Thread: Photo Competition #19 - Ends 2-August

The shot in the duration of the comp makes it hard. Some comps allow two shots with one from the archives, which gives me a chance of a single entry.

Another option to keep it current would be to say must be taken in the last 6 or 12 months. That will stop those with years of archives winning every comp, without excluding those who are two busy to pop out and take a special shot.

Cheers, Steve

I knew that by setting the restriction of submitting photos only taken during the course of this competition would reduce the number of submissions considerably.

It's not hard just to go out one night, sit a camera on a bin and take a long exposure shot of a car going past. Or a photo of a bird flapping its wings. The wind blowing through a tree ect. It may not be the best photo in the world, but what does it matter, it might be interesting. I guess having to do that isn't convenient enough.

What I wanted was photos that were taken with the intention to be submitted into the competition, not an archive family snap that shows a bit of movement blur that coincidentally meets the rules of the competition.

I didn't think I could submit photos since I set the rules, but after checking it seems that I can.

So this is what I got after spending 10mins with the camera facing out the window.

Reversing Ghost:

Exposure: 4sec
Aperture: f/22
ISO: 100
Length: 50mm

Floating Lights:

Exposure: 2.5sec
Aperture: f/22
ISO: 100
Length: 50mm

OK, you win. Here is one taken during the duration of the comp. I didn't realise that there was any time left in this one, but I've just scraped in. I had to think a moment on how to get a long exposure shot.

The only edit was to reduce the brightness a touch to hide the sensor noise. I took about 30 pics to get the lines right and the sensor is pretty hot and noisy. I also cropped a little.

This was F10, 100 ISO, 30 seconds. Shorter exposures meant I couldn't get the wheels in as I had to change position to reach that side. Exposure was controlled by the aperture.

Cheers, Steve

Nicely done Steve!
What camera were you using for this? I wouldn't have expected there to be much sensor noise at ISO100??

It is a Sony A100. There were multi-coloured speckles in the same place on the last few shots. I can't think what else it could be. Dust would be a grey/black and invisible in this shot. It would be a major sensor failure to have 40 hot pixels.

I think I should have turned off the steady shot as this is likely my problem. You would hear it adjusting the sensor position the whole time, but I didn't realise the significance at the time.

Cheers, Steve

This is off topic, but do you mean spots like these?





I got these at ISO400 and exposed for 15 seconds. The spots are in the same locations in all long exposure shots.

A little while back I did some long exposure tests with the lens cap on. 30 seconds ISO400 there was quite a few coloured circles and white pixels, 30 seconds ISO 100 there was less. 30 seconds ISO400 with long exposure noise reduction on and they were all gone.

I'm curious if there should actually be that many on an image (I don't know since it's my first SLR) the camera is a Canon 450D.

Stirling, if you are having issues with a hot pixel, you can get Canon to turn it off in the firmware. The camera just uses an average of the 8 surrounding pixels instead.