north carolina: my backyard, salisbury Azaleas After Dark II

Twelve seconds at f/11 well after sunset--on a tripod, of course. Just having fun here with a low-light camera. Commentswelcome.

--Lannie

Lannie, This must have been a windless day!  12 seconds exposure and they look sharp!  Did the colors photograph any differently than they do in the day?

 

Regards,

Jerry

These two shots are wonderful!

Diane

Thanks, folks.

 

Jerry, the wind had "laid" after sunset and it was very still.  Yes, the colors seem to be pretty accurate, to the best of my recollection.

 

As for the other element of sharpness--focus--I had problems getting AF to work in the dark, and so I went to manual focus.  I still had trouble looking through the viewfinder, of course, but I took a number of shots and finally got a few sharp ones.  The real trick, of course, was using a high f-stop and thus extending the DOF.  The flowers were in such sharp focus that pistils and stamen were visible on the full-sized file--as shown in the 100% crop.  (The 100% crop was taken from the left side, from a part of the original file that was cropped away.  It is still from the same file.)

--Lannie

Here is a second 100% crop, this time from near the center of the frame.

It turns out that I used a very shallow S-curve rather than regular contrast adjustment on both these crops.

It can be seen that the Canon 5D II does not give the sharpest files per pixel out of the camera, but this is not a factor in practice given the large size of the files. 

--Lannie