069 - Feeling Enlightened

Day 69. Linda and I spent the weekend in Canberra, Australia's national capital. We went down there for the hot air balloon festival but were pleasantly surprised to find out that Enlighten was also on. Enlighten is a light show on several of the nation's iconic buildings like the High Court, the National Library, the National Art Gallery and Old Parliament House.

So I wandered around the Parliamentary Triangle until after midnight last night taking photos in the dark and the drizzle. I threw out more than I kept (the joy of digital photography) but here are just a few, presented as my daily create.

You can click each photo to enlarge it a little.

033 - Seven Oh Five

Day 33. Tonight we went into the city to see the Chinese New Year parade. We met friends in George Street, at what we thought would be a great viewing location for the parade. Turns out it wasn't that great after all. I took my good camera, the Nikon D7000 to take photos of the parade but it was pretty hard to get a good shot. I looked upwards and saw the setting sun hitting the Town Hall clock and snapped a few frames.  I particularly liked this one.

The contrast of the orange sunlight on the sandstone against the blue sky makes it really stand out nicely I thought, however I did give it a little bit of postprocessing in Aperture just to make it pop.

017 - Moon Shot

Day 17. It was a beautiful full moon last night so I went out with my Nikon D7000 and tried to photograph it. I don't know if you've ever tried to take a photo of the moon but it's not quite as easy as you might imagine it should be.

This was taken with a 300mm lens at f10, 1/500th, 800ISO. It's actually quite hard to focus on the moon at night; you have to do it manually and it's hard to see exactly when you have focus (especially with my eyes!) You also have to guess a bit with the shutter and aperture settings because the camera's metering system doesn't quite know what to do with a bright white disk on a large black background. I metered the first few shots but the results were completely blown out so I resorted to a bit of guesswork.

I had the camera on a tripod and used a remote shutter release, but even then the images were pretty ordinary until I did a bit of post processing in Aperture. I mainly used the Curves adjustment to bring all the contrast levels back and restore some detail in the image.

While it's not a technically great photo, I sure learned a lot about shooting the moon.