O.A.K.A. Stadium by Night

Yesterday night, me and my good old friend George, decided to go for a photowalk, a bit different this time. He suggested we should go to O.A.K.A. However, I had no idea you could have free access to in the daytime, never mind the night. O.A.K.A. is known as the Olympic Stadium of the Athens 2004 Olympics but actually near and around the stadium are located one open air and one indoor Olympic-size swimming pool, Basketball court and several other facilities which look pretty impressive by day. So you guessed correctly, we went there at night.

The place is lit brightly for the most part but there are sections which are not lit at all. We went there pretty late, around 2200 and we chatted and took pictures for about two hours. That means that we saw some people running or hanging around but as we moved further into the facilities we did not meet anyone, other than the security patrols that is. On to photography matters!

For this photowalk, I used the excellent Fuji X100T, probably the first time that I challenged the camera so much for its low light and auto-focus abilities. And... it performed quite brilliant! The pictures you see below, are not the jpegs straight out of the camera as I shot on both jpegs and raw, I wanted to compare the two. The jpegs came out quite good but as the lighting conditions weren't ideal, I did some highlight recovery and some shadow and mid boosting to get the results you see. With that said, the original jpegs were generally less noisy {I did push those raws} and as far as color goes... identical. The ISO ranges from 2500 to 6400, but it is mostly 6400 {16 out of 20 pictures}!

As you can see, the place is great, you can go for a walk any time of the day, you can go running if you like and obviously, is a good opportunity for photography! So if you happen to be in the area, don't forget to bring your camera!