Municipal Auditorium Zone

It was almost solid overcast that night, but I had some stuff I needed to shoot and the spare time was there so we made a quick trek downtown.

The Municipal Auditorium has been featured here a few times, but for whatever reason I never climbed the steps and looked up before.
Wow!

This is the flag flying over San Antonio's Korean War Memorial--there wasn't enough light to shoot the memorial itself.

Our VietNam War memorial.
I always get a little misty-eyed here.
My new favorite view of this spot, but I'm convinced I can do better.

Someday I hope to shoot these overhead lanes of IH10 correctly.
Camera-balanced-on-steeringwheel @ 65mph doesn't really cut it.

On The Road Again

Tonight was an attempt to get back to my roots--drop-off books at the library, grab some tacos, take a few night photos, do a quick grocery run, get my Vodka & PhotoShop on, blog about it.
Felt good.


This is an attempt to update an old favorite from 2007, taken on the 3rd anniversary of buying my late great F717.
As far as the subject, I'll just mention that it took them forever to finish painting this section of new ramps and they didn't do a great job, but I was also waiting for a night with minimal humidity combined with low-level clouds moving fairly fast across the sky.
I'm excited by the Alpha300's resolution and other advanced technology, but the cheap lens that it comes with is more prone to flare than had been revealed in any of my earlier night testing.
To be honest, it kinda sucks and isn't really fixable using PhotoShop, but I now have a worst-case scenario to measure all future projects against.
The superb Zeiss lens on my last camera also had a problem with this scene, just not as bad, so it's not like I'm completely surprised by a few problems.
The main thing is that the worst weakness is identified and I can avoid it, so as a learning experience tonight was a major success.


There's nothing I dislike about this one except for the sloppy paint job on the ramp supports.
In-camera noise reduction seems a bit aggressive to me, but it might just be that this scene would look the same from a Nikon or Olympus or Pentax or Panasonic or Canon camera--I have no way to tell right now without further testing.

What's most important is that I really like these photos and learned a lot from them.
Pushing your camera gear to the point of disappointment is never a waste of time or effort.