In search of fall colours?

My friend Bill and I decided to hike up the west side of Gold Creek in Golden Ears Park this last weekend. The east side has large areas of deciduous tress and bushes that were likely looking quite colourful. Sadly all we managed to find west of Gold Creek was moss...

Gallery: Olympus M.Zuiko 45mm f/1.8 Tests

This gallery contains my first quick tests of the new Olympus M.Zuiko Digital 45mm f/1.8 lens. I wandered around for a few minutes while on my lunch break and snapped these quick test photos...

Gallery: Olympus M.Zuiko 45mm f/1.8 Tests

Gallery: Fall colours at UBC...

On a beautiful (but cool) fall day today, I wandered around UBC for a few hours, taking in the colours of the changing leaves.

Gallery: UBC Fall Colours

Gallery: Maissanne Bellydance

A photo shoot I did for my friend Maissanne, a teacher by day and a bellydancer by night. Click on the above image for a gallery with 40 of my favourite photos I chose after quickly going through all the images from the shoot. She will be choosing photos from this session for a future update to her website.

An evening with the Nikon P7100

I finally had some time to shoot with the CoolPix P7100, other than time-lapse, and took it down to Granville Island in the evening to test its high ISO, its VR and is low-light focus. For a P&S, its high ISO shooting was quite impressive and I am happy to report that virtually all the issues I had with the original P7000 have been addressed. Not that the original P7000 had any issues in the image quality department, but it had a terrible AF mechanism that had a hard time locking on in low light or even in good light sometimes, if the contrast was low.

The P7100 nailed the focus time and time again. Although it slowed down a bit in really low light, it pretty much always seemed to lock focus... at least as well as any other high end P&S I've used.

Almost all of the UI sluggishness and quirkiness is gone and the shot-to-shot time for RAW shooting seems improved too. The new front mounted control wheel works nicely as well. Anyway, this is now a very worthy contender for the top high-end-raw-shooting-P&S title!

Image gallery: Nikon Coolpix P7100 at Granville Island

Time-lapse: Prince George to Maple Ridge

A time lapse movie shot from inside a rental minivan, coming back from a PPOC-BC trade show in Prince George. A Nikon P7100 was mounted to a passenger side hand-grip with a Gorillapod. The camera was set to time-lapse mode, taking one shot every 30 seconds and the resulting frames are played back at 10 fps in this video. Unfortunately the battery died before we got all the way back. However, still very impressive battery life! The camera was running for over 9 hours straight and took about 1100 frames.

Music is an excerpt from the song "Speedbumps" by Sounds from the Ground. (iTunes Link)