My eldest is off to visit friends in the UK for a short while. He found a quite reasonably priced flight on Air Transat – a beautiful A330 by the way – for under $600 return to Gatwick. Not bad. He booked a train to catch it in Toronto and the cost still came out far cheaper than Air Canada. Of course, he flew on Friday the 13th, but everything went well anyway.
The night before, I poked the F550 out the window to see how the weather would be for our run to the train station in the morning. Not bad …
F550EXR 3200iso f/4.9 1/4s 0EV M size RAW
Earlier in the day, he spent some time on various web sites, printing off all the e-tickets etc. I shot a few images with the Afghan Girl lens at high ISO to see how it performed. It reminded me as to why I like the big sensors so much …
D7000 105mm f/2.5 Ai 5000iso f/2.5 1/160s 0EV RAW
I was up early and ready to head to the office when Nick suddenly woke up and asked me for the time. Apparently, he had forgotten to set an alarm but woke up literally 2 minutes before I was going to wake him. How interesting the mind and body are when something important is coming up.
We got outside and I spent 5 minutes shaving ice off the windows as we were in the middle of yet another freezing rain storm with lots of snow predicted for the rest of the day. I drove him to the station and dropped him there.
F550EXR 100iso f/3.9 1/110s
You can see at the exit to the platform shown behind him on the right that the conditions are blustery. We already knew that this did not extend to the Toronto area, so there was no issue with the flight or the shuttle between the downtown train station and Pearson Airport.
Also note how 3-dimensional this image looks … the F550 has the same wonderful tonality as the X10 does. It cannot handle as high ISO as cleanly, but base ISO is surprisingly close. It does not have the heavy halos that the X10 seems to have on edges ….
Anyway, I took off for work … driving on the slick roads. Traction control saves the day again … it is so very effective.
F550EXR 100iso f/3.5 1/90s
And when I came out of the office after 5pm, I was faced with a lot of snow on top of the rain. Yuck …
F550EXR 1250iso f/5.3 1/60s
Cleaning 3 or 4 inches of snow off the car … yuck …
F550EXR 320iso f/3.5 1/30s
The woman beside me had already been at it for a while … and this is the first time in my life that I have left my wipers up like this. Everyone else was doing it, so I thought I would follow suit, and the result was that they worked perfectly right away instead of me waiting the usual half hour before they would function properly.
Lots of blowing snow on the way home. It did not let up all night …
F550EXR 3200iso f/4.5 1/25s
And these are not X10-style ORBs … everything here is slightly out of focus, but it is also the best representation of what it was like to drive that night …
A short while after getting home, I tried capturing the progress of the snow …
F550EXR 800ISO f/4.2 8/10s (hand held)
F550EXR 800iso f/3.5 8/10s
The next morning, I woke up to spectacular sunshine and lots of fluffy snow on the ground. Lovely stuff.
D7000 18-200VR 100iso f/8 1/320s
Since we’ve transitioned to a new day, I’m going to stop here and create a new post for that. Because I shot the yard with three cameras while testing their dynamic range in bright conditions …
