43 minute exposure, f/13 ISO 100, camera noise reduction on. The lower ISO definitely helps with image noise, but combined with light pollution from city lights and the rising full moon, most of the fainter stars are lost.
20 minute exposure, f/13, ISO 100 camera noise reduction off. The bright streak at the bottom is Jupiter. Lots more noise without the camera noise reduction, but you get the image in half the time and get a more shooting time out of your battery.
It’s going to be really hard to get good star trail photos in the middle of the city anyway, but it seems like something between f/7.1 – f/11 and ISO 400 gets me some pretty nice shots with my camera.
Thought I’d try some long exposures this evening and maybe see if I could capture some Geminid meteors streaking through the sky.
Being inside the city and with a full moon out, I knew it was going to be a challenge. It might look dark outside, but city lights and the full moon can make long exposures look bright as day.
21 minute exposure, f/11 ISO 400. Had to knock down the brightness quite a bit.
Although I didn’t get any Geminids on camera, I did get to see a few streak overhead. Always cool to see. Got a couple other photos before condensation built up, but they didn’t turn out quite as well.
There are changes afoot to one of my favourite eating places, Great American Grill. One of the reasons it’s been a favourite place to eat for the past few years is the atmosphere. The food, while nothing fancy, is pretty good and home-y feeling. You can sit, relax, enjoy your meal, read the paper and not feel rushed to finish and get out like in other places.
There’s a new guy behind the kitchen now. The owner, Christine, has partnered up with Chef Mark of Southern Occasions Catering. I got to see him in action this morning when I stopped in for breakfast. He seems to be a friendly sort of chef. No changes to the menu yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see some soon. A sign on the door mentioned a grand re-opening coming in January.
Great American Grill has managed to stay in business longer than any other restaurant I’ve seen in that corner spot since I’ve been in Charleston. Looking forward to seeing what Chef Mark has to bring.
Helped out with another successful Help-Portrait event this year. And for the third year in a row, it was a chilly and rainy day. It was a great event though despite the chill. Seeing the expressions on the faces of everybody when they see their photo is heartwarming and exceedingly gratifying.
This year the tent was slightly smaller and the lights a lot bigger, but at least the roof of the tent was all white. No need to deal with odd lighting like we did last year with the yellow and white striped tent.
Like last year, we didn’t do any printing on site and considering the smaller space we had this year, probably just as well. I didn’t get an exact count, but from a brief look at the log sheets it looked like we had at least 160 families go through. Most of them were pretty large groups too. Most of the families that came through my station had 4-7 people. I’d say we took photos of at least 500 people today. With that much volume, trying to print photos on-site is pretty challenging. Since we were shooting tethered we were still able to give everybody a look at their photo.
We had three photo stations set up with some pretty big soft boxes at two of the stations. Made things cozy, but the photos were well lit.
Portrait station lights
Overall, things went pretty smoothly today. One of the photographers was having problems shooting tethered and eventually abandoned it. Not sure what the problem was, although it might have been cable related. Although the tethered shooting with my camera wasn’t working during testing, it worked just fine with Mike’s Nikon D40. I was worried for a little bit that it wasn’t going to work, but it turned out fine. As always, test everything before hand, and then test it again.
Having a bigger space would have been nice, but otherwise everything went pretty well. I was happy to work with a great group of people for yet another Help-Portrait event, and look forward to doing more in the future.
