Skip to main content

An amateur's review of the D40: Long exposure time examples

I am pretty pleased with high exposure times on the D40. The last time I really played with long exposure was with my film camera.

What I am NOT pleased with is MY inability to focus properly - aargh! But in my defense there isn't a focusing screen (like split prism, or ground glass). I wonder if I can get one of those for the D40?

Click on the examples to get a 1200px downsampled versions.



If you ignore my amateur focus you will note the amazing lack of noise even on 30s long exposures. I like this sensor.

In the last two pictures below I let the D40 decide the exposure and used aperture priority. The D40, like the F65, knows exposure. (For normal photos, on the F65, I ended up deciding to let the camera decide it. Whenever I took over I did something wrong. Only for special shots - like the really long exposures - did I put everything on manual. I think the same is going to be true of the D40.)

Its amusing though, these last two shots have the same exposure, but they are lit differently. It could be that the street lamps vary in brightness over time.

In short: great sensor!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A note on Python's __exit__() and errors

Python's context managers are a very neat way of handling code that needs a teardown once you are done. Python objects have do have a destructor method ( __del__ ) called right before the last instance of the object is about to be destroyed. You can do a teardown there. However there is a lot of fine print to the __del__ method. A cleaner way of doing tear-downs is through Python's context manager , manifested as the with keyword. class CrushMe: def __init__(self): self.f = open('test.txt', 'w') def foo(self, a, b): self.f.write(str(a - b)) def __enter__(self): return self def __exit__(self, exc_type, exc_val, exc_tb): self.f.close() return True with CrushMe() as c: c.foo(2, 3) One thing that is important, and that got me just now, is error handling. I made the mistake of ignoring all those 'junk' arguments ( exc_type, exc_val, exc_tb ). I just skimmed the docs and what popped out is that you need to return True or

Using adminer on Mac OS X

adminer is a nice php based sqlite manager. I prefer the firefox plugin "sqlite manager" but it currently has a strange issue with FF5 that basically makes it unworkable, so I was looking for an alternative to tide me over. I really don't want apache running all the time on my computer and don't want people browsing to my computer, so what I needed to do was: Download the adminer php script into /Library/WebServer/Documents/ Change /etc/apache2/httpd.conf to allow running of php scripts (uncomment the line that begins: LoadModule php5_module Start the apache server: sudo apachectl -k start Operate the script by going to localhost Stop the server: sudo apachectl -k stop