Glowing Chinese Christmas Tree

I was experimenting with settings on my camera. This was done with the ISO set at "Hi 0.7", which is two clicks (2/3 of a stop) past 3200. Hence the graininess. I also had the exposure compensation set at +3, the Active D-Lighting (for shadow detail) at Extra High, and the white balance set at tungsten with the A6 compensation, which I think makes it cooler. The exposure was 1/60th at 4.2. The "Picture Control" was set at Vivid, with the saturation cranked all the way up. This last setting may explain the unreal yellow glow behind the tree. But the tree was manufactured in China, so this may be luminous lead particles.

Emulating good old Agfa 1000

I was trying to emulate the old Agfa 1000 35mm film that was discontinued many years ago. This is set at 3200 ISO, with the white balance set to tungsten, but I think I modified the actual Kelvin temperature a bit to make it a little off of true tungsten. The lighting is available light, with just a small desk lamp behind and to the right of my camera. Oh ya, the little lamp behind me isn't actually an incandescent bulbs. It is a CFL. Anyway, notice the shadow detail, something that Agfa 1000 did beautifully. Actually, I think I had the Active D-lighting setting cranked all the way up too.

"Vivid" color setting with saturation cranked up

Experimenting with Nikon D300S on Vivid color with 'saturation' cranked all the way up. Then I did some cropping and contrast, etc. stuff in Apple Preview.app. Maybe too dark?

A picture of the Internet, really

Taken with my Palm Treo 750 cell phone under fluorescent light. This is a picture of a part of the Internet backbone (one section out of millions) at the point where it comes into our data center at work. The the conduit goes underground from here. You can see that we have multiple fiber optic cables. The thick black ones are for terrestrial transit and under the rubber there is kevlar, among other things. The thin orange wires are fiber optic glass coated in orange plastic. The glass is so thin that you can easily bend it. At the right is a fiber optic patch panel. The blue cables are spare runs of twisted copper ethernet for local connections. The speed of the uplinks to the rest of the Internet range from 10 Gigabits per second to 1.5 Megabits per second.

Pretty colored lights in the rain at dusk

ISO 3200, manual focus so that the raindrops on the windshield wouldn't come into focus. In traffic during a rainstorm, just before night.

First good picture with new Nikon D300S

ISO 3200, last night, driving past downtown LA during a rainstorm. There was also fog. The blue glow is from the Staples Center.