g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

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Sunday, February 27, 2005
00:18 - Rolling back the curtain of night

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We rolled into South Lake Tahoe late on Friday night, and on an impulse—ignoring the others' obvious need for a restroom break—I pulled off the road at the first turnout on the cliff face as US 50 dives down to the lake level from Echo Summit, and sat the 10D on top of the car to use it in lieu of a tripod for some long-exposure shots.



Given that this was my first attempt at any night photography, I can't really claim that these shots are any good—to properly get the backgrounds in focus I would have had to stop the lens down a lot more and take a much longer shot. But on the LCD after taking these, I was immediately dumbstruck by the range of colors available. You're telling me these were taken after 10:00 PM? (The backlighting against Chris there comes from cars passing by us on the winding and slushy road down to the valley floor.)

So after we'd checked in at our hotel on the lake, I went down to the shore where the snowbanks had helpfully risen to the level where the steel fence surrounding the beach came up just to waist height, and I could rest the camera on it and take some nice long exposures.



Again, not the sharpest things in the world—but the colors that it recorded nearly made my feet fly out from under me and land me in an icy snowbank staring at the stars as they described arcs through my field of vision all night long.

Looking at the pictures zoomed in all the way on the LCD in the room that night, I realized that they weren't especially sharp; in the morning I was out at the same location taking equivalent shots in daylight, stopping down the aperture to f/13 and f/22, which brought the mountain into much sharper focus. While I was doing that, a guy named Eki with an accent I couldn't identify stepped up behind me with his film Nikon ("NEE-kon") and began to hold forth on various camera-related subjects, giving me various tips on composition and lenses and telling me without a whole lot of vaunted European diplomacy that his opinion of the 10D (and digital cameras in general) was less than stellar. But though the pictures he took of me in the scene came out looking pretty foul (he forgot to do any fill-flash, so I'm all in shadow and the mountains are bright white), I did share a few minutes of geekery with someone who recognized me as a peer of sorts. Wheee!

So anyway, on Saturday night I wandered down to the beach again. The clouds had rolled in during the day, and the full moon that had illuminated the Tahoe mountains so nicely the previous night was nowhere to be seen. But though the mountains themselves were totally in shadow, I noticed a weird red wisp behind them off to the northwest. I figured this must be a fire somewhere in the mountains west of the lake, with its glow reflecting dimly off the clouds above. So I set up a 30-second exposure on ISO 800, which let me crank my 50mm prime lens down to f/4.5; and this is what came out:



Still not amazingly sharp—if I'd brought my tripod and remote shutter release, I'd have done longer stopped-down exposures than the camera's maximum automatic 30 seconds—but check out those colors, why don't you?

Now I think I'm starting to see what makes people like this guy do what they do. So much for my evenings...


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© Brian Tiemann