The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Venice, Monday

I took 324 photos on Monday, so I'm not all the way through them yet. I'll just start with a photo of our hotel's lobby. We stayed at the Hotel Danieli, a 193-year-old hotel in a 600-year-old building:

This was our one hotel splurge. I do not know the exact bill, except that it was approximately the same as the next four nights' lodging combined.

Lightroom 6 / Surface compatibility

I'd have photos to post already, but Adobe Lightroom 6 keeps dying on my Surface. It works when I install it, but the next time I try to open it, even after a reboot, it gets to the splash screen and stops loading.

I hope to resolve this later today.

Revisiting another HDR photo

As I'm still getting to know Lightroom 6 and its HDR feature, I wanted to revisit this one from 2013:

Here's the refresh. I think it's a more subtle result, and looks more like what I actually saw in Hampstead Heath:

On my next trip (in two days), I'll probably take a lot more HDR-ready images. The Canon 7D Mark II does a sort-of draft HDR in-camera, with a number of options for generating the raw files that my old camera didn't have. I'm looking forward to the results.

Awed by the power of Craigslist

Less than 24 hours ago, I put my old camera on Craigslist: $500 for the body, two old lenses, the battery pack and charger, and a 32 GB CF card.

This afternoon, someone stopped by my office, played with the camera for five minutes, handed me $450 in cash, and that was it.

Thank you, Craig. That was remarkably painless.

More HDR fun with Lightroom

I'm not sure this produced a significantly different photo, but I've done another quick HDR image with Lightroom. First, the basic shot, posted the day after my visit to the Joint Security Area on the North-South Korean border:

Here's the first HDR attempt posted a week later:

And here's one with Lightroom 6:

The second HDRI used different source images, but only from a few seconds later. Are they significantly different? Maybe insignificantly? I must ponder...

It Bodes well

Upgrading my camera unfortunately meant I had to upgrade Adobe Lightroom as well. But I discovered that Lightroom 6 has a basic HDR feature, which I didn't expect. For a long time I've been taking bracketed images in order to make HDR images, and then forgetting about them. Images like this one:

For comparison, here's the non-HDR image I posted back in February:

In this case, the HDR imagery expanded the dynamic range of the image without making it look really bizarre. I think it's a stronger photograph as a result, though the bottom image is still pretty.

What a difference four years makes

I've just upgraded my main camera to the same model's Mark II. The first shot doesn't seem that impressive, as it's a daylight shot of a familiar view. (There are noticeable differences in Lightroom, however.) But check this out:

That was shot at ISO-51200, 1/60th second at f/5.6. I mean, holy crap.

To put this into perspective: in order to take that shot with the Tri-X Pan film I used as a kid, I'd need a 2-second exposure at the same aperture—a 7-stop difference. The mind reels. Yes, it's grainy, but it's still crisp and accurate. (It's B&W because the sodium vapor street lamps don't produce any red light, so there's no way to correct the colors.)

The 7D I got four years ago was the first digital camera that was as good as the film cameras I used to use. This is the first one that's better.

Here are the stats, updated from 2011: