First Ten Years < 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 >

I was a late adaptor of digital cameras. I bought my first dSLR, a Canon 30D, in 2006 on my trip to the five year reunion at VMI. From B&H Photo in NYC, where else!

I immediately embraced the opportunities digital offered. I've always been fond of low light photography, and enjoy the challenge. Going digital has made it much easier and faster to shoot scenes like this; but I still enjoy shooting medium format film.

This photo of NYC Central Park sunset is by far the most popular on my website, and I certainly don't mind that: it is one of my favorites as well, despite its obviousness. Sunsets in general are overdone, Central Park is one of the most photographed locations in the world, and technically the photo could be better. But it is pretty, and I took it.

I bracketed the photo to capture the huge dynamic range of the early evening scene. This means I took two shots, one at 10 seconds, one at 88 seconds - I meant to do 90 but was too eager. In my defence it's not an exact science. This way I could avoid overexposing the bright buildings in one shot, while the other would be light enough to retain details in the shadows. I blended the resulting shots in post-processing, and a result is a quite pleasing shot with a compressed dynamic range suitable for printing and web use.

These days people use HDR for similar effect, although it's often overdone. I think I succeeded keeping this early example realistic, and I still prefer digital blending over HDR for most situations.