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.