Fireworks, originally uploaded by Edward Faulkner. On Hampton Beach in New Hampshire.
When shooting fireworks I'm always interested in not just the sky, but the interesting light you get on the people on the ground.
This shot is a composite of four photos, all handheld.
Whale Tail, originally uploaded by Edward Faulkner.This wasn't edited. The gradient at bottom is actually the out-of-focus handrail.
Japanese Garden at Villa Melzi, originally uploaded by Edward Faulkner. This came out of my list of photos from Italy that needed further editing. In this case I had a very high-contrast scene and needed two exposures to cover it all.
Eileen moved from one exposure to the next, but a careful blend gives a pretty acceptable result, unless you zoom in very close.
Aligned with Hugin, blended with Gimp.
I'm just back from two weeks in northern Italy. Here are three shots from the most beautiful day of the trip, while hiking in the Dolomites.
When you're fortunate enough to have a day like this, it's hard not to get fantastic shots. Which is why rule number one is: be prepared. You don't want to be without a working camera. I'm fanatical about packing light for backpacking, but the SLR with both a long and a wide lens was high enough priority to come along, despite the significant weight. And I'm quite glad I brought the two lenses, because on this particular morning my wide lens had a big ugly condensation spot right in the middle. It eventually cured itself, but without a second lens I would have missed all of these shots.
Our recent vacation in New Hampshire yielded a bounty of animal sightings. My favorite was this fox, who followed us down the trail on a high ridge north of Mt Adams:
The light was very low, so I had auto-ISO enabled and it selected ISO 1600 -- a very high sensitivity, with added graininess and noise. Thankfully my Nikon does a pretty good job at ISO 1600. This is a shot you couldn't really get with a smaller digital camera, because the sensor is just too small.
He or she stuck around surprisingly long, and I was firing in bursts the whole time. These two shots were the best poses that managed to come out sharp.
Next, we have the most famous megafauna of the north, the moose:
The shot was taken from the door of a moose tour bus:
The moose is lit with several spotlights. Apparently the lights don't scare them away. While it was nice to see one so close, it was more exciting to run into one out in the woods earlier that evening:
Alas, I was only carrying the point-and-shoot, and not my big zoom. But I didn't need a zoom for this critter:
