Winter pics from the DC'ers

Hey!

Just thought I'd start a thread to see what this winter looks like from the homes of fellow DCers. Take a shot of where you live/work/play and post it! (I recommend flickr for free image hosting, unlimited bandwidth

)

Anyway, here's the sunset last night (12/12) from Orem, UT!

(click for large photo goodness)

Happy holidays, peeps!

cheers.
t.

Simply beautiful Wombat. I'll try to get some good pictures this winter to post. But with the weather we've been having it looks like a dry one...

Beautifull! I like the frame you did. I did scroll through your photostream on flickr before, you have some cool stuff there! Where I live it's still autumn. Some recent stuff I photographed:

etc...

Here are a couple, not real recent but within the cooler season. We have had so much snow, rain and fog that photos have been moot the last couple of weeks.

I hope the glacier is wintry enough. Last pick is the view out my office window at the airport in Juneau. If you look close you can see a 737 on approach.

...
wow...simply wow...
*feels lame for not having snow..*

-Jason_x- wrote:

...
wow...simply wow...
*feels lame for not having snow..*

No, you may not have snow, but you sure do have surf and turf........

I miss snow but its what I get for being in SC. Would want to move back to Anchorage, AK again someday, absolutely beautiful up there.

Wonko The Sane wrote:

Some awesome shots coming through! Wonko, this one is brilliant! Just curious, what do you shoot with?

t.

That's gotta be what, an hour or so of exposure time? My 30D only does a measly 30 seconds ...

No wintery shots here - we aren't getting our rain, and are still seeing temps well into the 70s, if not tipping into the 80s.

We're in a drought I think.

Those are awesome pictures. My pictures would look the same as Wombat's since we live about 20 minutes from one another. I was going to post a picture anyways till I saw Wonko's pics. I can't outdo those. Those pics in Alaska look cool. I would love to go there and do some backpacking.

I shoot with Nikon D80 and I use off camera flash a lot. For that night picture, the exposure was somewhere between 5 and 6 minutes. During the exposure I flashed on that little fort from different angles, using red and yellow gels on the flash to give it red or yellow tint (flash on manual).

@Botfodder: My D80 has 30s max exposure time too, if I want longer I have to use bulb mode, a watch and remote control (to avoid camera shake). I am pretty sure your 30D can not only do it, but can do it better since its sensor is CMOS. Those are better at longer exposures.

Film is still the way to go for exposures longer than an hour though.

The longest exposure I've done was 10min (used hand torch to light-paint the trees). You can see the Polaris on the lower right.

See it big by clicking here.

Dude. You suck. Honest and true, you suck, as your skill, particularly with long exposures, far outstrips mine.

I do know there's a bulb mode but I haven't played with it much. I seriously need a remote but as a diver, there's more important camera gear to get. I'm fairly sure I warned you guys about:

My first underwater shots with the 30D, where I went down with my 100mm macro lens on

But I'm even more sure that I forgot to mention

My dives on the USS Oriskany, a WWII aircraft carrier that was sunk off of Pensacola to be an artificial reef

Mind you the Oriskany pictures aren't the best as really good wide angle shots either require the moderately large subjects to be fairly close, or for the visibility to be pristine for shots with any distance to them. So, the shots of the boat and the other divers tended to be very hazy and subject to a lot of diffused light from the particulate (further complicated by the light overcast), but a few of the barracuda shots came out really well.

Of course, I do have the occasional long exposure that I'm quite proud of:

If you think that looks cool, you should see the original printed up into 20"x30" - I have it hanging on the wall in my office (along with three others I had done to poster size). That's 20 seconds; in the same album (the picture is linky-ed) I have a 30 second one that's pulled back a bit, so you see some of the crowd (some solid, some ghostly).

Wonko The Sane wrote:

I shoot with Nikon D80 and I use off camera flash a lot. For that night picture, the exposure was somewhere between 5 and 6 minutes. During the exposure I flashed on that little fort from different angles, using red and yellow gels on the flash to give it red or yellow tint (flash on manual).

@Botfodder: My D80 has 30s max exposure time too, if I want longer I have to use bulb mode, a watch and remote control (to avoid camera shake). I am pretty sure your 30D can not only do it, but can do it better since its sensor is CMOS. Those are better at longer exposures.

Film is still the way to go for exposures longer than an hour though.

The longest exposure I've done was 10min (used hand torch to light-paint the trees). You can see the Polaris on the lower right.

See it big by clicking here.

Wonko, your pictures are incredible... I'm a big fan of the reflection of the tree and the color contrast. I've been shooting with my D40 which I'm very new at, haven't done much with long exposure times (don't know if it can to be honest), but you've given me some ideas to try out sometime... anyway those pictures are amazing!

@BotFodder: O, you shoot underwater? Those pictures you linked are awesome! I don't have any idea how you do that.
The racing track shot is cool beans! I am a bit puzzled as to why one particular car headlight path is so wavy. Empty tire? And I believe you about the print, largest I've done were 44" and they looke really spectacular so large. Most photos look a lot better large.

@Pramidion: Thanks! D40 is a fantastic camera (my dad has one) and pictures come great straight out of it. It is capable of just about anything you can think of, including long exposures. I am in general so thrilled over all DSLRs, what you can do, how fast you can learn and experiment with them...

Another good idea for cold winter shots might be shooting smoke. You can do it inside (incense sticks, or books you don't like) it is pretty easy to do and it leads to interesting pictures with abstract feel to it. Or drops. I am a geek over drops, shot thousands (literally) of photos of drops. Won't post any photos of drops or smoke, since I've alredy gone waaay off topic. What I am trying to say, even if you are lazy to go out, you can have fun inside too. I once took a candle-lit portrait of my logitech mouse. Hehe, I'm nuts. But I had fun and it looked decent, really.

Wonko The Sane wrote:

@BotFodder: O, you shoot underwater? Those pictures you linked are awesome! I don't have any idea how you do that.
The racing track shot is cool beans! I am a bit puzzled as to why one particular car headlight path is so wavy. Empty tire? And I believe you about the print, largest I've done were 44" and they looke really spectacular so large. Most photos look a lot better large.

The 30D does 8MP, and starts dropping to sub 100dpi when you start getting up to 24"x36". Underwater shooting requires a housing - basically, something you put the camera in that has buttons/controls that make contact with the actual buttons/controls on the camera. One of these days I'll do what I can to take a decent shot of mine to give you an idea of what it might look like (perhaps using the old PC110 video camera in still mode to take the shots).

It can be a pain in the butt though - you're always fearing a leak, and it takes me about an hour of prep-time to get the camera, lens I'm going to shoot, housing, port(s) for the lens, o-rings, external strobe(s), all worked out. It's like a big jigsaw puzzle really. If you shoot wide angle, I use an 8" dome port with a 3.5" port extender on it; with the 100mm macro, I have a flat port for it that's sized specifically for that lens (and has a manual focus control on it). In the water it all can be very cumbersome. Out of the water it's just as cumbersome but *heavy* too.

I tell you, though, if I had the money for it, I'd be all over the body and a housing for a Canon 1Ds MkIII. 21MP! I think one of my New Years dive buddies has one of the 16MP MkII's.

Oh, and I suspect you might be right about that headlight, or perhaps anti-lock breaks for some reason. I did have the camera on a tripod but there's no telling if the stands were vibrating or something as well, and the side shot of the headlights wasn't feeding so much light to the camera to where the movement of the stands was a tad more obvious than the flood of light you'd get from a headlight head on.