JayKnight Life: Running, Reviews, Photos

   Nikon's First SLR the F (1959)        So, Nikon has jumped into the mirrorless Camera market...great...  It kind of makes you think: Why do we need mirrors in cameras?      According to my always resourceful and sometimes accurate wikipedia sources, SLR's or Single Lens Reflex cameras have been around 1884. They were called single reflex because of the action in the camera that moved the mirror out of the way to expose the film or sensor. 35mm SLR's weren't commercially available until Leica's PLOOT camera in 1935.     In 1952 japan jumped into the SLR game.. with  ( Pentax ) releasing the  Asahiflex . Asahiflex 1952     Nikon , Canon and Yashica introduced their first SLRs in 1959.    SLR's were needed for serious photographers who really wanted to see exactly what would be captured on the film. Before SLR's your viewfinder was just a hole through the camera above the lens -- Close, but ...

On the graveyard shift I get a lot of chances to check out the moon at night. There have been some pretty spectacular nights with large harvest moons, moons with a tinge of orange and some eclipses. But it's ironic that I am always working while the moon is out and i never get the chance to stop for a ten minutes and take some good pictures. So this past weekend I took my opportunity.. while I wasn't working. I did a little experimenting with exposures and ISO and even the aperture. I posted some of the picture stats next to each clip so you can see what worked and what didn't. Model Canon PowerShot SX20 IS ISO 1600 Exposure 1/2 sec Aperture 5.0 Focal Length 54mm     For one thing, the 1600 ISO on this camera was way too high. There was a lot of "noise" as they call it. to me it just looked out of focus. So, I brought the ISO down to 400 where I felt a little more comfortable. In those pictures you can really see some of the detail of the craters in the moon. For ...

Hapy 4th of July weekend. It's a holiday weekend.. so a lot of opportunity to take pictures. But, I'm having more fun with fake HDR. This time I used the Bracketing feature on my Camera. Bracketing is a setting that will tell the camera to take three consecutive pictures of a scene. You can either do it at different focal lengths or exposures. Since I'm doing HDR, I used the exposure bracket.. hoping to get some more pop out of my HDR photos. It worked. Take a look at the main picture above and the two below. Both of the original pictures look kind of dark. You can tell that the one on the right is brighter by the color of the sky. That brightness was just enough to lighten up the treeline. So, after a little lightening of the shadows in photoshop, boosting the color and some other small tweaks I combined the two photos.      Here's a huge tip: Always use a tripod especially if you know you are going to combine more than one photo in post. This is actually three photos ...