The Venetian church, viewed from the terrace of the Hotel Danieli:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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:
...with my new camera:
More details forthcoming...
This was the view at the top of North Pond on my walk this afternoon: