Blue Hour at Albert Park Lake

After all the hand-held night photography experiments I've been doing lately, I decided to go out for a more "traditional", tripod-based night photo walk tonight, to nearby Albert Park Lake.

Nothing special about this series really, except that I had noise reduction turned off and haven't done any tinkering with settings during processing.

And I think they turned out quite okay.

Processing Balloons Over St Kilda Road

I took a nice shot of hot air balloons over St Kilda Road at sunrise this morning. And finally I'd decided to play around with some settings and filters and carefully compare the results over the same photo. Not sure how I never got around to this before.

As it turns out (further to some noise reduction and sharpness experiments last night), it actually seems like it's best to not use any noise filtering, and not attempt to fiddle with sharpness settings at all. As long as the ISO is very low, things come out fine without any need to twiddle those things. And for cityscapes and general daylight photography (where I don't need a particularly fast shutter speed), the camera essentially gets it perfectly right by default.

Other than this, I've also played around with a couple of art filters, saturation, and other settings. Here are the results:

No Processing

Auto Tone Correct

Maximum Sharpness Applied

Saturation +20

Pin Hole Filter

Pop Art Filter

Experiments in Hand Held Low Light II

So I went out tonight and did some more experiments with held-held low light. Much of it were attempts to capture the "gas brigades" at Crown with a fairly high shutter speed and the ISO cranked up. And then the rest of it were just random Southbank and St Kilda Road street scenes on my way home.

Verdict? As expected, it doesn't really work very well once it starts to get too dark. High ISO creates noise which is very hard to filter away (either during shooting or processing).

Still, I have a better idea now of what I can do with my Olympus OM-D EM-5 hand-held  (with my current lens anyway). For twilight and well-lit city streets at night, it's reasonably doable, at least from the point of view of amateur photography / holiday snaps. Anything more "serious" than that, and it definitely pays to keep the ISO as low as possible and use a tripod.

Anyway, here's a selection of pics from tonight's walk. Note the increasing noise towards the end...

Experiments in Hand Held Low Light I

I've been somewhat of a low-ISO freak with my low light photography, and when it backfired on me a few days ago (long story), I decided to try out higher ISO settings for low light. And that, in turn, prompted me to test the limits of my camera with hand held low light photography.

It actually didn't turn out too badly. The highest ISO setting I let it get to was 3200, and the slowest the shutter speed got to was 15. And even under those conditions most of my photos were coming out okay. Very few rejects due to hand movement blur, and no major problems with obvious visible noise.

I went home while it was still blue hour, rather than full-on night, so next time I'll try even higher ISO settings and much darker conditions, and see what happens then. But now at least I know that for these conditions - hand held is quite viable.

Random Circuit Walk to Port Melbourne

So I had some free time this afternoon and decided to go for a little walk around my area. Nothing too big I thought - maybe just to the next neighbourhood along, maybe check out some local parks....

Three hours later - I walked right across Albert Park, Port Melbourne, Southbank, South Melbourne, and back home down to St Kilda Road. If you know Melbourne, you'll know that this is a reasonably big walk - and it took longer than it could have, due to faffing around with photography.

Speaking of which - much of this route isn't actually all that exciting photography-wise. Most of the areas are nice enough, but are also just fairly standard run-of-the-mill inner city Melbourne urban scenery. And mostly too flat and leafy to offer impressing sweeping views of anything. This is part of the reason why I ended up taking some macro shots of flowers in the parks along the way - because the wider street scene really didn't offer anything particularly unique.

Anyway, here's a sampling of the walk - in chronological order as I looped around through Albert Park, Port Melbourne, Southbank, South Melbourne, and back home:

Picnickers on Port Melbourne Beach

Port Melbourne Foreshore

City View from Port Melbourne

Port Melbourne Beach

Walking towards the City

The tail follows the light rail line

Backstreets of Port Melbourne

Approaching Southbank from the west

West side of Crown

Clarendon Street, South Melbourne

Backstreets in South Melbourne

Shrine Of Remembrance At Dusk

I took a photo walk to the Shrine of Remembrance tonight. The Shrine is raised on a little hill, and has some decent views of the City and St Kilda Road. Those views were going to be the main focus of the walk, rather than the Shrine itself.

Nothing much new or exciting in this series. Just experimenting with some settings.

And so, here are the best shots of the walk: