This is a gallery of test shots using my new camera. There were some challenging lighting situations, and the camera handled them very well.

These are some HDR experiments from yesterday’s walk. I screwed up when taking these because I left the camera in program exposure mode; The aperture was not constant between the 3 exposures. If I had been in aperture priority mode, the depth of field would have been more consistent. I’ll get it right the next time. The first version was done using tone mapping, and the second one was made using exposure blending. Which do you prefer?

I went for a walk near Arrowhead Lake today. I was hoping to take pictures of deer, and other creatures, but I wasn’t so lucky. I only saw one squirrel, and he was very shy. I managed to get some other interesting shots though. These have minor editing, but no cropping. The black and white ones were all infrared, and have more drastic edits. Enjoy.

I finally bit the bullet and got myself some nice tripod legs. Before now, i settled with my crappy ones, and borrowed Peter’s when I needed something nice. I purchased the Velbon El Carmagne 640. It is great. It weighs just over 3lbs, but is very stable. I experimented with some macro shots tonight:

These shots were editing in Adobe Lightroom. I did some minor exposure correction, and sharpening. I also added a vignette effect to the first image.

Today, I posted 2 new galleries. These are a bit different from previous, as the images in them have been edited. I have done cropping, exposure adjustments, sharpening, etc. As time goes on, I expect this to become the norm.

The first gallery contains some more infrared photos. They’re not my favorite pictures; I considered this outing more of a proof of concept than anything else. They were all handheld or monopod mounted. I used the “liveview” feature on my camera to frame the shots. Mastering infrared photography will take some time, but these at least show some possibilities.

The second gallery was just a walk in the park. I’m still working on handholding my heavy 50-200mm lens.

I find infrared photography fascinating. These are my first experiments. Because I get home after dark, I was a little limited in my subject matter. The only post processing done was a little noise reduction and some minor sharpening for the web.