Changing Lanes

Still persisting with the Sigma 24mm f1.8 as my main walk around lens, I managed to snap up this photo of the view from my balcony while it was raining heavily last night. It took me 3 tries to get it right as I wanted to get a proper exposure of the complete scene while capturing the rain in the air.

I chose a slow shutter speed of 1/40 to capture the rain with some motion blur, combined that with the lowest possible f number (large aperture) of f1.8 to allow maximum amount of light to enter the camera and increased the sensitivity of the sensor by bumping up the ISO to 1600 to achieve a proper exposure (though I think I've over exposed the shot a little).

The lens flare wasn’t added in post processing but done in camera as this lens tends to flare a lot which I took advantage of with some careful positioning of the light source. If you look carefully at the bright white lights in the background, you’ll see a bit of purple fringing. This is the only (for now) drawback of the lens when shooting wide open (small f number) which might get distracting in some cases. It can be removed in Photoshop but it doesn’t bother me here.

Camera Model : Canon 7D
Shooting Date/Time : 01/17/2011 18:37:30 PM
Tv(Shutter Speed) : 1/40
Av(Aperture Value) : f1.8
Metering Mode : Center weighted average
ISO Speed : 1600
Lens : Sigma 24mm f1.8 macro
Focal Length : 24mm

Last night me and SJ had decided to wake up early and try to shoot the sunrise, the Sheikh zayed road skyline and some other random shots from Ras Al Khor. So woke up today at 4:30am, got out of the house by 5:10am and headed out to Ras Al khor hoping to find a spot to shoot from. We found none which sucked though driving with the windows down in the rain was fun...

In the process we ended up on Al Khail road and I managed to snap this 7 shot panorama.As we tried to make our way back to Ras Al khor, we ended up on the road that went the Nad Al Sheeba instead and I decided to show SJ the area. Parked and we randomly walked around. We ended up spotting a rainbow like phenomena in the sky.We were literally in the middle of nowhere in the sense that there wasn’t anyone to bother us, it was just us enjoying the silence and being shutter happy.

I kind of liked the way this tree looked and how it went with the whole scene. This is a 3 shot HDR.After that we headed towards a section I hadn't explored before to look for camels as SJ hadn't seen one for ages. Luckily we ended up finding a camel farm with a female camel and its calf outside the fence taking a walk. We bothered them for a while before they decided to walk back to the farm. The mother seemed a little annoyed by us. Got some really cute shots of the calf. Here's a shot of both of them.Then we headed off to Karama to have some cheese manakeesh from Al Reef. And in the end we made our way to Nad al Hamar to pick SJ's car from the garage and then home sweet home.

A nice morning out...managed to take lots of nice pictures and had lots of fun.

crappy video but the best I could do....I need to work on my video skills...hmm...

Took these last night after spending a good 3 hours camping out in my balcony. Got a slight cold due to it now...

Took this from Garhoud bridge after a small hail storm that hit Deira on the 1st of January 2010....Camera Model : Canon EOS 7D