Night Lights

Well, I went from ignoring my camera for weeks, to spending three full hours last night trying to photograph one of the most amazing spectacles of Mother Nature I've ever seen. An unbelievably intense thunderstorm lolly-gagged its way over the city in which I live, giving me ample opportunity to test out most of my camera's manual functions. I must have taken two hundred pictures! Of course I ended up keeping only about ten of them... The unfortunate part was that it rained and hailed so hard that I could not be outside; I had to do the best I could through a window. However, it was still a great learning experience.

I shot with a K20D, in JPEG format, which is unusual for me. I always shoot in RAW, but, I figured I was experimenting all around with shutter speeds, apertures, ISO's and focus, and I just didn't feel in the mood for alot of post-processing. I was disappointed with some of the results, as I noticed a couple of 'hot pixels' on a few of the photos. This apparently is a known problem with the K20D when using the 2-second timer. A recent firmware upgrade offered by Pentax was supposed to correct the problem, and obviously it was not successful.

At any rate, it was good to snap the shutter again! I'll be starting a set of two weeks off of work tomorrow night, and I look forward to spending as much of the time I can taking pictures. Did I mention in a previous post that we're heading to Nitinat Lake, BC, for their Windfest 2008? Check out my travel blog (http://www.kidinacandyshop.blogspot.com/) for more information and to read about the trip.

Cheers.