9 thoughts on “Chicago: sunset and lights”

  1. That’s actually pretty damned good for hand-held at 1/4 s.

      1. Peeking at the EXIF data tells me it’s a Panasonic DMC-FS15 at ISO 800. Remarkably good for such a small camera, but you can tell it’s not a big DSLR by the mushy texture in the skies.

      3. Or judicious use of walls, lamp standards, etc. Lots of ways of achieving the same end.

        1. One of the best is to sit on the ground, knees up, elbows resting on knees. You can actually do astrophotography like that with a modern Canon supertelephoto. As in, Orion nebula astrophotography. (Not as good as you’ll get with a decent tripod, and nowhere near as if you used a tracking mount. But you’ll still get better pictures that way than likely anybody could with any technology maybe even as recent as a century ago.)

          b&

    2. Agreed. Zoomed all the way in the photo isn’t sharp, but there’s very little (almost no) motion blur. I’m pretty sure the softness is just the way that camera renders high ISO not-fast exposures. A tripod would only have been of marginal, perhaps negligible, help.

      b&

      1. The ZS-15 (assuming David Evans’ deduction from the EXIF data) looks to be a brother of my TZ-20. It will have OIS (Optical Image Stabilisation) which is, frankly, amazing. It’s the main reason a small light camera is even usable in dim light without a monster great heavy piece of glass on the front to guzzle photons and steady it.

        I’ve found I could take photos from the open observation car on the Coastal Pacific looking ahead past the loco on bends, zoomed out to 300mm (equivalent) and on New Zealand track it’s difficult to even keep the loco fully in frame at that zoom – and about half of them are sufficiently steady to be usable. Which is a remarkable credit to OIS.

        I do find it tends to get a bit grainy in dimmer light, as in Jerry’s photo, but – as he notes – the light makes up for it.

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