Night shots, snow!
Here are some shots around my parents’ house, both at night while it was snowing, and out the backyard the day after. The night shots were also tests of the low-light capabilities of the new camera, and turned out surprisingly good. In SCN mode, ISO was fixed at 100 and f-stop was wide open for the slow lens at around 3.8. The variable was the shutter speed (is this what’s called aperture priority?), and I somehow held the camera steady for the 2+ seconds it took to expose the CCD. Either that, or the Sony has a few tricks to compensate for jitter, which I belive it does. (As a side note, there’s a photography cult around a Soviet-era camera. With it’s low-quality-control lens and a similar as-much-exposure-time-as-you-need-in-low-light feature, the Lomograph cameras are prized for the weird effects you get, what with the blurring and color saturation. I guess I might get some of that with the SCN mode, but I think the Sony lens is better, and the CCD isn’t a rich as film. On the other hand, I’m not restricted to taking only crappy snapshots with the Sony.) Anyway, here they are:
One handy thing from all this info is that I can make a guess on shutter speed for my Nikon SLR. With, say, a 2 second exposure on the Sony, I’ll need a 1/8 second exposure on the Nikon for the equivalent image, given ISO 400 film and a couple of f-stops faster lens. This is one of the many things I have to figure out with photography: how to judge exposure times.