Tripod Repair

I went down to Kirkland last night and took a few pictures to test my tripod repair. I didn't get camera shake on any of them so it looks as if my repair was successful.

For those who haven't been following this blog, I have a tripod that has a removable piece that attaches to the camera for quick release. The shoe that it sits in had a rubber mat to provide tension so that it was a tight fit but that fell out at some point leaving the piece attached in the camera free to move around in the shoe causing camera shake.

I used some of the fabric portion of stick-on Velcro as a substitute for the rubber mat and it seems to provide a nice snug fit that completely solved this problem. The only shake I experienced last night is that I took some photos from a dock and occasionally waves from the lake would hit the underside of the dock hard enough to move it.

Seattle First Hill at Dusk photographed from Kirkland

Downtown Seattle at Night

Lake Washington Shoreline at Night

Click on any of these to see an enlarged version. The middle one especially but also the last benefit from this as there is a lot of detail not visible in the smaller image. The first image I think I did something accidentally bad like in Paintshop with the high pass filter and over emphasized the fine detail distorting the image.

When adjusting sharpness detail, if you have things not sharp enough, not enough high frequency content, a point will blur into a smudge. If conversely you have too much, then a bright point will get a dark ring around it. This can happen if you set the sharpness too high or if you accidentally run a high pass filter twice.

I've pretty much worked out a formula that compensates for this camera without overshoot which consists of running the high pass filter with a setting of two pixels and strength of 35, then a setting of one pixel with a strength of 70. This combination seems to compensate for the camera just about perfectly. I suspect I ran one an additional time on the first image.

Night Photography

I went down to Alki recently, primarily with the intent of taking some pictures of KNND's setup for my radio blog but I also wanted to take some night shots.

Unfortunately, what I didn't realize was that my tripod had lost a piece. It's got a quick release mount for the camera and the piece that attaches to the camera sits in the head of the tripod originally on a kind of rubberized mat.

Well, that mat was glued in apparently not well and fell out and went unnoticed except that when I went to use the tripod the camera wouldn't stay still on the head. I have since repaired it by using a piece of the fabric portion of stick on Velcro which provides the necessary tension to hold the little camera mount plate stable.

But some of my pictures that day got some camera shake in them as a result because I hadn't figure out what was wrong with the tripod yet.

4th of July Fireworks

This year I had a fair degree of success at photographing fireworks. The settings I used were approximately F3.5, 3.2 second exposure, and 400 ASA film speed.

I started with a 50 ASA setting but that proved inadequately sensitive. 400 ASA was good for most, might have been a little too sensitive for some resulting in color wash-out, but overall was probably a good compromise.




I took many more. You can see them on my July 4th gallery page.

Macro

I've been playing with the macro capability on the Powershot S2 IS camera a bit lately. The following is a close-up photograph of a tiny flower being worked by a bee that, although I keep hearing has been dying off, seems to still be quite plentiful here in western Washington.


A limitation of the Powershot S2 IS shows up in this photograph. It is impossible to stop the lens down more than F8 and thus impossible to get a decent depth of field. A macro lens I have for my 35mm camera stops down to F22 which gives a depth of field just short of a pinhole camera.

Yes, I know I can't expect as much from a $300 digicam. Still I don't understand some of Canon's design decisions, particularly with respect to the lens on this camera.

Most Popular Image

I've put over 700 images up on my gallery since I got the Cannon Powershot S2 IS. This one is one of the very first pictures I took, messing around at Golden Gardens just after I got the camera. It is also the most popular image on the gallery, viewed more than any other.

Girl In Water