Friday, January 2, 2009

Subject: Bridge at night


Night bridge, originally uploaded by jiihaa.


Winter night, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

The Dpreview site launched recently Challenges Beta, a new service for doing photographic mini-competitions. I'm not taking part there, but one of the topics got me thinking - "Night shot of a bridge with a compact camera".

Probably most photos in the competition will depict a big lighted bridge, but my idea was different - catch a really small bridge in available night light. Here are two versions of the concept I wanted to catch. I feel that the LX3 did a very nice job here.

2 comments:

Den Lim said...

Your photos really have nice colors. What are your current settings for the LX3?

Juha Haataja said...

I'm currently using standard film mode with nr turned down (-1 or -2) and constrast slightly up or down depending on the situation (is there snow or not). And automatic white balance.

Sometimes I'm also using PSE in post-processing to remove the color cast, if there is such. (With LX3 firmware 1.1 there is less need for that.) With the photos here I did use PSE, but the difference between the originals and these was slight.

I have done some experiments with RAW also, tuning the color temperature in Silkypix, but so far I haven't found much benefit to that in terms of color balance compared to the jpeg workflow.

But since a week or so I have started to shoot in RAW+jpeg instead of just jpeg, thanks to getting a 8 GB SDHC (class 6) card for the LX3.

I was thinking that this would have some impact on the usability of the LX3, but I can shoot pretty much as previously. There is a slight impact on the preview speed (I'm using the function button for this; it might be that the camera is using the RAW file for preview), and the camera shuts down slower when there is data to be saved in the buffer.

The biggest problem with my shooting style - of taking several photos of the same subject in quick succession - hasn't proved to be a problem, as the camera seems to be able to write RAW+jpeg to the card fast enough.