Lincoln at Night and Skinny Tires on Dirt

I took a lot of pictures this weekend. Somewhere north of 500 in three different situations. I'll show you two of them (the third was a birthday party and, trust me, yeah, you missed a kick-ass party).

Getting back to the pictures I'll show you, it's kinda interesting (at least to me) they required almost polar opposite settings. Friday night I was using a tripod and long exposures, and on Sunday I was just hoping I could focus in the right place to get the shot during a bike race.

Also, I need to say, it's amazing how many people there are visiting the Lincoln Memorial at 11 p.m. on a Friday night. Seriously, there were tour buses pulling up and dropping off tourists. If any of you should happen to be reading this, let me give you a hint: you're pictures will come out better if you turn off your flash. Trust me, none of these were shot with a flash. And you know what? You won't create giant blobs of light in my long-exposures.

The first three pictures were shot at a 400 ISO equivalent. That is a moderately fast ISO allowing for shorter exposures, like this one which was shot at f/2.8 (a really big aperture) for 1 second.

On the other hand this one, as you can tell by the flag, is a bit longer: f/9 (a middling aperture) for 20 seconds.

Or this one which is in color (trust me), shot at f10 for 10 seconds. If I remember my photography class correctly, f/10 is half as big as f/9 so it had half the amount of light coming through the lens for half the time. OK, it's interesting to me and probably one other guy.

This picture took a while to get, and I really need to get some gloves that have a flip-back finger. The ISO was cut in half to 200, the aperture was closed down to f/16 and the exposure was set at 5 seconds.

Sunday afternoon (after waking up late following the aforementioned party) I headed out to Rosaryville State Park in Maryland for to watch a little cyclocross race. Cyclocross, for those of you who are wondering, combines a little bit of on-road with a lot of off-road and some obstacles you have to carry your bike over. It's not for the faint of heart. Here's the start of the women's race.

The course quickly turned to dirt. OK, grass.

This is called the "bunny hop" where you have to get off and carry your bike.

Throughout the race, this woman always had a very determined look on her face. Either that or she didn't like getting her picture taken.

I wouldn't want to think about tripping here. You'd probably get run over.

A little downhill going around a curve kept the riders on their toes.

And in this sequence, the remount...

And finally a nice downhill section.

Yep, got caught taking this one.

Well, that's all for now. If you want to see some more of the cyclocross, check out my Flickr stream, there's a whole bunch more photos there.