Back From Five Days of Camping
, f/3.5, ISO 500 — map & image data — nearby photos First Evening Half an hour after sunset. -- Kotobikihama, Kyoto, Japan -- Copyright 2008 Jeffrey Eric Francis Friedl, http://regex.info/blog/
Nikon D200 + Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 VR @ 18 mm — 10 sec, f/3.5, ISO 500 — map & image datanearby photos
First Evening
Half an hour after sunset.

I mentioned the other day that I was going to take Anthony camping for the first time, and I did. We just got back this afternoon.

I'll write more about the whole experience another day (one that I don't wake up at 5am), but the location was a campground on a cliff overlooking Kotobikihama beach (map) about three and a half hours away by car, in the far north-western corner of Kyoto prefecture.

I took the picture above on our first night, about half an hour after sunset. It was so dark that I could barely see anything (including how tilted the camera was), although the 10-second exposure compensates to allow the photo to show much more than could be seen. The light in the tent was from a single small candle (safely parked in a candle lantern).

Five-year-old Anthony enjoyed the moment, mostly because of his all-his-own kid-sized camping chair with drink holder. I'd bought it the previous day (along with the tent, my chair, and a bunch of other stuff for the trip).

Final Evening A few seconds before sunset -- Kotobikihama, Kyoto, Japan -- Copyright 2008 Jeffrey Eric Francis Friedl, http://regex.info/blog/
Nikon D200 + Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 VR @ 18 mm — 1/250 sec, f/5, ISO 250 — map & image datanearby photos
Final Evening
A few seconds before sunset

You can actually see a few pixels of sun on the horizon in the picture above, just left of center. It's as “the moment of sunset” as I could get, during a fairly drab sunset. Some of the other sunsets were more drab, and some much nicer. I have shots of them all, of course :-).

Continued here...


All 5 comments so far, oldest first...

Good morning!! I am a mother of four children,do you remember? This is my first time to type English! It is very hard for me! Any way,I was looking forward to look at your new photo. So,I am very glad to see Anto again. My English is so poor,and I am
worry about if you can understand or not,but I will try again.And also I will send you my taking photo of Anto. Not now. Because I have no time in the morning! So,see you later . Please say hello to Anto and Fumie san.

— comment by Chiharu Tamai on May 7th, 2008 at 7:09am JST (15 years, 10 months ago) comment permalink

Really liked both photos and the idea of taking your son camping. I hope to do that this summer w/ my boys, 7 and 5.

ps: also a fan of your LR plugins. thanks for doing those.

— comment by joshua on May 7th, 2008 at 10:14am JST (15 years, 10 months ago) comment permalink

I love the photo of the tent and anthony in his chair. You’ve put the tripod to good use. I thought of this photo from the Strobist:

http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3792/2480/1600/boat1.jpg

He made an ambient exposure at night just like you did, but then set the white balance to tungsten (very cold) and used a warm CTO gelled flash to light the subject. I couldn’t help but think it would have been fun to try with your photo!

I did play with the white balance in Lightroom, and to get reasonably realistic colors I had to set it to the maximum (50,000K). However, “realistic” in this sense means “what you’d see in direct sunlight”, but the light illuminating the scene (if you could call the encroaching blackness “illuminating”) was so far away from white that the eyes can’t compensate, so you really did see everything in a dark muddy blue, so the photo as it stands represents the colors reasonably well.

I did have my SB-800 flash with me, but totally forgot about it until I came home and found it while unpacking.

Another thing I wish I would have done was take the picture earlier, as I describe on my Kyoto Cherry-Blossom Lightup, 2008 post. —Jeffrey

— comment by Jon on May 7th, 2008 at 12:19pm JST (15 years, 10 months ago) comment permalink

Yikes! It looks pretty, but it sure looks like a walk to the bathroom in the middle of the night would be scary – one step to the left, and bye bye!

— comment by Marcina on May 7th, 2008 at 3:32pm JST (15 years, 10 months ago) comment permalink

Welcome back, Sir!

— comment by Britto on May 8th, 2008 at 12:36am JST (15 years, 10 months ago) comment permalink
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