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Swan in the City October 23, 2004 Yokohama, Japan
The weekend before last I was poking around Yokohama with The Man in the Photo looking for some good shooting opportunities. We spotted a row of colorful used Volkswagens for sale at a used car lot and headed over to get in a couple of quick photos.
That turned out to be nothing particularly interesting (click below to see for yourself), but as luck would have it, just then The Man noticed a lone swan swimming down one of those Japanese urban concrete "rivers". The swan heeded our call and swam over toward us, made a few loops, and then dismissively continued on its way.
I reached for my 50mm because it's the fastest lens I have (and a must-own at such a low price, unless you have the considerably more expensive 50/1.4). It was dark but I would need to do the shot handheld. I opened up to f/2.8 which is about as fast as you can get with this lens without sacrificing image quality (f/1.8 to 2.5 can be OK but I find it comes out soft more often than not - maybe it's just the narrow depth of field that wide open). At ISO 800 I was still only metering around 1/25 and so I took that up as high as I could and hoped for the best. After a little work in Noise Ninja, the full size image came out fairly well.
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