Nothing Special: SNOW 2 – Second major storm …

Friday, December 28, 2012

SNOW 2 – Second major storm …

I was at Mary’s place when the second major storm rolled in late on boxing day. These shots are taken early the next morning.

panasonic gx1 & sigma 19mm 2.8 160iso f/2.8 1/160

This is an interesting shot. I left it in manual and shot it at flash settings. Needless to say, it was really dark. So I adjusted it and shot again. But interestingly, I prefer the rendering of this image, the one that I dragged up out of the shadows, as I showed in my article on latitude.

This is just a taste of what was to come …

panasonic gx1 & sigma 19mm 2.8 1600iso f/2.8 1/25

After lunch, things had stabilized a bit yesterday. But it did snow off and on during the day.

panasonic gx1 & sigma 19mm 2.8 160iso f/2.8 1/1600

The view from her back porch is amazing … a beautiful little park …

panasonic gx1 & sigma 19mm 2.8 160iso f/2.8 1/640

After hearing reports from Jon that the plow had come, I boogied on home to deal with the aftermath of storm 2. And, as usual, the last house on the street gets all the plow-droppings …

panasonic gx1 & sigma 19mm 2.8 1600iso f/2.8 1/6

Nick apparently made the executive decision to risk getting hung up on the snow bank when he arrived home. Of course, this snow turned out to be less intimidating than that last batch from storm 1, which had been mixed with rain and was thus insanely heavy. This was simply lots of normal snow. Still, my car cannot make it, and Nick’s car could not make it into the other space either.

panasonic gx1 & sigma 19mm 2.8 1600iso f/2.8 1/5 (!)

Note the shutter speed of 1/5s … that’s rather low for an unstabilized lens and camera. Yet the GX1 lends itself to getting such shots, adequately sharp for the web anyway.

panasonic gx1 & sigma 19mm 2.8 3200iso f/2.8 1/13

Of course, at this point I realized how hard it was to get sharp images, so I bumped ISO to 3200 Smile

That’s a lot of snow …

panasonic gx1 & sigma 19mm 2.8 3200iso f/2.8 1/13

And again … things look so much tidier once I have spent the time to clean it up … this shot is a couple of hours later.

panasonic gx1 & sigma 19mm 2.8 3200iso f/2.8 1/20

One thing about snow is that it makes everything look pretty … like a scene from a movie … here, a young couple make their way down the street …

panasonic gx1 & sigma 19mm 2.8 3200iso f/2.8 1/15

Note … these shots are also possible with the typical kit lens. The shutter is slower, but Panasonic kit lenses are stabilized. Again, remember that stabilization is statistical, so shoot a burst of images to make sure that one is adequately sharp.