my name is mwd: photos

During lockdown I’ve taken a lot of pictures of this scene in different conditions, for example here it is on a clear day. It’s probably one of the closer "interesting" non-suburban scenes near my house that I can walk to without meeting too many people. So when the fog hit, it seemed an obvious destination.

Unfortunately the shot I had in mind, which was the only one I had thought about before heading out that night, I couldn’t get, as my tripod wasn’t tall enough to see over the guard rail. So instead of ISO 200 lovely stillness, I had to go for a more grungy ISO 8000 hand held shot. I’m still happy with the scene.

I did have to work more on this though. My old X-E2 never had an issue with the dreaded Fujifilm "worms", but the X100F definitely does at higher ISOs, and given I bought this camera in the spring I’m only just hitting this as I shoot in the darker nights of winter. The issue is specifically related to Lightroom, so I did finally try Capture One to process this image, but in the end I found reducing the default sharpening and a little noise reduction got rid of the visible artifacts in the noise to an acceptable level, and Lightroom seemed to do a better job out the box of dealing with the headlights.

As a random aside, I don’t need to drive much in the UK, and for five years most driving I did was on work trips to the US, so I’ve taken to calling motorways freeways out of habit, particularly when it aptly allows awful alliteration.