Round the World

As part of a highly recommended three day tourist bus package we got tickets to visit three New York landmarks.  One of the places we chose to visit was the UN.  We had a fascinating tour led by a Japanese member of staff in full traditional dress.  The tour was excellent and well worth it and this was one of the images that captivated me during our time here.

I liked the simplicity of the display and the way that the chips and scuffs in the paint suggest at the harsh life of a UN peacekeeper.

I took this using my 18-55mm lens on my EOS7D at 18mm, f5.6 and 1/30th of a second at ISO4000 due to the low light in the museum area.  There doesn't appear to be a huge amount of shot noise but the large aperture has softened the focus on the far edges of the helmet.  If I had my flash gun I could have avoided some of these issues but it wasn't high on my list of items to take on our trip!

Post processing was a simple crop and addition of the watermark.

Apart from the soft focus as discussed above the main issue I have with this image is the fact that due to time constraints on the tour I couldn't set the white balance to the correct setting so the white is slightly cream coloured, it's so bad that no matter what I have tried I can't seem to correct it so I've left it as I originally shot it, maybe I need a return trip and to set the white balance correctly!

Time!

It's been a while since I last posted, partly due to our holiday and also a lack of free time due to work and various other activities.  I thought I would share some of my favorite holiday snaps over the course of the next few posts (may take a while if the gap I've just had is anything to go by), so here goes!

This image is of Times Square in New York.  It was bitterly cold and in the background you can see steam rising from the subway vents.  I loved the way the lights almost make up for the fact that it is dark, making it just possible to get a handheld shot without too much trouble.

The image was taken with my 18-55mm lens and my EOS7D at 18mm, f4.5 and 1/200th.  I managed to get the ISO as low as 400 so avoided the shot noise of higher ISOs whilst maintaining a fast enough shutter speed to freeze the motion of the people and cars and not have any hand induced blurring.  Had I remembered to actually carry my monopod whilst on holiday I could have taken this at slower shutter speeds and a narrower aperture which would have given interesting motion blurs of the cars and people and sharper long range focusing.

Post processing has been relative light.  I have cropped, and removed a distracting advert on top of a building in the background that looked like it was floating in mid air and then added my watermark.

If I were to do anything differently I would have shifted my position to the right to make the flag poles more evenly placed, it would have been great to use a wide angle lens but alas I didn't buy it until after I took this shot!

I loved the challenge of getting the exposure right for the bright lights of the advertising boards and yet not losing the foreground to the depths of shadow.