I haven’t been taking photos as often as I used to. I suppose having a full-time job and a 100-mile-a-day commute can do that. So I wanted to share a few photos, as well as a commentary on the ExpoDisc.

When I first got it, I knew that photographing in Margarita’s would be the ultimate test. They have red lightbulbs. The atmosphere’s great, but the pictures end up coming out like this:

That’s with the camera set up to automatically adjust for the right type of light. Obviously, this is a major headache if you’re trying to take photos. And it’s really not that easy to fix up in Photoshop because the colors come out so far off that you can’t salvage much.

It’s underexposed and boring, but here they are after I calibrated my camera with the ExpoDisc to the light hitting the fake flowers. It’s not quite perfect in my mind: it’s got a tiny bit of a green cast. But something like that is easy to fix in Photoshop. (The problem was that there were “green” lights in the parking lot coming in through the window, red light bulbs indoors, and orange light coming in another window from across the street. It’s pretty much impossible to have things look great in that case.)

This is an entirely unrelated photo, but I was on a long car ride and decided to practice panning. (Car companies almost always do this for their photography.) I shot at ISO100 and f/8, so that not much light was coming in. This meant that a fairly slow 1/30-second exposure was needed. At 60 miles an hour, the trees in the background became blurred, since 1/30-second was entirely too slow to “freeze” them. But since we were roughly matching the speed of the car, it remained in place on the frame, causing the car to “jump out” as the only object that’s not blurred. Besides looking cool, it gives a sense of motion. The sun was setting, and a little Velvia Vision magic helped bolster the already-nice light. It might not win any awards, but it’s still a shot I’m happy with.