Car Show !

Today evening, I came across a local Car show just by chance. Lucky I had G5 with me. So I tried some photography in low light of the evening.



F2.0, 1/15 sec, ISO 50

The first one came out nice. I did not have a tripod with me. In aperture priority, I opened full aperture F2.0 for maximum light. I did not move ISO from 50. And just tried this shot 1/15 sec to see if I could handle it. Lucky, it came out nice.

I did not want to take chances again so settled the camera on a Fire Plug and shot this second one.




F2.8, 1/8 sec, ISO 50

The fire plug was a bit far, so I had to zoom in. But zoom reduces the limit on Maximum Aperture, so now I was limited at F2.8 instead of F2.0. To compensate for that I could have upped the ISO, but that invites the noise. Instead, with the stability of fire post, longer shutter time was not an issue, so I kept it in Aperture priority and shot is at 1/8 sec. Not bad ! :-)

For the rest of the pictures, I had no choice but to increase the ISO because people were all over and I could not waste time looking for a support or waiting for it to get clear. The Higher ISO brought in a lot of noise. I got rid of a lot of noise using free version of Neat Image. I have not dug deeper into its features but it works like a charm on the higher ISO noise. I still prefer to avoid the noise in the exposure.

Even at ISO 400 and F2.0, the shutter speed was slow at 1/30 or 1/40. This limited the number of pictures that came out unshaken :-( Even some of these you see below were shaken but don't look that blurred here due to loss of resolution.

Check "Lessons Learned" at the bottom.


F2.2, 1/40 sec, ISO 400



F2.0, 1/30 sec, ISO 400



F3.0, 1/30 sec, ISO 400



F2.0, 1/40 sec, ISO 400



F4.0 , 1/6 sec, ISO 200


Lessons Learned

• Once again, I wish I had a tripod or monopod with me. It wouldn't hurt to keep an extra cheap tripod in the trunk of the car (I'm still amateur you see...)
• In some of the shots I tried to stabilize the camera by pulling the camera away from me with the strap tightened around my neck. This did help in some cases but not always.
• Couple of times I tried to stabilize the camera by pulling the camera away from me but towards the ground to get an angle closer to horizontal. This required the LCD to be flipped on the side and face upwards toward me. It was so inconvenient with the strap coming in the way, reminding me once again how much I dislike sideway flipout of G5. (See "What I like/don't like about Canon G5")