David's Images of the Day Photoblog
It was foggy when I woke up this morning. I took this picture using the Leica X2 using the in camera high contrast B&W mode. I find this useful to envision what a scene will look like in B&W in real-time rather than waiting till I get back to my computer and start processing images. Thom Hogan mentioned in one of his recent blogs that he often does the same thing.
I took this image from my back deck using a Nikon 1 V1 camera and 500 mm f/4 VR lens connected using the FT1 adapter. With the smaller sensor size in the N1V1 the effective field of view (FOV) is equivalent to using a 1350 mm lens on a 35 mm FX sensor camera. This image is not cropped — almost too much magnification to have the whole deer in the frame. The lens was supported on a monopod, and VR was turned on to help stabilize the image. The mass on the lower part of the doe’s neck appears to be a deer fibroma, thought to be caused by a papilloma virus infection. I am seeing more of these abnormalities on the local herd of deer.
The deer are very skittish right now, between rutting season and hunting season. There were a few does in the backyard late Sunday afternoon. As soon as I got out onto the back deck to try to get some images, there was a series of shotgun blasts in the distance. White tail up and the deer quickly took off. I thought that hunting wasn’t permitted on Sundays for those of us that like to go walking in the woods.
I processed the raw image with a trial version of Capture One Pro 7, and then converted it using Nik Silver Efex Pro. The new version of Capture One is going to take some getting used too — some new features, but also some idiosyncrasies that will take some time to understand.
I went out to check if the sky would be clear tonight for the Leonid Meteors, and saw the waxing crescent moon. I took this image with a Leica X2. The camera was set for black & white (natural). Since this camera does record raw (Adobe DNG) images, I was also able to process a color version. Let me know which image you like. Since the sky looks clear, I will have cameras out to capture some meteor images — and don’t expect to get much sleep tonight.
Last Night I tried to do some night sky photography. I had to give up after less than 3 hours as clouds moved in. With the images I had I did some star trail images, and a short time-lapsed video including the 15 minute star trail images.
