Gosh, it's November already!

I have been posting up some pictures of Newcastle and Gateshead at night. This series is partly thanks to chihiro-bengah [link] for telling me how impressive the Quayside is at night and to beachgirlNikita [link] for encouraging me to make the most of what is possible. October sees the days shorten rapidly here, Newcastle is 55 degrees north, but less day = more night-time.

This shoot was also a chance to meditate on the cameras needed to take these photos and the monitors needed to view them.

Compact cameras have more and more pixels, which users rarely benefit from, but this is at the cost of poor low-light performance. Low-light pictures have a lot of noise and colour distortion. Also, many compact cameras are sold as having a "5 times zoom" or whatever, without saying at what angle that zoom starts. But a 5 times zoom starting at the equivalent of a 35mm lens on a film camera is nothing like as useful as a 5 times zoom starting at 28mm. For shots like these you need all the wide angle you can get. Consumers should demand real wide angles! After all, if you want more telephoto you can always enlarge the centre of the picture and finally use some of those megapixels.

Similarly, if you are taking a picture of reflections in water, you need a reasonable amount of height. Most of the Newcastle pictures have an aspect ratio of 4:3. Yet it is becoming almost impossible to buy a monitor that is anything but 16:9. That's fine if you watch blu-ray movies all the time, but for most other kinds of work it is an awkward shape. Most the things we see are not 16:9 in shape (e.g. the human face, people sat down or stood up, buildings, kittens, written documents ...). Looking at the pictures on dArt, over 25% are in portrait rather than landscape aspect, and 16:9 monitors mean these have to be reduced down to a tiny size to be viewed.

I could not have taken the night pictures without a tripod (though some other tourists were bravely trying to take the Tyne Bridge using flash). Luckily a long time ago someone I worked with gave me a tripod as it had a component missing and he'd not been able to find a spare part. Well recently I found the very thing in a shop's box of junk and managed to fix it. So thanks, Keith.