David's Images of the Day Photoblog
The extended Mathre family was visiting Amelia Island for Thanksgiving, and more importantly to celebrate our parents 50th wedding anniversary. These images are of the Amelia Island Lighthouse taken with a Polaroid DSC-700 digital camera.
A tree in my backyard decorated with toilet paper the previous night, the brand of toilet paper used, and an empty egg container. The police took a report, but never got back to me other than saying it was probably high school kids with nothing better to do the day after Thanksgiving. I guess I was lucky since I had cameras out in the backyard taking night sky images that were not tripped over or stolen.
An interesting night six years ago. I set up my Nikon D200 camera with a 10.5 mm fisheye lens to take wide-angle night sky images from my backyard. I actually put the camera quite a way back from the house, because I wanted to have the camera looking north in my back yard so I could see Polaris (the north star) above the roof of my house. I was still early in a learning mode on how to do night skies and star trails (30 second images + 30 second long exposure noise reduction) once every 2 minutes. I started the exposures beginning about 18:30 H (6:30 PM). The EN-EL3e battery used in the D200 camera had about a 2 hour life, especially when it was cold outside. I had to go out to change the battery every ~ hour. A little after 20:00 H (8:00 PM) I realized that a tree in my back yard had been toilet papered. Going through the images taken by the camera, I could tell when it happened. I am just glad that they didn’t trip over and/or take the camera and tripod. This was reported to the local Montgomery Township police, but nothing ever came of the report.
Time lapsed video of night sky looking north. The images were taken with a Nikon D200 and 10.5 mm f/2.8 fisheye lens (ISO 100, f/2.8, 30 sec).
One year ago (23-November-2011), I got my Nikon 1 V1 camera. My image database indicates that I have taken over 50K pictures with this camera, and this doesn’t count video. Granted, about half of the images were when I used the camera for taking time-lapsed images while driving on a road trip to Florida last year and New Mexico this year. It is a great travel camera being significantly lighter than the DSLR cameras I use. It does have its idiosyncrasies. I don’t like the location of some of the controls/dial, the propensity for the rear mode selection dial to move/change — I have lost images because the camera was not in the right mode (mood???). I did get the adapter to use Nikon F-mount lenses, the GPS adapter, the flash adapter, and the remote adapter. I really would like a wider lens for the camera. The field of view for the 10 mm lens on this camera is equivalent to 27 mm on a FX (35 mm sensor) DSLR. A 6 or 7 mm lens would be nice (16-19 mm equivalent). For wider landscape images, I end up taking multiple images and stitching them together in post processing.
Five years ago I completed a photography workshop on the Big Island of Hawaii with Thom Hogan. While on the way to the airport to catch our return flights, we stopped at Lighthaus Camera. Coincidentally, it was “Black Friday” and everything was on sale. We noticed that the store just received their initial shipment of the newly released Nikon D300 camera. Three or four of the workshop participants purchased the cameras on the spot. I have to admit that mine was an impulse purchase. Over the next four years, I took nearly 55K images with the camera (2007: 3164 images; 2008: 20371 images; 2009: 29355 images; 2010: 919 images; 2011: 628 images). This was my last Nikon DX sensor camera. Since then all of my Nikon DSLR cameras had full frame FX sensors.
The last shooting location for the workshop on that day was at Hawaii Tropical Gardens. I reprocessed an image Onomea Water Falls using Nik Silver Efex Pro.
