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

Remove field code from Word document

e.g. before submitting a MS, or hand manipulating some formatting because Word does things (like cross-references) so half-assed [from here ] Select all the text (CTRL-A) Press Ctrl+Shift+F9 Editing to remove anonymous comments that only contain thanks. I really appreciate the thanks, but it makes it harder to find comments that carry pertinent information. I'm also going to try and paste informative comments in the body of the post to make them easier to find.

h5py and multiprocessing

The HDF5 format has been working awesome for me, but I ran into danger when I started to mix it with multiprocessing. It was the worst kind of danger: the intermittent error. Here are the dangers/issues in order of escalation (TL;DR is use a generator to feed data from your file into the child processes as they spawn. It's the easiest way. Read on for harder ways.) An h5py file handle can't be pickled and therefore can't be passed as an argument using pool.map() If you set the handle as a global and access it from the child processes you run the risk of racing which leads to corrupted reads. My personal runin was that my code sometimes ran fine but sometimes would complain that there are NaNs or Infinity in the data. This wasted some time tracking down. Other people have had this kind of problem [ 1 ]. Same problem if you pass the filename and have the different processes open individual instances of the file separately. The hard way to solve this problem is to sw...

Reading spreadsheet data in Python: The lack of a good ODS reader

I try and keep long term data in as simple a format as possible, which means text where ever possible. In earlier times I would enter data in excel spreadsheets and then read them from my Python programs using the xlrd package which is excellent. This works well, but in the back of my mind is the thought that someday Microsoft might do something funny with their business model making office software more janky to use and all my fears about keeping data in proprietary formats would come true. Oh, look, that day is today . So, I'm completely abandoning the MS Office suite and going back to basic text files. However, there is a tension between keeping tabulated data in a simple form, such as csv, and entering it in a convenient manner. Excel, of course, nags you everytime you edit a csv file and save it. Libreoffice is excellent: it handles loading and saving in a very streamlined fashion. However, every time you open up the csv file you need to tell Calc what widths you want...