…(and the reasons why you should have a good, calibrated screen for doing image editing and/or color corrections on photographs)

When I was driving home from work the other day I passed (again) this particular part of the route. There’s a little bench there that I’ve been meaning to take a picture of for years already, but never got around to.
Neither did I this time. But I noticed something else which I hadn’t noticed before, for some reason. Funny, because from the looks of it, they’d been there already for awhile, and they were almost ON the street. Instantly I thought “Light trails, long exposure”, and I decided to come back in the evening (with camera, duh).

And so I did. And I sat on my knees in the grass for almost 40 minutes, trying to get the right picture. Cars slowing down all the time, because they thought I was a cop photographing speeders 😀
It was a bit tricky, because of my positioning. I didn’t have much choice here, since right next to the mushrooms was a massive tree that I didn’t want in the picture, and a bit further on the road was a curve which would give a good swing to the light trails. But that meant that the cars coming towards me would shine there headlights pretty much straight into my lens.
And so it didn’t quite turn out the way I wanted. I had to make, or try to, separate exposures for tail lights and head lights and combine them in post-processing.
That worked out quite ok in the end.

But then there’s the thing with the screens. One image (the bottom one) I did on my desktop computer, with big, calibrated, graphic screen. The other one I did on my laptop, which, quite frankly, is a piece of crap graphically speaking. Sure, I tried calibrating it, but that only makes things worse. Glossy screen, reflecting the sh!t out of everything near and if you bat your eyelashes the color changes. So apologize you me for the bad quality of that first image. I will make a post in the coming days, when I get back to my good computer, where I put the two side by side: one done on the laptop and the other one done on the desktop, and see the difference.

Anyways… Fall wasn’t quite over yet.

D700, ISO200, 30 sec @ f/5.6, Nikkor 50mm, off-camera SB-800 (flashed manually several times on the mushrooms near the end of the 30 second exposure)

D700, ISO200, 20 sec @ f/8, Nikkor 50mm, off-camera SB-800 (flashed manually several times on the mushrooms at the beginning of the 20 second exposure)