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Here’s a long exposure of a freeway at night. (It’s the, I say the, 405 taken from the Yale overpass.) This picture is practically a cliche, and for various reasons I couldn’t even produce a very good one. But I was eager to try it anyway just because I’m so thrilled to once again have a camera that provides enough manual control to do something like this. Technically, my old Canon had most of the manual controls I needed—though not all—but in practice they were all but impossible to use.

One feature the Lumix has is built-in neutral density filters. I had never heard of such a thing before, but it’s surprisingly handy. This picture, for example, was taken with the lowest ISO setting and a 64x neutral density setting. It was the only way to get the long shutter time that I needed.

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AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

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