McAllister Park

A couple of infrared shots from around the pond in SA's biggest park.

I don't have anything much to say about them beyond the fact that they're a little 'soft', but handheld IR in high winds will do that.
The infrared experiments continue...


I just had a friend call me today with an offer to print a 36" x 48" poster of whatever shot of mine I wanted to email him.
Because he got some free glossy photo paper that fit his company's printer, we had to get it done right away--if you get my meaning--and it was hard to pick something quickly that might look good at that size.
'Waiting To Cross Over' was our first choice of course, but even NeatImage couldn't clean it up enough to suit me. It will make a nice 8x10 but the noise after cropping is too big.
Making it harder to choose, my external harddrive was offline while I worked on ripping mp3s and putting them on the Sansa. The time needed to search through my archive CDs wasn't there, so I just picked a relatively clean file of an outtake sunset from South Padre.
It was a ten-second exposure with stacked ND4s and a CP filter taken at dusk, as compared to 8 seconds for WTCO, but even with a strong levels push the file was still three+ times as clean.
And it was from the old sensor.
At 3mp instead of 5mp.

Since WTCO was taken when full dark, maybe even a small amount of light from the sky is enough to overpower noise? (The old signal to noise ratio thing matters in music recording, too.)
My dusk shots from Christmas were only 2 second exposures, and their skies were smooooth!!

As much as I enjoy shooting for hours at a time at night, I'm constantly reminded that results are best between 20 and 40 minutes after sundown.
Unfortunately, the light changes fast at this time, so wandering around looking for a shot will never beat being prepared and already knowing what you want.

I can't wait to see my poster-sized print!