James says, "the eyepads don't help much when one's wife decides we must get up and photograph the sunrise anyway. "
[BTW - this week's blogged fotos from last weekend's mountain trip (Monday,Tuesday, Wednesday) are all taken with James' wee LX3.]
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Posted By jules to jules' pics at 5/25/2010 06:06:00 PM
Beutifull. But I've always been a sucker for sunset/rise pictures
ReplyDeleteBecause I think they are a cheap cliche, I decided just recently that I would never take pickturs of empty rowing boats on lakes. But there we were at dawn, with a lake and a rowing boat posing before us. There was even a tumble-down jetty, only we weren't clever enough to photograph that well.
ReplyDeleteIf it's any consolation, the eyepads should be just as effective against really strong moonlight. Come to think of it, though, really strong moonlight should present some wonderful photographic opportunities, and one can always catch up on sleep at work. :)
ReplyDeleteI have to say - you guys take some great pics (I'm also a fan of the Panasonic Lumix cameras).
ReplyDeleteWill the LX3 take full-moonlight long time exposures?
ReplyDeleteThanks for the compliments, it is easier to take snaps than trying to think of something interesting and witty to blog about :-)
ReplyDeleteHank,
The LX3 will go up to a 60s exposure, I hadn't tried it before but as it happens I did try it on this trip. The foreground light in that shot is from the hut lights, there wasn't much moonlight (if any) and the blur on the stars is their movement, not camera shake.
Of course stacking pictures is easy enough anyway, not that I've tried.
Carl C,
ReplyDeleteThanks for being kind about our pickturs. The Panasonic cameras seem nice, but the problem is that the firmware on the Japanese versions is Japanese language only. As they are such menu-reliant cameras this makes them pretty hard work. For all the other brands that I've tried in the shops the language can be changed very easily through a menu option.
I like the fact that my Nikon N80 has no language at all - buttons and dials and symbols instead. :-) Having to wait more than a week for the results isn't so great though - especially for a blog!
Hmmm, I think I need eight or ten minutes' exposure for moonlight to get a decent color picture, roughly speaking, from the rules of thumb I recall friends using successfully. Long enough to see some real star movement for sure.
ReplyDeleteI don't know about this 'stacking' -- can it be done in the camera without touching it physically so it doesn't change position, like with a remote? Or is that overlaying images later?
Ah, I see it's the landscapes themselves you are after. You can put the ISO up a bit of course, at the risk of losing quality (my pic was at the base ISO of 80), but I don't have any experience of that sort of shot.
ReplyDeleteRe: stacking, I just mean adding the photos together in some image editor, though come to think of it, many cameras (mine included) allow for multiple exposures in-camera too. One problem with my camera would be that it actually takes as long to process these long exposures as the exposure itself took (it does some fancy noise reduction) so stacking a sequence might make the stars look like dashed lines!