This week’s Friday image is something a little different. My main Drobo storage unit (4TB) is full. I could buy more storage but given that all 4 drive bays are in use and the existing disk drives are all quite large, it would be a costly exercise. It’s much cheaper if I go and clean out some of the images I have cluttering it up that I just won’t use.
Whilst doing this I started coming across all sorts of shots. This one is from London, just below the Millennium Footbridge. I shot it with the camera on a Gorillapod wrapped around the railings of the footpath. Whilst I would have liked the footbridge not to have cut into the dome of St Pauls, I was more focussed on timing the shot. The bright patch of light you see just behind the central column of the bridge is a passing boat and I needed to judge the exposure just right.
Looking at this image now, what surprises me is how good a camera the Canon 400D was when the RAW files are processed with today’s software. If you haven’t processed any old RAW files in the latest software, you should give it a try.
Have a great weekend.
The Lightweight Photographer 
Neat shot, reminding me that I really do need to get back to London some day. I still have a lot of images from my old 40D (I think is the same as your 400), and you encourage me to try reprocessing some.
Speaking of night photography, have you considered a blog on Live Comp with the Olympus OM-D? I thought that was a great idea when I bought the camera, but have struggled with using it. How do you know how much time to give to each exposure? For that matter, Live Time has given me trouble also – it seems that the images always come out much lighter than they were when I stopped the exposure while looking through Live View. I have also had trouble using a ND filter with the OM-D since the darkness brought by the ND filter doesn’t come through the EV. It looks just as light as it would without the filter, but when the real image is viewed, it is greatly underexposed. Any similar results? Any corrections?
Hi Charles, the 40D was a more advanced model than the 400D. At the time the 400D pretty much the Canon entry level DSLR but it was still a very usable camera. The 40D should have better image quality. Good idea about the Live Time and Live Bulb settings. It is difficult to judge these and I have also had difficulties at times. I will look to post something on these over the next month.
What a fine, sharp and clean image. It makes me question whether successive cameras releases are such a great improvement on their predecessors as the manufacturers and the pixel peepers would have us believe. Or did the law of diminishing returns click in a few years and each new camera release is far less futuristic and full of improvements than the marketing departments claim.
It’s quite interesting when you go back and re-process images from a while back. I just tried some old 5D images from 2010 and they look great. Whilst cameras do move on and improve, so does the software. We tend to forget about that part of the equation.