Week 51 (December 17th - December 23rd) | Pictures 53 & 54

I got out of the house this past weekend (and spent my first night away from my toddler), to do some shooting with my friends Amy and Melanie. We went to Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden in Richmond to see their Gardenfest of Lights. The display itself was nice. Although I have to say if we hadn't been taking pictures, it wouldn't have been nearly as fun. Lights, trees, COLD.

We were those annoying people with tripods, but it was a ton of fun being out with women who share the same hobby. (If my husband had been with me, he would have been bored 15 minutes into our 3 hour stay.)

I got a lot of awesome pictures with my tripod, like this one:



Camera: Nikon D700
Lens: 28-75mm f/2.8 (@28mm)
Aperture: f/18
Shutter Speed: 15 seconds
ISO: 400
Flash: Flash: none
Exposure: manual

But my favorite one happened to be one that I shot handheld, before we broke out the tripods:



Camera: Nikon D700
Lens: 28-75mm f/2.8 (@28mm)
Aperture: f/2.8
Shutter Speed: 1/60
ISO: 3200
Flash: Flash: none
Exposure: manual

I really wish that had been a more thought out shot, or I had gone back to revisit it with the tripod, because I've been wanting to play with HDR all year, and thought that would make an excellent HDR image. I went ahead and used that one image to generate two files of differing exposure to do an HDR composite that was not planned ahead, and despite the noise, I think it's pretty cool. Not my normal style at all, but cool.