Nighttime with the EF 35mm f/2 IS Lens

Waterford, NY had it's Christmas parade and tree lighting last evening. To walk over from my home I cross a bridge over the Hudson River. Here are some shots of the festivities and some shots from the bridge. This was well after sunset but there was enough reflected light in the sky that the camera meter tried to make it dusk.

These are all made with my EOS 5D Mark III and EF 35mm f/2 IS USM lens.

f/2, 1/350 sec., ISO 6400

f/2, 0.3 sec., ISO 6400

f/2, 1/8 sec., ISO 3200

f/2, 1/6 sec., ISO 6400

f/2, 1/6 sec., ISO 6400

Another School Musical

I spent about eighteen hours shooting and processing over 1,000 RAW images of the Lansingburgh school production of the musical Hairspray the past couple of days. Hairspray is a great musical with a great message - especially in the stupid times we find ourselves in -  and the students at this school have embraced the theme.

The show runs tonight through Sunday afternoon and is well worth the effort. I uploaded 439 photos including headshots of the cast to some galleries on zenfolio which can be viewed at http://trulandphoto.zenfolio.com/hairspray. All, except for a few, were made with my 5D Mark III and EF 70-200mm f/2.8L lens.

Here are some from the second dress rehearsal I shot, last evening. All these are at f/2.8 and ISO 3200.

Morning After Rain

Albany, NY registered over 1.5 inches of rain yesterday, a new record for November 15th. I expected to see some results this morning in river levels but there was none. I expected the "bogs" to have water in them on Peebles Island, they had only a little.

I guess that the lack of serious rainfall had left a lot of room for the rain to soak in rather than run off. There were some puddles on the trains and the ground had that nice saturated look that comes with wet and overcast skies.

Here are some shots from this morning, all with my 5D Mark III and EF 24-105mm f/4L lens. These are all bracketed HDR composites. Some were processed using three, four or all five of the bracketed files. I don't remember which ones were which.

The Leaves, They Keep on Droppin'

This morning was one of those nice crisp, clear late Fall mornings, prefect for capturing what color is left before it's all gone. I went out on the canal trail North of Waterford with my 80D and 70-300mm lens looking for plant closeups or birds. The birds were not cooperating but the leaves were still falling from trees along the trail onto the water of the canal.

Here is a photo of the general scene along with some of the leaf closeups. The trail extends for about a mile North of this spot and is one of my favorite haunts.

The last two are the same leaves with just a slight shift in angle which created a whole different background.

Little Did I Know...

...when I headed out for my walk on election morning that the day would turn in to one of the most tragic, disgusting days I've experienced. But while people can be - and are - vile, cruel beings, nature remains herself. At least until the President-Elect grabs her by the...... Nature, however, has a way of grabbing back. Bigtime.

Here are some nice images from early in the day when the future still seemed reasonably pleasant.

Hoboken, New Jersey

Yesterday saw a day trip to Hoboken, NJ for an Empire 8 women's soccer playoff match between Hartwick and Stevens IT. I shot the match with my EOS 80D and EF 70-200mm f.2.8L lens.

The much faster SD card fixed the delay caused by the camera writing to the card which I experienced back in October with this same combination. I shot most of the match at f/2.8 and ISO 100 on aperture priority which was giving me shutter speeds of from 1/1000th to 1/300th of a second. As I think there are still some focusing issues with this lens (although they're much less pronounced than with the EOS 7D) I wish I had chosen f/4 for the added depth of field.

Here are some action shots from the match along with a Hartwick group hug as they ended their excellent season with this 2-1 playoff loss.

And, Stevens is located on the Western shore of the Hudson River above Frank Sinatra Drive in Hoboken, right across from Manhattan. Here's a five file HDR made with my 5D Mark III and 24-105mm f/4L lens.

More Crop Sensor Scenics

As a follow up to my last post here are more photos from that morning with the same setup.

24mm, f/5.6, 1/45 sec., ISO 100

47mm, f/6.7, 1/125 sec., ISO 200

24mm, f/6.7, 1/125 sec., ISO 200

24mm, f/6.7, 1/500 sec., ISO 200

28mm, f/6.7, 1/750 sec., ISO 200

A New Combination

I set out this morning in dense fog with my crop sensor EOS 80D with the EF 24-105mm f/4L lens. I hadn't used this combination before. In fact I've only used the 80D once, for a soccer game. I wanted to get more used to he 80D because I'll possibly use it for a daytime college soccer match on the weekend.

I certainly could have used a wider angle of view this morning and didn't really use the long end of this lens which has a full frame field of view of 38mm to 168mm. I remain very impressed with the 80D and, in fact, the only reason to choose the 5D Mark III would be the wider full frame view or very high ISO purposes.

I did once again notice the camera taking a long time to write files to the SD card. Upon checking, I was using the card that came with the camera which is a 40mb/s card. The camera is capable of a faster write speed than that. I have a couple of 80mb/s cards and will try one of them next time out.

I ended up with a lot of images from a chilly, foggy morning and will spread them out over a couple of posts. Here are the first which are single shot images (no HDR) with data in the caption.

UPDATE: The 80D does write to the card faster with an 80mb/s card. I've never paid attention to SD card ratings much because my other cameras write to CF cards. Of the six 32MB SD cards I have, I discovered that two are 80mb/s, one is 60mb/s, one is 40mb/s, one is class 10 with no mb/s rating and one is class 4 with no mb/s rating.

24mm, f/8, 1/20 sec., ISO 100

24mm, f/8, 1/30 sec., ISO 100

24mm, f/8, 1/45 sec., ISO 100

24mm, f/8, 1/60 sec., ISO 100