Happy Christmas by abirkill

Happy Christmas

Happy Christmas to all my friends and followers on 365project! Thank you all for your kind comments, favs and incredible images, and my apologies for always seeming to be behind on comments!
Beautiful big christmas tree :) and hope you have/had a lovely christmas!
December 26th, 2012  
Beautiful tree!
December 26th, 2012  
Happy Christmas!
December 26th, 2012  
That looks huge!
Merry Christmas. Did you get snow?
December 26th, 2012  
What a gorgeous tree!
December 26th, 2012  
@humphreyhippo No snow in the city, but all the snow I could possibly want is only a 15-20 minute drive away for about 6 months of the year :)
December 26th, 2012  
Beautiful shot Alexis. It is such a shame we dont have beautiful Christmas lights all the time...but then again it probably wouldnt be so spesh if it was out there all the time.
December 26th, 2012  
Beautiful. I didn't see the f/stop, but the focus field seems very deep. Detail on the tree and on the backdrop windows seems good. Or post-shoot sharpening? Enquiring minds want to know. All the best in the New Year.
December 26th, 2012  
@frankhymus Thanks Frank. Due to the location it's quite difficult to get a non-distracting shot of the tree, there's a lot going on in the background whichever way you look. I've tried three or four different compositions but this is the best I've come up with.

This was taken with my 1970s Pentacon 135mm f/2.8 lens from the GDR. Because it's entirely manual it doesn't report back focal length or aperture information to the camera (I've ordered a chip to fake that information from eBay but it's not arrived yet). This was taken wide open at f/2.8. I took a photo of this lens (which is quite beautiful in and of itself) a few months ago when I got it:
http://365project.org/abirkill/365/2012-08-29

The tree is very large -- you can get an idea of the scale by the sign at the bottom, which is probably 4+ feet high. I was hoping to blur the background more, but due to the scale of the tree and relative distance of it and the buildings behind, the background is pretty sharp as well. On balance I'd probably have been better to stop the lens down to f/4 or f/5.6 -- the lens is sharp wide open, but gets even better stopped down a bit, and I wasn't getting the advantage of a narrow depth of field here (although I did get the advantage of a short shutter speed). However, it's still sharp enough to make out the individual pine needles when viewed at full size.

When shooting RAW, no in-camera sharpening is applied to the image (regardless of what the in-camera settings are), so sharpening is almost always desirable in post-processing. Both the Bayer filter that all cameras use to render images in colour, and the anti-aliasing filter that they have to reduce moiré will limit the absolute sharpness of an image, regardless of how good your lens is. Hence a small amount of carefully-applied sharpening will almost always benefit a RAW file, and this was no exception. However, the level of sharpening applied is not really discernible at web sizes.
December 26th, 2012  
Vancouver BC added to my list! Thank you so much!
December 26th, 2012  
This is stunning
December 27th, 2012  
Very nice! Hope you had a great Christmas. Wishing you a very happy new year too. Your photos are consistently amazing and a real pleasure to view -- I look forward to seeing many more in 2013! :)
December 31st, 2012  
Leave a Comment
Sign up for a free account or Sign in to post a comment.