Sigh

Everyone's getting neat camera stuff for c'mas and I'm still stuck with my point-and-shoot Olympus. Guess ol' Santa found out about all the naughty things I did last year...:evilgrin:

Anyway, took a walk on the Mall last Friday with Ms. GOPFighter and grabbed this pic of the (fairly) new American Indian Museum (located next to the Air and Space Museum for those who haven't visited D.C. recently).



(Handheld @ 1/25 sec, f2.0, ISO 200, zoom 37mm)

Is it digital?

GREAT composition!

Thank you....

I like taking handheld night shots, and using a digital camera allows me to experiment with the settings until I get it right.

How much more crap can we cram on the mall?

since some are underground with very small buildings above ground. Must take a trip soon to the Native American Museum.

Great shot and reminded me that I haven't seen it yet.

the National Museum of the American Indian - but a lot of the folks most interested in visiting it have a hard time not calling it the Native American museum...

Definitely worth a visit - I visited last year about this time. Nice shot, by the way, GOPF.

That way you don't have to worry about parking.

just built a nice-looking new shopping center across from the old and very nice Bellevue Square Mall. The new complex is called Lincoln Center and it includes apartments/condos as well as shops and restaurants. There's a skybridge from Lincoln Center to Bellevue Square.

That's happening everywhere. They call it mixed use zoning, the latest trend in development. Or as developers like to say, "a move away from suburbs back into the city where residents can work and play in a bustling downtown."

Or to be more accurate, where residents can spend their money as soon as they're done earning it.

It worked well here in the denver metro for a short time. Many "old town" style developments. People can work, live, shop, and be entertained in a "small town" type area. It started out as a middle class idea but then the developers figured out they could double or triple the prices so it's now become just as bad as living in the heart of an urban area.

Greed tends to fuck up all the good ideas.

It's only available to those with a lot of money. They're doing the same thing here in Miami after decades of letting the downtown go to hell.

Trouble is, Miami has one of the highest poverty rates in the country so most of the people buying the new condos are rich Europeans and South Americans.

I get out of focus snaps at 1/5000.
:shrug:

Nice shot.
:thumbsup:

You don't need a new camera. And I just realized that you haven't been round' these parts lately. I'm a little slow.
:dunce:

...it's not that crisp, but reducing it down to 500x700 for posting it looks pretty good.

I went through an "ugly photo" phase this fall when all my pics were absolutely cruddy, especially my night shots...and some of those were in Copenhagen and Paris where I really wanted something to bring back with me. Maybe I should look at them again and see if they've improved with age - like wine. I go through cycles like this...

I've heard that museum has a very nice section dedicated to the Alaska natives which I would love to see. I wanted to go there when I was in DC in September for the march, but I didn't get a chance. If you take photos this good with a point and shoot, you'd be downright scary with a camera like mine.

So many decisions. So many lenses. By the time I figured out what I needed and changed the lens and set up the tripod the light would have changed and I'd be screaming in frustration. But I'm still jealous... :silly:


(I still haven't been inside the Museum yet)

I'm kind of scared, too. For some reason I just don't "get" aperture. Does it get easier?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depth_of_field

Aperture selection is a very important consideration when it comes to depth of field. You as the artist must decide what should be in focus and what should be out of focus. Landscape photography is more than "F-8 and be there!". (I do not know who coined that phrase but it was very popular with Ansel Adams and his students).

I'll study it hard when I get a minute. For some reason it just all seems kind of backwards to me and counter-intuitive, but I'm sure I'll figure it out sooner or later. Does it also have to do with how much light gets in, or is that just shutter speed and ISO?

I get all confused with that stuff too. Aperture, f-stop... I only have the vaguest of ideas how they work. It's in fractions, that's the problem! x( But even though I still don't get it, somehow knowing what to shoot has become easier, more intuitive in the 10+ years I've been shooting. So hang in there, it will get better! :hug:

...smaller is bigger, whatever. It just makes my head spin. I really want to figure it out though, because as much fun as the computer programs are, it just seems so much better if the photos look right coming out of the camera. I still can't get past feeling like it's cheating somehow to digitally enhance the pictures.

It makes your head spin because it seems so much like BushWorld.
"War is Peace. Clear-Cutting is Conservtion. Smaller is Bigger. Whatever."
:rofl:

One whole pie is bigger than one piece out of 16. Hell that is how I finally remember, went back to the elementary school fraction examples. :rofl: I know the math is different for aperture but the pie thing does work for remembering which way lets in more light. Beyond that just using your camera will give you and idea what each f stop lets in. Now for real fun, take the same picture twice, once with a small aperture and once with a large one. That can be fun since you can get a different light effect on each along with depth of field. (Set camera to aperture priority so the shutter speed changes)

Just as 1/16th is smaller than 1/8th, f/16 is smaller than f/8. The "f" refers to the focal length of the lens, and the diameter of the opening of the aperture in that lens is not described in absolute measurements, but as a fraction of the length.

This is useful, because it means that any lens with its aperture opened to f/8 will let the same amount of light energy in, and thus expose the film or sensor at the same rate as any other lens set at f/8.

Taking f/4 as an example, an f/4 400mm telephoto would have an aperture of 100mm, while an f/4 40mm lens would need an opening of only 10mm. This makes some sense, since a telephoto captures a smaller number of the photons in the scene which are heading toward the camera than a wider angle lens would, and so needs a larger opening to gather in a comparable number in the same time.

The f-stop measure gives you the information you need to know how "fast" the lens is, since all lenses that are open to f/16 on a bright sunny day will allow you to shoot at 1/100th second on ASA 100 film or 1/50th second on ASA 50, or 1/3200th second on ASA 3200. (That is the sunny f/16 rule - that your exposure time is equal to 1 divided by (film speed) when the lens aperture is set at f/16.)

More at http://www.uscoles.com/fstop.htm -- if you want more.