Cadillac Ranch at Dusk with Nikon 50mm 1.4 G
December 22nd, 2008
We were racing the sunset to Cadillac Ranch on a drive into Amarillo and the sun won. But we got there on the tail end of dusk. My new Nikon 50mm 1.4 G saved the day. I was able to get a few passable shots. When I say passable I mean for my scrapbooks and to play around with in Photoshop with artistic filters.
An expert will have to let me know if I’d had a tripod or played with my shutter speed settings a little more if I could have had a chance at sharper images.
This is the one of the first photos I took facing into the sun. The camera took it at 1/15th of a second after I set the aperture at f/1.4 and the ISO at 800.
This photo was taken on Aperture priority with 800 ISO at f/1.4. The lens certainly did its job on letting in the light because you cannot tell by this picture that it was actually nearly dark. With an auto setting for shutter speed it took 1/8th of a second. It is fuzzy, but it will still be fun to play with. Maybe around Mother’s day I’ll share it in a higher resolution after applying an artistic filter.
This next photo was taken when the sun was all but gone. I had to bump the ISO up to 3200 and the camera took it at 1/20th of a second. But hey, we got the shot.
This last picture was taken as we were leaving. I couldn’t see well and didn’t realize I cut Uncle Eric’s feet off too tightly. I rather like the lighting of this photo, too bad it is noisy at 1/30th of a second and 3200 ISO.
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Andrew says:
December 30, 2008 at 12:02 pm
The rule of thumb for full-frame (35mm or FX sensor) is that the shutter speed should be 1/ the lens focal length to get sharp images of a stationary subject. However with the APS-C size sensor on your D90, the equivalent full-frame focal length is 1.5 x the actual focal length you are using. So with the 50mm lens, the equivalent full-frame focal length is 75mm, so 1/75 sec would be the slowest shutter speed for a sharp image of a stationary subject. Actually this rule is a bit conservative, 1/60 would probably be OK.
You were shooting 1/8 to 1/30th of a second, so this was a bit slow for a hand-held shot. A tripod would definitely have improved image sharpness. The other benefit would be that for the images that don’t have people in them, you could have gone down to 1 second or so, and reduced your ISO to 200, to reduce the noise.
Regards,
Andrew
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Dailyscrapper says:
December 31, 2008 at 11:30 am
I know that place very well. I grew up in Amarillo.