Thanksgiving Evening

After having Thanksgiving dinner at this place (sorry, no pictures) we drove home, collected cool jackets, walking shoes, and camera and drove down to the Atlanta Botanical Garden to see their Garden Lights Show.

Taking these pictures last night really exercised the camera and I think the iso was getting up to 3200 for most of the evening. I've processed shots through Lightroom with a certain amount of exposure and noise adjustments.

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I like this photo a lot, and the fact that it was not a flash shot shows that the camera performs well under natural light conditions. For other photos in the set (check out flickr). Except another photo in front of the tree my other shots of Jane and Brad (her son) are all using flash.

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And here's one of those shots with flash. I've taken to using bounce flash with the builtin flash on the Sony NEX-6 by pressing back the spring loaded flash that pops up so that it's light doesn't shine directly at the target. This technique seems to work quite well, but I can see it would be a pain to keep doing. Perhaps I can jam a piece of cardboard into the mechanism to keep the flash pointing up at an angle?

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Here's one more shot showing off the wide angle end of the 16-50 lens kit on this camera. Actually this is a RAW photo and apparently in RAW you get an uncorrected 14mm lens that shows vignetting under normal conditions. In this case I don't care since the corners of the image are already dark. Incidentally the camera corrects the vignetting when shooting in jpeg, and there's a just released Lightroom lens profile correction that adjusts vignetting in RAW mode.

Library Slopes

Just 3 shots today from the back of the library leading down to Mason Mills Recreation Center. I think they show off the camera and in particular I was able to shoot at widest angle with the lens kit, and correct for vignetting using this tool.

At Band Practice

I'm the unofficial photographer for the Seed & Feed Marching Abominable band. Here are some photos from last night's band practice. I've been testing my Sony NEX-6 at practice just to make sure that it's going to be capable of capturing band events where frequently musicians are moving around and the light's not always good. Most of these photos are at ISO 3200, and after some Lightroom work, I think they are quite acceptable.

Good focus on this one, but of course they are not moving around to much, except for the hands!


Betsy was jumping around somewhat, but she wasn't moving towards or away from the camera. I guess capturing people moving forward or backward (from camera) is the real test.


Another group shot of band members. Once again, there's not a lot of movement here, so it's a test of low light performance rather than ability to quickly focus.

Living Room

I stayed around the house today which is why I ended up just taking pictures from our living room. These photos were a test of focusing - particularly that last one. I used focus peaking to capture focus on the middle of the ornament. The automatic focus of the camera was attempting to focus on the dark object to the left of the ornament. I also tested flash on the third photo. This actually shows off the excellent quality of the sensor, where I show the photo without flash along with the shot with flash. All of the 4 photos were processed in Lightroom 4.2

Sunday in Lullwater Park

This place always seems to be waiting there when I want to take pictures with a new camera. And of course it's autumn in Atlanta so it was a good time for me to head out late this afternoon to capture some photos. This afternoon I was shooting jpeg rather than RAW. I'm not sure exactly which format I'm going to settle on. We'll see.

And now I'm heading down the path just between the railway line and Lullwater Park, close to where the Emory Shuttle Bus (on the new road for said bus) takes the bridge over the railway line.

More color in the surroundings. Fall really has come to Atlanta, and the wind that we've been having over the last few days still hasn't managed to remove all of that color from the branches.

This photo (above) is looking over the railway track towards the track and field at the back of Druid Hills High School.

Early Walk

This is early in the sense of one of the first outings with this new camera.
This photo is rather interesting and my wife also likes it.
I walked around the Medlock Park area of N Decatur and in particular along the boardwalk.



The camera's doing a good job of capturing the colors of an Atlanta Fall season, although I've been helping it along with Lightroom. These photos were shot in RAW format.

Camera Arrives

A few days ago I ordered a Sony NEX-6 camera from B&H Photo after reading about the camera and similar models on DPReview. It arrived earlier this week and needless to say I was very excited to have that UPS man deliver the actually quite light box to the doorstep. I'd been just a little nervous actually because the weather last Monday was not fine and there were scattered showers in the area. I had envisioned finding a wet and soggy box deposited outside and in the rain, but of course that didn't happen.
I didn't do an unboxing video or anything. I'm not that organized, but I did happen to have downloaded the Sony documentation for this camera from this site. There's what they call a handbook and a users manual. I like having access to the instructions in PDF form, especially since the manual that did come with the camera (the User Guide) has a somewhat small font, and is, of course, not searchable like a PDF file. At least Sony does provide a paper copy of that file or as they call it the Instruction Manual. The handbook (which is a more complete description of the functionality of the camera) is provided on an included disk which is good.