168/365: Hello Kitty.
Just a quick cat photo. Went to a family get together today, and this little friend stopped by as well. I will say this about the new camera, it performs rather well on the spur of the moment quick snap front.
167/365: Night Crossing.
One of the main reasons I wanted to upgrade my D200 to the D800 was for the extra ISO range it provided. Naturally I was quite eager to point the new camera at the night sky somewhere on a cloud free night. Last night’s geocaching trip provided the opportunity. This is an old bridge over the Grand River near Grand Valley. The image is unaltered, right out of the camera. 30 second exposure so the stars didn’t move. The illumination on the bridge is from a car that crossed during the exposure. For all the forum topics that say you “need” an FX lens to get a good night photo, I am quite happy to say this DX Sigma 10-20mm performed quite well enough!
166/365: Cold Remedy.
Stuck at home today with a cold. As much as I’d like to be wandering all over the countryside with my camera today it’s just not in the cards. So here’s a photo of my anti-cold regiment that will hopefully get me back up and about in the morning. It’s already worlds better than it was at this time yesterday. D800 with one of my DX lenses on auto-iso.
165/365: Unplugged Melody.
Came down with a rather nasty sinus cold so today’s photo is a quick one on the way home from work – back to the abandoned gas station for this photo. I wanted to play around with the D800 some more with my nifty fifty. Here’s that colourful wall again, this time with an electrical outlet to add interest. Here’s a link to the original size image if you want to see just how much detail the camera is able to resolve.
164/365: Badlands Redux.
Took a trip to someplace “landscapey” to try out the D800’s feature set. Well, the Cheltenham Badlands fits that category nicely. Since I wanted to try out the full abilities of the camera, I had my older, but FX type lenses out for the trip. I am definitely enjoying the camera, and off all the features, the one I am most using right now is just that built in spirit level! Tomorrow will hopefully be less windy and I can target the HDR capabilities a bit more.
163/365: Mocha’s Test Track.
Mocha here is helping me test out the AF on my newest upgrade – my Nikon D800. Here I was playing with “Live View” which is completely new to me and well it shows in the photo. I was picking Mocha’s eye and sending the ball around the track for her. I’ve got a bit of work to figure out the continuous focus mode on this camera. Let’s see what happens when I get a tripod involved and a bit more light 🙂
162/365: A Grand (Island) Sunset.
Heading back to Canada and we were approaching the border at sunset. Here’s a view of the north Grand Island bridge near Buffalo moments after the sun set. We had a fantastic view of the sun setting beside the bridge but couldn’t stop at that vantage point in the middle of the Interstate highway. This was just one more thing that helped cap off a fantastic weekend with Kristen.
161/365: Rainbow Falls at Watkin’s Glen.
Well, getting out for today’s Project photo was dirt simple. The entire day was allocated for a trip into Watkin’s Glen State Park, at the south end of Seneca Lake in New York’s Finger Lakes region. I’ve been here before with Kristen so we knew what to expect: It’s a trail along a gorge feature where you hike in from the bottom on a 1.5 mile long climbing trail. Along the way you encounter waterfall after waterfall. No, today’s challenge would be selecting which photo to use. I’m still not convinced I picked the “best” one as I have lots of great shots from the day. Here is Rainbow Falls, which is a little over half way up the gorge. The photo is an HDR from 9 exposures taken with my D200. You better believe I had the tripod on this hike, and my ND filters too, but the cloud cover both eliminated hot spots in the photo, and darkened things enough that I didn’t need to resort to using the ND for 1/2 or 1/4 second shots in here.
160/365: Rooftop Pattern.
Today is my ten year wedding anniversary with my wife, Kristen. Today was also day two of the great network outage at work. Between our travel plans and the extra work hours my photography time took a hit. Fortunately at this stage in the Project, I always have one eye looking for photo opportunities along the way. Here, we’ve stopped at the Gateway Niagara complex near Grimsby on our way to the Finger Lakes region. I took a few photos here and there, then looked straight up and found a pattern similar to my gazebo pattern earlier in the Project. Well, the iPhone came out and I grabbed a photo with an eye to “topping it” later if I could. I decided in post to take this and make it more abstract so I went with a Black and White conversion, and skewed the histogram toward more of a high key exposure.
159/365: Disconnected.
This sums up my day rather well. It’s a photo of a computer at the office trying to get to our internet gateway at Blink.ca. Problem is, our internet went down, and stayed down for well over 24 hours. That’s an internet connection with a 4 hour service level agreement. What happened? The ISP (Blink/Rogers) tells us that at 11:30 AM a dump truck driver with the bucket up took out hydro lines as they drove under them. Our fibre was part of that and got trashed as well. Hydro crews had the power lines fixed at 4PM and then Blink could start work. By 11PM we were still down and around midnight we got word the fibre was repaired. Then at 6AM, the same thing happened. Again. As of 2PM on the following day, we’re still without our main internet connection at the office, but we’ve rigged a backup using Telus 3G.