Saturday, April 30, 2011

F550EXR – Big Wind and the Bernoulli Effect

The tornadoes that rocked the US on the 27th were part of a huge system that came through here overnight and on the 28th. We had a sunny day for part of the 28th but the wind was unbelievable. We had gusts over 100kph, gale force.

Apparently, more trees were knocked down in these few hours than during the ice storm a few years back that lasted days and knocked out power across huge sections of Ontario and Quebec.

Here, for example is a garbage container whose bag was inverted by the wind and then stuck straight out for hours, held there by the low pressure from above (Bernoulli’s Principle.) The container itself blocked the wind from going below, hence the pressure was higher underneath, which lifted the bag up and held it there. Cool.

Note that I brain-farted and shot these in RAW only. The problem with shooting in RAW only mode is that the camera automatically shoots high resolution only. It does not allow you to tell it to set medium resolution, but it does respect the previous DR400 setting (which actually means that it forces ISO to 400.)

So here I got a full sized image shot at 400 ISO instead of a half sized blended image shot at 100 ISO. Fuji’s engineers really don’t understand the value of a feature interaction table where you cross reference every setting to see how it *should* behave …

Anyway, the images are ok after processing through ACR 6.4, but it’s still really annoying.

So here is what it looks like in action. No wind-cut filter on the F550EXR by the way. Not that they work well anyway.

And speaking of things being knocked down … trees weren’t the only casualty. Hundreds of roofs were ruined and that many fences were flattened as well. I was up in the middle of the night trying to get my temporary barrier to stay up reasonably well as a back yard pool without a barrier is illegal here (as it no doubt is everywhere else too.)

You can see shingles peppering the ground around the fallen fence. Take a closer look …

Rather different processing on all three … but all suffered the same brain fart as the day before. Higher ISO because of RAW only mode. Duh.

Here’s a close up of a leaf with water on it that took an even bigger beating from the brain fart … I left the aperture at f/16, which made for a really excellent depth but also made for 1000 ISO during the day. Big duh …

Still … a nice shot.

So the great wind storm of 28 April 2011 lasted only a few hours but kicked the sh-t out of the whole region. And apparently Windsor got it worse …

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