Wicked Weather

July 05, 2006 @ 3:47 pm

We had some wicked weather here in Hood River, OR over the last couple of days. It’s been windy as snot for a few days (which I like very much for Windsurfing ), which is nothing unusual, but we’ve also had thunderstorms for a few days straight which is very unusual.

Last night it was going off with lightning hitting about every 3-4 seconds for about an hour straight. It was quite the light show here with the energy focused on the two mountains around here (Mt. Adams to the north and Mt. Hood to the immediate South).

I got to play around a little bit with a new digital SLR camera I bought last week and I managed to capture a couple of the lightning blasts going off.

I know, I know – you guys from the East Coast’ll say that’s nothing but it was a pretty impressive show just BEFORE the forth of July on this end of the country. It woulda been kinda strange if this had happened tonight – the lightning show would have definitely overshadowed Fireworks I saw last night…

I love this new camera too. It's Nikkon D50 that comes with two lenses: 28-80mm and 70-300mm. I'm not particularily camera savvy and although I like to play around with photography I've always had a hard time with small digital cameras getting them to do what I want them to do. This camera (from the little I've played around with it) makes it so easy to shoot a huge variety of stuff easily.

I took to camera to the beach with me yesterday and took a handful of sailing shots of a few friends and I was amazed how great these pictures turned out without even trying, using the built-in Sport programs.

This one's half way across the river with the 300mm zoom. What's amazing about that is just that I took about 20 pictures with the zoom out at full 300mm and not one of them is blurry. Yet the shutter speed is still slow enough to slightly blur the background.

And here's another closer in, full frame right off the program which is pretty cool.

Oh and yeah, even those are not really the most exciting pictures for the action it was freakin' windy yesterday. It musta been blowing a steady 35 for most of the day with gusts will into the 40's. By this time when I took these pictures all that was left is staying upright after 5 hours of being on the water... Next time I'll try to get the camera out a little earlier... <s>

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re: Wicked Weather
by Andrew Robinson July 05, 2006 @ 4:58 pm

Rick,

Beautiful pictures. What kind of camera did you buy? One note re: "...not one of them is blurry. Yet the shutter speed is still slow enough to slightly blur the background." This is likely to do with depth of field related to lens aperture and not shutter speed or subject / camera movement. The wider your aperture, the shallower the depth of field. Try putting the camera on a tripod and closing down the aperture (use a slow shutter speed / long exposure) and you will see that much more of the picture is in focus. On the other hand, the slightly blurry background with the in-focus subject that you captured adds attention to the subject.

re: Wicked Weather
by Joe Brinkman July 05, 2006 @ 5:45 pm

Rick,
People have spent hours trying to achieve the depth of field effect in photo-editing software. It is actually much nicer when done by the camera, and as Andrew says, it lends a more professional appearance to your picture - unless you really want us to see all of the details on the shoreline in the background.

re: Wicked Weather
by Rick Strahl July 05, 2006 @ 7:08 pm

Right - actually my point was that I was actually able to man-handle the 300mm lens without a tri-pod and in a wicked wind to start with. In the past I had non-digital 200mm zoom and that thing wouldn't even think about not blurring the picture in hand held operation even with the super fast shutter speed. The depth of field effect is a bonus in my eyes - I think that's what you'd want.

The nice thing with the camera I just got is that the sailing pictures where taken in program mode (ie. no fiddling which is important when you're shooting picture from 20feet to 300 feet away or you want to loan your camera to somebody else so I can get a picture taken for my own vanity) <bg>...

The lightning pics were done manual with tight aperture and long exposure and lots of (over 100) tries to capture just one lightning bolt which was tricky cause there were so damn many.

According to the documentation the auto-focus is adaptive by default and as you move the camera it automatically refocuses immediately. This can be changed with focus lock option, but the default seems to be working pretty well so even if you have the lock down it continues to focus. I have about 20 pictures that all have what I think pretty good

Then again, I'm not a photo buff - I think I know just enough to be dangerous, but I'm not adverse to fiddling. Digital makes this easy enough in a way that just wasn't possible with film. I might have to go take another photo class when I get some time <g>...