Testing Out My New Toy

I finally got myself a wide angle lens for my DSLR. Its a Canon 10-22mm EF-S USM, which makes it about 16-35mm on my 350D. I was actually amazed just how wide that is.

It was a pretty nice day so Rickard and I decided to go around town and see if we could get some nice shots. The Majestic Center was always one of my favorite buildings in Wellington so I wasn't going to miss this opportunity.





I liked this photo so much I'm getting my ATM card printed from it. Check it out here and make sure you vote :)

Then was a quick stop at Te Papa (by the way I've lived in Wellington for over 11 years and this was my first time in Te Papa). I took more shots in Te Papa but more on that later.

I have no clue what this is, but the colors were nice :)

The next location was Victoria University. Man what a hike to get there, cant believe I used to walk there every day for four years.

This is the view from the top, just to show how wide the lens is. Its two shots, one at 10mm and one at 22 stitched together.


Here we have the Hunter Building. Its the oldest building in the University if I'm not mistaken.


And here is The Quad. This is where all the cool people hang out between classes. Of course I studied CompSci, so I didn't hang out here :)

This is where I thought our trip would end. We were going to a party later that evening. Around 3am after consuming some alcohol we decided to leave and guess what - go around the city taking more photos :) On a side note - Absinthe and Red bull are never to be mixed in a drink.

So back to Majestic we went.


Night photography is great. 10 second+ exposure are pretty common and a tripod is a must.


Civic Square. Didn't really like this shot, I think I can do much better next time especially with some tricks I learned in Photoshop.


Part of Wellington Waterfront


A crane barge. Not photoshopped at all, thats exactly what the sky looked like. And thats only a few minutes after the previous shots where the sky looks clear. Only Wellington can do this.

This was pretty much it for the most part. I've also been learning about HDR imaging. This involves taking multiple exposures of the same scene and then combining the images to produce an image with high range of black levels and highlights. This is usually impossible with a single exposure as you are always likely to end up with either some washed out whites or too much black. Think of taking a shot of a room with a large window on a sunny day. Its pretty hard to take a shot that will have both the insides of the room as well as the view out of the window.
The way to solve this is by taking multiple shots each exposed for different levels of brightness. So you'd take one shot that is exposed correctly for the view out the window, one for the main part of the room and one the dark corners of the room.
Photoshop CS3 has a nifty feature to automate this process for you, but it is doable manually too.

For my first two tries I did exactly what every tutorial tells you to do. Find a bright window.

Doesn't look too natural but not bad for first try.


Stained glass windows are also a classic example of when HDR photography really helps.


I'm slowly getting better. This shot was hard, the brightly lit up statue makes very hard shadows.


I don't doubt that I can take great shots, its my photoshop skills that let me down most of the time. So Rickard photoshopped this one.

This is it for now. Next week I'm taking the whole week off work and going to South Island - another first for me. The plan is Kayaking, Paragliding and taking lots of photos.