This is pretty much the way The Dalles is right now. I took this shot from my pourch with my longest lens setup. It's about 800mm 35mm equiv. From the deck, this mountain is only about two fingers high and this is not a crop. Some teli-converters do a very good job.
I caought this lucky shot from the car! It can be a real hassle to be in a car trying to take pictures. On a nice day however, you can bring your shutter speed up high enough that you won't have image degridation. This is the "Sternwheeler" A famos old ship that actually runs on it's sturnwheeler system. Many of these boats use modern propulsion and just have the paddle wheel for show. I remember hearing about how this one actually is real. Restored, you can cruse up the river in it for a price, I forgot how much but it's not a fortune.
Things are looking like this now, on a day at the OHSU, I got this and several other lucky shots last year.
I REALLY like my old Cannon 10D with my 50mm F1.8 lens. At f1.8 digital pictures kind of come alive. There's absolutely no substitute for the real thing. Of course you can digitallyadd blur, but having the lens is well worth it. And Cannon makes a nice one for under $200.
No, it's not super-rugged, but it works very well when you want to get creative. Add an extension tube, and you have a nice close-up kit. Allot of my nighttime pictures have been done with my Cannon 10D. The camera was over $1,600 if I recall, without a lens in 2004. I find 6.3mp surprisingly effective for what I do. Comparable to good 35mm film. The 10D has a very fast system for processing long exposures. I'm not sure how that works exactly, but most cameras from compact to three other digital SLRs I have used from the E-500 to my XTi (400D) and Nikon D40, it takes about 30 more sec. to process a 30 sec exposure. Often it's really cold outside, and I want to get it done. The 10D surprisingly crunches the picture in under 5sec. Slowed down? I'm not sure, but the 10D was for a time, Cannon's 2nd to only to the pro-camera.
Just a few weeks ago, we had a near-blizzard here. I have a whole bunch of pictures I have not yet processed for my site about this. This is another shot showing the power of my new lens rig. It's actually a teli-converter setup, but it works very well. This shot was a serious distance with no tripod.
I love how everything changes when it snows. Lighting, contrast, and so much more. My best night shots which I am getting more and more interested in, have yet to make it to this site.
Deep freeze. Houses got snow, then it froze, and we got some snow action and ice-cycles this year. Small, but at least we had them. A portable temperature probe sensitive enough for use in processing film, recorded the lowest temperatures here during the freeze here in The Dalles at 15F. It can get colder and this was on my deck. The depth of field here is shallow enough that only a mid-range of the ice-cycles is is captured.
One of the many back-roads from the old-Dalles. If you click this picture you might see the effects of having a lens that can focus with such a thin depth of field giving a sense of depth to the image. The lower your F-stop the more creative you can be with this. Distant objects appear blurred slightly, showing there distance.
FINALLY! I got Photoshop running on my laptop again! So I was able to remove ugly power lines from this shot.
This is a lot near where I live when the snow was as deep as it got and falling, I was out with my Cannon 10D and 400D cameras. I got one of those water-resistant bags you can put the camera in, it was effective. You may wonder how to capture snowflakes. A simple secret. If it's snowing and you want to catch the snow, USE YOUR FLASH. As long as you can turn it on manually (nearly all cameras you can, even cheap ones) Flashing snow in a blizzard will make it look as good as it does to you. How bright it is outside has nothing to do with it. This picture also had large power-lines in it. To remote utility lines from a tight spot, use the healing tool very carefully. Set your pen-size to match the wire or be just slightly larger. Slide it up to only a moderately larger size and you won't get it. One size does not fit all. The tool copies data from it's surroundings and fills in the blanks. Trace very carefully and you can take out Utility lines no matter how big and ugly they are.
