Darkness

Here we are, three days before the winter solstice, and the miserable fall just continues. Outside it is 4°C, raining and dark. Not what you would expect at this time of the year. While we might not always have winter by now, we should at least have some signs of it. Instead the long, grey and rainy fall just continues.

Last weekend I went on a short overnighter to take advantage of the forecasted übermiserable weather, but the weather wasn't that bad after all. I took the opportunity to check the Olympus E-P2 video performance in the darkness. With a maximum ISO in video mode of 1600 ISO it has its limitations, since the longest shutter speed possible is 1/30s when doing videos. In practice the kit lens or any other of my zoom lenses would be just on the limit, but the Panasonic 20/1.7 lenses has an advantage of 2-3 stops, so it was quite usable even without going to the highest possible ISO. I also used an additional light as seen in the following short video:


The extra light was simply a bike light (nominally some 1200 lumen with maybe 800 real lumen) fastened to the tripod.


The moon even showed itself that night, giving a fairly interesting light.


The actual video is still not ready, since I have yet to find music for it. Finding suitable royalty free music is time consuming, as I don't feel like paying much for it. Jamendo does have something as well as Kevin MacLeod, but it is still difficult to find music of the right lenght and mood. This is one of the things preventing me from getting one of the new cool GoPro Hero2 HD cameras. A GoPro would enable some interesting footage, though.