Finally Upgraded My Body

After roughly four years of service from my Nikon D80, I’ve finally upgraded to a new D7200. The specifications completely blow my previous body out of the water. I’ve mostly been messing around with it so far.

The D7200 is phenomenal in low light. I took it downtown and shot entirely without a flash. Where the D80’s ISO would become too grainy to be of any real use after about 800, but the newer model still looks solid well beyond 6400.

And that’s just scratching the surface of what this thing can do. Stay tuned for more. If you have anything you would want to see coming up, let me know in the comments below.

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The New Downtown

 

There is a ton of construction going on in downtown Kent right now. It’s been going on for the last few years as part of a push for rejuvenation, but has exploded in the last few months. This clock tower and parking garage all went up the last few weeks. I even shot the photo from a freshly redone addition to the campus’ main walkway.

I liked the idea of the original shot (on the left) but I planned making the image an HDR from the get go. The more I looked at it, the less I was thrilled with the shot itself, so I wound up making it a very quick and dirty edit. Basically, I took the RAW image and opened it twice in Photoshop, one exposed for the sky and the other for the buildings. I still wasn’t happy with the building exposure, so I created an inverted Level layer and painted it to fine-tune the exposure. After that, I did one final level layer over the whole thing to get it right where it needed to be. I thought of posting it there, but the lampposts were bothering me, so I took those out. This shot was probably WAY more trouble than it’s worth, but It’s good practice, I guess.