Thursday, December 11, 2014

Brief Rides for the Girls

Nice weather today, with a forecast of snow for Sunday, so I took Brigitta out for a short lunch time ride to "stretch her legs".

We only covered perhaps 20 miles since I had meetings to attend to, but both she and I felt good to be in the wind under nice sunny skies and temperatures in the low 60s!

Of course, I forgot to pack my new Sony A5000 camera, and had only my iphone 4s with me.

Turns out, it shoots rather "noisy" shots when one uses maximum zoom.  So here's a highly cleaned up version.


That's Long Peak at the far right of the mountain range visible in the background.  As you can see, not much snow on the front range mountains so far.  I'm hoping the snow on Sunday will change that.

On the far left, on the horizon and before the mountains, you can see downtown Denver and the infamous brown cloud.

In the evening, as the sun set, a fairly bland sunset (for Colorado standards you see) was on display and I rode Scarlett out to take pictures with the new camera.  Shot in both Sunset and Enhance Intelligent Auto mode to see the difference.

The iA mode actually went into "shoot 3" HDR mode and combined them into one shot.  Colors were brilliant in both modes but in iA mode, you could make out more foreground details on Scarlett.  Cool Stuff.

I did tweak the picture below but right out of the camera, it would have been fine too as you can see below.

 Straight from the camera, just cropped and resized

Tweaked version using tools at ribbett.com

Previously: Ergo/Protection Mods for Scarlett

8 comments:

Trobairitz said...

Nice sunny weather you are having. Can't complain about that for December.

Pretty sunset too.

RichardM said...

No snow in December? What's the world coming to...

Nice hdr right out to the camera using its own built in software. Pretty handy and it looks much less hdr-ish than many others. (Not over-saturated)

redlegsrides said...

Trobairitz, well, I think I'd rather have more snow....we're below our levels for this time of year. The sunset was "ok".... :)

RichardM, yeah, nice HDR result.

Bluekat said...

Nice photos, and nice weather. Probably good if the snow shows up sometime though. New camera and you didn't bring it with you! :)

redlegsrides said...

Bluekat, getting senile in my dotage....have now rigged a case to my riding jacket to carry the new camera....

SonjaM said...

I myself rather take a camera with me as I am not too satisfied with the quality. But I am impressed with the quality. I have a generation older and the pics are always too "noisy" in twilight.

redlegsrides said...

SonjaM

I've found the iPhone camera pretty useless in low light situations but as you can see, the Sony A5000 did just fine for the sunset pics. Thanks for the comments.

redlegsrides said...

Some phone cameras, under good light, do pretty we'll but yes, better to have a dedicated camera.