These are from way back around Halloween, I went to crew the Halloween Bop in Venue 1 & thought I’d try & get some nice light trails from the moving lights.

These were all shot with the kit lens, hand-held with ~2 second exposures so I’m quite surprised any of them came out at all.

Definitely going to take a tripod one day & attempt this properly, maybe leave the body on interval shooting or something.

The venue doesn’t always have the scary face hanging down the back, it was just a Halloween thing.

All of these lights are controlled from the Pearl 2000 you saw in yesterday’s post.

I wanted to try & catch some of the beams in the air with the haze, but because the kit lens is quite slow (3.5-5.6) I had to crank the sensitivity up to 3200. Haven’t tried putting them through Noise Ninja yet, need to find a way to integrate it into Lightroom because opening the image in Photoshop just to use Noise Ninja is a bit long-winded.

U2 Rattle and Hum anybody?

A quick shot of the Pearl 2000 lighting desk I use in the Union during Bops, etc.

I never did a post when I got my new dSLR, but today I took delivery of a new lens so I figured it was worth showing you what I shoot with. This here is my Pentax K20D with the Pentax D-BG2 & my brand new Sigma 28mm F1.8 EX DG Aspherical Macro (quite a mouthful I know). I wanted a ’standard’ fast prime like the 50mm f1.7 is on 35mm bodies, but on the K20d with its APS-C sensor the crop/zoom turns it into a 75mm equivalent, which is too long for a standard walkaround lens. The 28mm works out as 43mm, which is just about perfect :)

Don’t really have any time to test it out though, because it’s slap bang in the middle of revision/exam season here. But after exams I’ve got a full 20(!) days before semester 2 teaching starts, so hopefully there will be lots of time to play. From what little I’ve used it, it seems to focus perfectly without the reported front/back focus issues that have supposedly plagued the newer HSM Sigmas (this older model uses the screw focus) & the minimum focussing distance of 20cm is rubbish – the thing focusses so close you can almost have the hood touching the subject!