Dug up from archives: Sunrise

This picture was taken with Fujifilm FinePix 1400Zoom which is a 1,3 Mpix compact camera and which does unfortynately not have too good imagequality when used in lowlight conditions.

Anyways one has to work with the equpment one has available, right? So this picture was taken on a cold December morning in 2002. 19th just a little to 9 am says the exif data so I am inclining to trust that.

Sunrises this colorful are rather rare in Finland if you ask me. If anyone says otherwise I am in no position to argue since I am quite heavy sleeper and am up quite rarely at sunrise. Even durin winter when the sun does rise late in the morning. Nonetheless this sunrise was worth immortalizing in my opinion.

The silhouette of the tree tops against the burning orange sky is dramatic and the only thing that bugs me in this picture, besides the obviously poor image quality, is the atenna tower visible just to the left of the pinetree top. Oh, I hope I just didn't spoil the picture for you too.

Happy New Year!

Ok, so the New Year has already gone (both the western New Year and the chinese New Year) but I still am going to post this.

I was sitting on our balcony with my wife and looking at the fireworks shot by others, some of which exploded at alarmingly low altitude, I had an idea. I went back into the house, grabbed my camera and decided to try and take some shots.

Well, it wasn't quite that easy. First the automatics in the camera wanted to have way too long exposure time, being dark and all outside, so I hit the ISO value all the way up to 1600. Still too long, the camera shook too much. Then I took a look at the pictures taken so far and found out them to be too light to give any justoce to the fire work. So I used manual settings and set the aperture size all the way up to get the exposure time down. This way I got darker pictures from which the fireworks display show up pretty nice. Or would have shown if I had had better reactions.

A dilemma. I had to flip the camera to sports mode and set it to underexpose as much as it was possible with the (fine) tune of automatic settings. Lo and behold! I managed to capture an explosion! The exposure time wass still a bit long as you can see but luckily image stabilizer saved the pictures from my hands shaking out of cold.

I am pretty pleased of the results even though there is yet again room for improvement.

It feels good to win

Yet another vicroty in the photographing competition amongst the amauter photographers of Pelit.fi. Although the overall quality in this particular subject (balance) was in my opinion significantly lower than usually I must admit it did feel good to win. Yet again no prizes were even to be expected except the fame and glory in the closed community of subscribers of Pelit-magazine.

Being typical me I just put the coin standing, took my camera, pointed it in the right direction and shot the picture. Only later I occured to me that maybe I should have given it more thought as I had promised myself to try to do so. Well I didn't go and setup the coin again for another photo. Instead I went to my computer, downloaded the picture and found out it to be just fine. The lion stands as straght as it can considering the fact that if I had tried to get him anymore straight the coin would have just started rolling. The reflection of the flashlight isn't too bright, instead it gives the coin more shine that it really had. The reflection of the coin itself on the surface it is standing on is quite nice too and I like the way the sharpened area is quite thin.

Maybe if I gave more thought to the actual setup and shooting I might be able to have better pictures. Or maybe I just go overboard and overanalyze things and end up with more crappy pictures. We shall see.

Latokartano Spirited Away - Underexposed

As requested in the comments of my previous post here is a underexposed photo of the same scenery. The cropping is different but the same elements should be there.

This photo is still unsharp even though it is sharper than the previous one and now that I have compared these two I think that the unsharpness somehow does give better atmosphere to the picture. And of course, due different exposure, the colours are totally different and yet again I prefer the earlier posted one over this.

Now the request fulfilled I have to apologize for not posting anything here for quite some time. I haven't been quite ok for the past month or so and therefore I haven't been out shooting. That sucks. But then again I rummaged through some more of my old pictures taken with some 1.3 MP Fujifilm camera and found some pictures worth posting. I'll post some of them here too later.