Friday 6 April 2012

BLOG 2012-04-05

Today was the final full day in Hong Kong… The plan was to go to Macau as we had done a fair bit of shopping and I had gotten the key shots I was after… In an ideal world, I would’ve liked to have had more time shooting the architecture here at night as it’s simply mind blowing… However the first night I was too exhausted from shopping around in the Markets, and the second day was too Foggy… Today we was in Macau, and by the time we got back, it was fairly late, and was absolutely chucking it down with Rain… Seeing as London has had a bit of a drought, I haven’t seen rain like that in a long time!

So I have attained some shots I wanted, however the conditions were not ideal… Maybe in the near future I can come out for a quick visit with better weather to get the Hong Kong Peak shot once again, IFC Building and Bank of China… if I do manage to come back I’ll also head over to Kowloon and shoot across the waters to Hong Kong City, and get that shot…
In Macau, we went to MGM Casino… Amazing building inside… I just did high ISO hand held shots and got some good results… Then security asked me to stop taking pictures so I had to stop… But the Casino was like palace and I would’ve loved to have got it from more angles and in more rooms…

Outside the casino, we went around Macau and it was pretty good visually, but once you have seen Hong Kong City, everything else seems a bit poo…
Macau is bloody expensive btw, if anyone who reads this is planning on going… Hong Kong seems to be on par with London… I found some purchases I made either £1-2 above or below UK prices, so it kinda balanced out… But Macau on the other hand, everything was more… I wanted to get a CF 
Card for my new D800 but couldn’t because

Amazon.co.uk = £48
Hong Kong = £55 ($680)
Macau = £80 ($990)

So I didn’t make that purchase… Got left over HK Dollars I might either change back to £, or spend stupidly in the airport and on the way to the airport… Hopefully I can find some Camera stuff... or treat the family to a slap up meal…

I’ve noticed since getting the D800, I’ve been more selective with my shots… Two reasons, one, I’m trying to keep Shutter actuations down… In the past year I clocked up 25k on my D7000, as I did a lot of shooting for practice and a few events… not only that, holiday and family photos… so it went through a lot in a year…

Second reason is that the RAWs are so much bigger… So I have half the available shots with the memory cards I own. Selective shooting is pretty good though… Less pics to file through later and less to edit…

I did a shot with the H.02 ISO Setting… a comment from a member of the Dom Bower Photography Facebook Group requested a high ISO test… Figured I’d give it a go… On the back of the screen it looks pretty clean… but that’s the back of the screen…



On the computer, with the RAW exported to 1000px, the image seems pretty good to me… You can tell it’s a high ISO shot and slight loss of detail, but it’s definitely acceptable for a holiday shot. I probably wouldn’t be submitting it for a professional shot…

I do plan on doing a head-to-head ISO test against D7000 with a controlled lighting situation, as for all I know the ISO on D7000 could’ve handled this shot just as well, you can never really tell until you see direct comparisons as Image Noise is more apparent in really dark conditions, whereas this shot did have a street lamp which provided some illumination…

It’s crazy how far you can zoom into these images and see little details… I didn’t even realise there was someone in the distance… I thought it was an empty alley way…

Tomorrow I’ll be off to Thailand, NO idea what kind of shots I can get from there as I no nothing about Thailand…

It’s going to be interesting…

No comments:

Post a Comment