Christmas in Davidson
December 3, 2022
Using the Black Friday pricing and another discout, I ordered a Fujifilm medium format camera and a 35–70mm zoom (view equivalent of 28–55mm in a full frame camera). I hope eventually to get the 20–35 wide angle zoom and use the camera largely for landscapes. For medium to telephoto range, I plan to continue to use my Canon DSLR. The new camera has 102 MP resolution, which I clearly don't need. The pictures you see here are less than 2% the size of the original shots. Still, I think if you zoom in on them, you will see a lot of detail.
Christmas in Davidson is an annual town festival held the first weekend in December. The camera was delivered on Saturday of that weekend, and the rain had gone away, so I rode the trolley that came by my neighborhood and took pictures that would deal with low-light and high-contrast challenges for exposure. Since I'm learning to use the camera, I chose to let it make automatic choices for exposure and focus. I can make more artsy decisions later after I've learned the controls. These few pictures will give you some sense of the festival and a hint at the capabilities of the camera.
A competition between small decorated trees is a way to raise funds for local charities.
I also shot video of jugglers and edited a few clips together. They were shot handheld, but the camera's internal stabilization kept the video from being jerky. This video is not optimized for streaming, so if playback stops, wait a few moments for the rest of the video to come in. Click here to watch.
Before I headed to the festival, I tried a few shots of decorations near my house. The first shot below is a panorama stitched from three different pictures. The resulting file could print out a mural three feet tall and six and a half feet wide. So as posted here, it is about 1/150 of the area of the original.
Holiday Music Impressionist card Moravian Star Christmas Puzzle Shepherds Aunt Norma’s Card