Welcome to 2009…

Wishing everyone a
Healthy & Happy New Year

Before Christmas I posted several photographs of lights taken at Walt Disney World. If you are interested in the settings I used, expand this post.

The night shots from the Fort Wilderness Campground were taken with my Nikon D70 SLR set on full manual, including manual focus. The ISO was set to 200 to avoid noise. Most of the photos were shot at f/8 (for a few displays I used f/5.6) at 1 second. As always, I was shooting RAW. I used a tripod and remote control shutter release to avoid camera shake. My workflow consisted of importing the photos into Adobe Lightroom, making minor adjustments, opening the photos in Adobe Photoshop CS3 for a few more "tweaks", and then back to Lightroom. I print from Lightroom, and for photos posted on the web I output the files in a compressed, jpeg format for easy uploading.

To create the panorama shot, I used the photomerge feature in Photoshop which stitched eight photos together.

While I don't always want to lug around my SLR camera, I almost always carry my Canon Powershot S50 point & shoot, and that is the camera I used for the light display at Disney Hollywood Studios. As a rule I don't bother with manual shooting when I use the point & shoot, and with the lights so bright I was able to shoot in program mode with the flash turned off and the ISO set to 400. I shot RAW and followed the same Lightroom/Photoshop workflow. The camera varied the f-stops from f/2.8 to f/4 and the shutter speed varied from 1/8 to 1/20 of a second.

As I write this I am anxiously awaiting tomorrow and a visit from the UPS truck which will be bring my new camera, a Nikon D90. Since I bought my D70 almost five years ago there have been a lot of advances on the digital single lens reflex front, and I am really excited about having a new camera. The D70 still takes great photos and has served me very well, but it is time to move on! Watch Linda's Lens for more photos taken last December, and new photos from the new camera as soon as I get the hang of it.