Archive for the ‘Photos’ Category

Last month I went to Hull Speakers to provide a bit of peer review on their meetings. It seems like a lovely club and I felt very warmly welcomed. On the way back, we stopped at the Humber Bridge to take some photos. Click to see full size.

Dan recommended me a budget set of ND grad filters. They’re £16 so you would expect them to be terrible but all the reviews on Amazon spoke highly of them, so I gave them a go. I’ve literally taken a few photos out of my windows so far, and at 25mm I get some serious Vignetting, but at 35mm and beyond it produces good results.

The top image is taken without the ND grad and the details of the building faces and trees are lost. The bottom image is taken with the ND grad and has far more foreground detail while still maintaining the dark and stormy look of the clouds.

My friend Samra recently bought herself an SRL, so we headed down to the river so I could show her how not to take photographs. I’m hardly a tutor, but it was quite nice to be able to share my tips.

Last month, I finally found time to head up to the very excellent York Skeptics. It was good to see a lot of friendly faces and an interesting talk on autism.

While there, I took the opportunity to take some photos and polarise the flip out of them.

In August, I went to Goole for a speech workshop organised by Gillian. It was a highly informative day and should really raise the standards at contests in area 15 and 51. So much for any hope of retaining my trophy!

While there, I also took the chance to take some photos. Click for the full sized versions.

Who are they kidding, it’s a Big Mac.

While in Finland, we spent the final three days of our time in Finland with Elina’s family, in Laitila.

We tried to swim in a lake at 2pm, but it was still freezing cold at this time, so in the end we gave up and spent the day enjoying the sunshine from the bank.

This is a rose from Riitta’s garden. She has a lot of beautiful flowers.

The view from Henry’s garden.

Henry’s cat.

We spent Friday evening at a summer cottage by a lake. This is the view as the sun went down.

It was surprisingly warm when we went for a midnight swim.

This was my second day out photographing one of our local american football teams, the Yorkshire Rams. Here is what I learned…

Set the white balance manually. During the Lancashire Wolverines game I left it on auto, whereas in this game I manually set it to cloudy and left it there. The photos came out a bit cold in the first game and a little inconstant too. This time they have a more consistent, warm feel.

An exposure of 1/500 is not fast enough to freeze the action. It is OK for players running around but when the ball is being thrown, you need at least 1/1000. When I photograph birds in flight I use 1/1250, and the ball is probably moving faster than that, so makes sense.

I tried taking off my 2x extender and just using my 70-200mm lens (whereas with the extender on I would get a focal range of 140-400mm), as this allowed me to open the aperture up to 2.8. I didn’t see much benefit though, I was already shooting at around ISO 100, so I simply didn’t need to open it up to that unless I specifically wanted to do so, and while that allows me to easily blur at the background, it makes it difficult to keep everything in focus. So 140-400mm f5.6 it is then; it is broad daylight after all.

I also tried increasing the ISO to 3200 in an attempt to get a much greater depth of field. This allowed me to work at up to f11 even at 400mm, again I didn’t see a great deal of difference, but I might give it another go next time and see if I can shoot some catches and plays where I don’t have time to re-focus the camera.

I used AI servo and back button focusing for this shoot. That means I turned off auto focus activation when you press the shutter half way down (I posted a video on how to do this a few weeks ago), and used a button on the back to activate it instead. Because it is in AI servo mode (continuous auto focus), I could then press this button on the back to focus, hold it if I wanted it to work continuously and then release when I wanted to take a shot, or even leave it going the whole time. Mostly I focused and then left it alone, unless the action started coming towards or away from me.

There is also an element of luck to it. I was shooting in continuous mode, but cameras can only take so many shots per second, and given a kick of a throw takes less than one, being able to capture the exact moment comes down to chance. Of course, the more expensive your camera is, the more it can take – my 6D clocks in at 4.5 I think, whereas if you have a 5D Mark III it can take up to 6.

You can find some of the photos in a previous blog post.

My photos from the East Kilbride Pirates at Yorkshire Rams game. The full set is on Flickr.

Higher end Canon EOS cameras have two types of shooting modes – regular and silent. I use silent almost all of the time because I find regular quite loud and annoying. However, surely there must be some disadvantage to it, or they would just have silent mode as the only mode and be done with it.

The answer is it is to do with how fast the camera can take photos.

Under regular continuous shooting, my EOS 6D can burst to 4.5 frames per second, whereas on silent continuous mode, it slows down to 3fps. So if you’re trying to capture action and things in motion, best switch off the silent mode until after you’re done.