More photon-based shenanigans

Last weekend was a trip up to South Lake Tahoe, and it wouldn't have been the same without some unwarranted and needless geeking out.

I was keen to test both plungercam 2 and the time-lapse recording setup under some more challenging conditions out in the field.

I'm a huge fan of Keith Loutit and his use of tilt-shift for minituarisation, and I wanted to have a go myself:

I carried a netbook, camera, lens and mini-tripod up on the hike around Emerald bay to get the shot. Chuck kindly took a couple of shots of me setting up the whole thing and running the capture, so you can get an idea of how (relatively) minimal the setup is:

On a less terrestrial scale, I also wanted to get a nice capture of stars in motion. Given that we were well outside of the city, I thought it was a a reasonable enough proposition - however, the moon was nearly full, so that did tend to wash things out a fair bit as soon as it rose. However, the result wasn't awful:

I used auto-levels to try to bring out the stars a bit, but it does tend to cause some odd colour artifacts - see the weird green hues in the second sequence above. Next time I think I'll try to control the levels manually rather than leave it to an algorithm.

On the plain old 2D front, Tahoe yielded a few nice shots:

Full set here.

...and last Wednesday, I was helping out the San Francisco Bay Guardian again by taking some candids at the annual Best of the Bay party downtown. Good time had by all :)

Full set here.