(Warning: This blogpost has a lot of pictures so it may take second or two to load)
One of the joys about the upcoming holidays is how all the lights that people put up put an end to gloomy and dark November. This year it has been a particularly gloomy and gray November with VERY little sunshine and that has had an effect on the general mood and the urge to shoot (although I’ve been unusually active with stuff like that this month, thanks among other things to the outing to the coast I’ve covered in two blogposts lately).
When a friend on Facebook suggested a group trip to the Tivoli amusement park to experience the Christmas decorations there I jumped at the opportunity right away. I’ve enjoyed that place several times in the last few years and it’s always a positive experience. The weather looked to be somewhat iffy with splashes of rain in the forecast, but I didn’t really care. That’s what umbrellas and rain covers are for! Also, this was the first chance I had to try out my new Fujifilm camera at night and that was exciting in itself…at least for me.
We did this last year too with the Facebook group and then we left Sweden earlier in the day and got to experience the park before the sun set. Not so this year, it was well and truly dark when we got to the park entrance, but that was okay with me. The place comes alive with all the decorations anyway, so this year we skipped the “preliminaries”.
I enjoyed the evening a lot and snapped away like a lunatic in some parts of the park, especially when trying to capture the rides (not an easy thing to catch moving targets…at night) with a new camera where I’ve not yet bothered to open up the manual…typical male I guess…but I will get to that too..eventually.
Daemonen (The Demon) at ISO 12,800. Somehow I got this in just one(!) image.
I must say that I am very happy with how the images I’ve uploaded here came out. I had no qualms about going up to ISO 3200 or more with this camera and that is definitely a change from my old Canon 600D where 1600 really was the maximum before it started to look like a digital snowstorm rolling in. There were a few shots up at 12800 that were actually usable (albeit pretty grainy) and that’s very impressive to me, especially since I was using the kit lens and not a prime lens like a 35 f2.0 or 23 1.4. I’ll probably get something like that eventually, but for now I am sticking with the kit lens…until I’ve figured out what other lens I actually need.
After about 3 hours in the park and 232 exposures we pretty much reached our limit and decided to head back to Sweden. A quick train and bus ride later I was home and could rest my tired legs. After 21,000 steps in 24 hours that Friday I definitely enjoyed a very laidback Saturday!
Below are many of the other keepers I ended up with after a thorough culling in Adobe Lightroom.
