Hedge Gone Wild
I am guessing this row of trees started as a hedge around the dirt playing field, what was a parade ground, in Beacon Hill Park. The more open section in the middle has caught my eye at 8:30 or so in the mornings when driving this route and yesterday morning I took the time to stop and photograph it. I thought the light was not going to last as the seasons progressed, and besides a bit of monochrome HDR is overdue on this blog.
For the first time, just before I took this shot, I had an poorly secured lens fall off my camera. Fortunately it landed in a bed of pine needles and seems unharmed, though the adapter chip did reset itself so that the exif data now thinks this is a 24mm/f1.4 lense (if only). The good thing about the chip is that it kept its focus confirm (though I had better check its accuracy) and no longer chokes on automatic brackets as it has been doing.
I think what happened was that after the camera became totally drenched and fogged up when using it for work in the snow a couple of weeks ago, I had hung it up to dry near the wood stove and must have loosened the lens while inspecting the camera for moisture damage. There seems to have been none from that drenching, even though there were spots of moisture under the rear screen and the top display was totally fogged – eventually somewhere inside became fogged and clouded some images. That was definitely pushing it too far; I am going to need to get a more weatherproof camera for field work. I hear the Olympus OMD-EM5 or -EM1 calling my name.
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Canon EOS 5Dmkii, Nikkor-N pre-AI 24mm/f2.8 lens, ISO100, f4, 1/2000th +/- 2 E.V.
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burnt embers 
I hate when that happens! I’d love to have a new Oly but the budget is tight these days. Instead, I bought a Fujifilm XP, a waterproof, weather proof cheap point and shoot which works very well, especially considering the weather we’ve been having recently. It has it’s limitations and it’s not as flexible (control wise) but for quick shots it works fine for me.
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Hi Ken. I know what you mean about the new Oly being recently “retired” and not sufficiently employed to compensate an inadequate pension. I was given a gift towards an Oly, so I have quite a lot of the funds I need. I have been intending to call it a business expense and use it to cost reduce my taxes, but I need sufficient income for that to actually make sense. Also, I have been delayed in that purchase because just when I was going to buy one before, I got the Pen and was totally distracted by it. The little pocket cameras like your one do a pretty good job under a wide range of conditions, I was recently using a Lumix similar to your camera and found it worked very well in some difficult conditions, though its GPS performance was a bit of a disappointment (and for the project something we want working well).
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Looks like I’ll have to stop saying I hate HDR. I like the shadows and other lines (tracks?) in the foreground. Well, yeah, and the sky.
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Hi Linda. I know what you mean about HDR – but only some of it. This is, to my eye, stretching things a little bit, but that was on purpose. A lot of HDR looks perfectly natural. I like knowing how to do it and keeping it in my “tool kit/camera bag” for those times when the dynamic range really needs some attention, and I don’t have, for instance, a graduated filter with me. It is a much simpler method than doing a lot of masking and tweaking of a single image, even though all the information might be lurking in that one image.
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And yes, those are bicycle tracks in the dirt surface and the broader pale line some kind of concrete divider or cover between parts of the field.
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That sky! I can’t stop looking at it.
I hope the lens is OK – I’ve never had that happen, but my polarizing filter has fallen off a few times.
And, now I’m off to follow up on a lead for a particularly run-down building downtown. After I check my lens, I mean.
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Thanks Melinda!. It seems to be OK. I did notice in the lower right corner a bit of a lightish vignette in some of the pictures, but that could be a stray finger as it is tough to keep the fingers out of shots with this lens. I need to experiment a bit, and possibly recalibrate the adaptor, but there are not dents, cracks or scratches and it still takes pictures.
Check you lens for sure, and good luck finding some photogenic decrepitude.
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I DID find some photogenic decrepitude, so I had a successful morning. I also took about 70 shots of some clouds going by, which I made a (not very good) timestack photo from and then made a (also not very good) time-lapse movie. Neither will be posted on the blog.
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Well I would like to see them. Timestacking as some bright wit has named it looks like a cool thing to do. And as you know I like time lapses though I have not attempted one for a while now.
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