aadm: critical mass milano ten years

Yesterday evening I had the idea of taking a few shots during this special edition of Critical Mass Milano (special because it was the 10th year anniversary). It’s carnival time too so I figured there would have been good photo opportunities.

But I have a huge backlog of photos to check, catalog and process, so the last thing I wanted was to have another batch of photos waiting to be checked, catalogued and processed.

I remembered what Thomas Fitzgerald wrote about his experience with the Nikon D700 in his blog post a few months ago:

I like taking black and whites, […] Normally I would just shoot RAW and do any black and white conversion afterwards. I had been thinking a lot lately though about how the noise on my Nikon D700 at high iso looked very much like film grain. Not intrusive, overpowering grain either. At ISO 3200 it looked like ISO400 film. SO I decided to try shooting jpegs in camera, with the picture mode set to black and white and the iso turned up to 3200. The results blew me away.

I’ve never considered anything else but shooting RAW on all my cameras; this new Nikon D7000, however, is incredible at getting details out of the extremes of lights or shadows so I decided to give it a go. I selected black and white with pumped up contrast, jpeg fine, iso up to a ridiculous 25600, autofocus in continuous mode (AF-C) and 39-point dynamic-area AF; the sort of settings that I never use, as I like to shoot the old way (aperture priority and a single focus point).

And I took lots of photos, as if I was doing some action reportage; I took photographs while cycling so most of the shots are not framed or focused accurately; I used only one lens (the 35mm f/1.8, a little gem¹) and for once, I trusted the camera to do the right thing.

Most of these shots are not technically perfect the way I’d like them to be; out of focus, very grainy due to high ISO, not sharp — but I think they do convey the buzz and excitement of the event.

Here’s a selection. All the other photos are on this flickr set: Critical Mass Milano 2012.