aware of is that I need to find my remote release. One can not do long exposures without it, unless you HOLD the shutter open. That sort of defeats the purpose of even having the tripod. So anyways have my baby back is nice, having the tripod is cool.
 

Ok Dell just got my system fixed after 5 days (4 weekday). Somehow my service request got put into the “inactive” queue. The person on the other end of the phone does not know how that happened, but I got a faster CPU (+200MHz) and HT on the CPU… granted I can’t tell a speed difference with that hack of a change. So anyways my D70 is still in the shop, thus I have been shooting with my Canon S30. It may be a crappy point and shoot with bad optics, a laughable sensor, and poor long exposure support, but it still makes images. It is not so much about the gear, it is seeing interesting things and maybe even having some images turn out. Having said that there are some great tools out there that can help the photographer out a great deal, I am currently writing up my work flow (including tips and tricks) on how to create panoramas with very high technical quality. But the true topic for tonight is Photoshop CS. This will be a two part post, the first is an image which came strait out of the S30. Because of the 15 second restriction on the S30 some of the images I was taking are darker then I would like them. Fire them up in Photoshop CS -> Image -> adjustments -> shadow highlight and all of a sudden you have a rescued image. Play around with the sliders a little and you can even pull some detail out of an image which was over exposed. I picked up CS just for this feature (well I got a student discount too). There are some grain problems, but still a very usable image. If anyone knows how to reduce the grain in PS please drop me a line.
 

 

I doubt any one reads this but I am also thinking about picking up a storage unit to dump my images off to. From looking around most of them are exactally what I do not want. They can display them images, and the battery life is WAY to short with very slow transfer times. I don't want to display the images on the portable unit, I have better resolution on the camera display. But when one thinks about it for a second you are only seeing about 1/30 of the pixels. I can't see how sharp that is, or how the image will really look. Heck I can't even do that very well on my laptop which runs at 1600x1200. The other thing is battery life. All of these things apper to have around two hours of life. Well take the 521MB CF card plug it in wait 25 min for it to copy and all of a sudden the device is only good for a day or two of shooting before recharging. What am I to do when I am out in the wilderness and recharging is not possible? Hmm it looks like 2GB microdrives are only $130 with 4GBs comming in at $219... looks like I have a new toy. 

I spent some time tonight takeing low light images with my Canon S30. There are a few shots that were OK. 15 second exposure is not all that great. What I have come to understand is that I can usally get away with not using a tripod durring the day, can't do it when it gets a little darker out. So I am going to break down and buy one when the D70 gets back... which brings up that who ever is negotiating for Ritz Camera with Nikon is either stupid or really sucks at their job. When one moves that high level of volume you should be able to get the first batch of cameras and maintain a good flow of them. 

This is a composite from the last few images i took with my D70. It was very close to my fathers (pictured here) 50 birthday. To the eye this scene appeared dark. Amazing what one can do in the dark room, digital or not.