Car Photo of the Day: Stalking Big Cats at Night.

Digital cameras seem to have the ability to shoot just a bit better in low light than film cameras ever did. (Leica excepted of course!) With flexible and higher ISOs available in the film days, you can generally get shots on chip that would have been fruitless on film. My old Olympus camera was pretty darn good in low light, with a fairly fast f1.8 lens. It is what I used to shoot this image.

This was shot at an informal Jaguar owners’ get together in San Francisco a few years back. Several E-types were parked in a row, and after the dinner was over, as guys were standing around chatting, I wandered about taking photos. Grabbed a few good ones, but this is one of my favorites of the bunch. Car spotters can shout out the differences between each car.

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My new camera’s fastest lens is f3.5, which isn’t going to cut it for me long term. This is why I’m looking around for a fast lens at the moment. I have an amazing “photo assignment” coming up that will require a lot of night shooting. (More news on that as it develops… pardon the pun!)

Car Photo of the Day: It’s Red … and Weird.

When topless this car is truly elegant in appearance (though apparently not in performance), and in an odd bit of connectivity I owe my very existence to this car. However, much like the Jaguar XK 120, when fitted with a hard top or in Coupe form it is as if Venus herself has been transformed into a hunchback.

Can you name the car?

Car Photo of the Day: Where’s my cloning tool?

And I’m not talking about the car! To me this is just such a nice shot. Taken at the Annie & Steve Norman Classic Motorcar Rally a few years back. The classic BMW Coupe and the Port Gamble water towers look great. The dumpster and crane in the background? Not so much. In cases like these I usually reach for the cloning tool in Photoshop and start removing such minor eyesores from my backgrounds. Not today though, too busy. Sorry!

Early Spring

A Bloomin' Early Spring

We’ve had an exceptionally mild winter this year. Very little rain, even less snow, and since the new year, very warm temperatures. This tree usually blooms in late March, or early April. Here it is February 28th and it has burst out with color.

This is a shot from the G1, captured in camera raw format, with mild edits made in Aperture, then saved to JPEG using Photoshop’s “save for web” feature.

What. A. Game.

Excited Wil (Wheaton) is excited. on Twitpic

This photo (of and by my fellow Goaltender Wil Wheaton) best represents today’s Olympic Gold Medal game in Men’s Ice Hockey that wraped up the 2010 Winter Games just over the border from me in Vancouver, B.C. If you missed it, you missed an epic game, filled with more thrills and excitement than can be described. Team USA came back from a 2-0 deficit and tied the game with 24 seconds to play. This forced the game into overtime.

Overtime. Sudden Death. It is how the ultimate games should always finish. Play until you score. None of this shoot-out stuff. The 1994 Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway ended their Gold Medal game with a shoot-out after overtime expired, with Sweden edging Canada for the Gold. As a hockey fan it was awful to watch, as games should be played to win, not forced into an artificial conclusion via a shoot-out. Overtime play however is never artificial. It is thrilling beyond belief because it is real, it is intense, and the end can come at any moment. Some of the best games ever were decided in overtime. Many have become legend: The Easter Epic. Bobby Orr’s flying goal on May 10, 1970. The Miracle on Manchester. The “Monday Night Miracle” in game 6 of the ’86 Conference Finals. The epic goaltending battle between Hasek & Brodeur in the ’94 Playoffs (both had shutouts going, and Buffalo won in the second overtime 1-0 over the New Jersey Devils.) The five overtime Flyers-Penguins game of the ’00 Playoffs. The Canucks quadruple-overtime win over Dallas in ’07.

Nothing is more thrilling than overtime hockey.

Team USA played very well today. Our Goaltender Ryan Miller won a well-deserved tournament MVP award. They put on a show that nobody expected, and that delighted everyone who watched. They played their game, and took the heavily-favored Team Canada right to the very brink. Thank you Team USA. You earned every ounce of the silver around your necks, and then some.

Photo: E-type Tach

Speaking of photography… Here is a shot I just snapped off with the G1, right here on my desk. This is raw, and unedited, exported out of Aperture 3, just to show how nice this camera & lens combo is (14-45, at 45mm here, manual focus.)

The tach is out of the 65E for a refurb and upgrade. It has been inaccurate for a while and that will be fixed soon. It took me several hours of work to get the bezel removed!

Life on the Bleeding Edge, sometimes you get cut.

When I finally jumped to a new camera last year I took a chance on the new and emerging format of Micro Four-Thirds. This is a sort of compromise between the consumer-grade point & shoot and the bulky DSLR. It has all the benefits of a DSLR: Interchangeable lenses, large sensor, significant exposure, aperture, and shutter speed controls… but without the immense weight and bulk of a traditional SLR camera body. I chose a Panasonic Lumix G1. It is remarkably light weight and compact compared to a DSLR. This is mostly due to the lack of a mirror and the attendant mechanisms required to use a mirror. Instead it has a viewfinder which is essentially a video screen off the actual sensor.

The lenses for this camera are built by Leica and are amazing. I have two so far; a 14-45, and a 45-200. They were the only two available (beyond a fixed 20mm “pancake” lens) when I bought the camera last year. I waited for over six months to buy the camera as the price dropped so far that the telephoto was essentially “free” compared to if I had purchased it when it first came out.

My preferred lens for shooting close ups of cars is a very wide angle lens, which did not become available for the M4/3 format until very recently. Unfortunately it is very expensive, so I’ve been making do with an old .7 lens adapter that makes my 14-45 into a 9.8-31.5 lens. However it vignettes badly at the shortest focal lengths. I live with it for now, and either don’t shoot at the shortest or just keep the corners of the frame in mind when composing in-lens.

I have an RSS feed for a few M4/3 websites and I noted recently that one proclaimed a price drop on this wide-angle I really want. Whoo hoo! I rushed off to Amazon to see how far the price had dropped, with memories of the several-hundred dollar drops seen for the other lenses over time… only to find this:

Ninety Five Cents!

A whopping .95¢! Sigh. I guess I’ll be waiting a while.

Yeah, it is not a very fast lens, but it is right in my focal-length sweet spot, and the sort of shots that I want to do with it don’t have to have a real huge aperture.

Literally a few months after I acquired the G1, Panasonic produced the GH1, which adds HD Video to the feature list. Oh well. My “cut” from being out on the bleeding edge isn’t very deep or losing much blood, it just stings a bit now and then. I know the native lens choices will only keep getting better, so patience is key.

BTW I haven’t shared much of my output from this camera here on my website yet, beyond my father/son road trip last summer and a few random shots. I promise I’ll rectify that deficiency soon! In fact I’d love to see if you car-spotters can also spot a G1-produced image, so expect bonus points if you add “which camera” to your “name that car” comments!