Archive for the ‘Photos’ Category

I’ve recently purchased a polarising filter for my camera, so I took it out for a test run. You can get quite a difference out in the bright sunlight, though some times it seems to detract from the dramatics of the image. Below is a photo I took of Leeds Canal, with light polarisation on the left and heavy polarisation on the right.

The fly and clouds come out with a lot more texture in the one on the right, and it’s difficult to see at this size but the water goes from a horrible grey to a beautiful blue too.

At first, it felt a little like just under-exposing the photo though. If I wanted to prevent the cloud detail from blowing out, surely all I had to do was drop the exposure a little. But of course that isn’t the case, as can be seen in the photos below.

In the top two photos, I haven’t used much polarisation. In the top one I’ve used the camera’s recommended settings, and in the second one I’ve sped up the exposure a few notches. In the third one I’ve put it back to the camera’s recommended setting, but used heavier polarisation.

As you can see in the third one, I’ve obtained the rich detail of the cloud, while still maintaining the vibrant face of the building, and captured much more detail from the block of flats behind it too.

I tried my hand at panning so that I could capture cards speeding by. The idea behind the technique is that you pan the camera as the car drives past, thus blurring the background while keeping the car in sharp focus.

I was using my 24-105 f4 lens. Ideally I would have had my 70-200 f2.8 so that I could blur the background even more, though whether I could get down to f2.8 and still keep an exposure of 1/200 I’m not sure. I got better results when I turned off my image stabiliser (because the camera stops trying to fix my panning), but my better lens also has a specific image stabilising mode for panning, so I would like to give that a go.

Earlier this month, we headed to Yorkshire Wildlife Park. It’s fairly small, no where near the size of Chester Zoo or even Helsinki Zoo, but it does have “contact areas” in which you can go in and pet the animals.

A wallaby comes jumping across the path.

A capybara hides under a bridge after it was chased into the water by a rhea.

A lemur diving through the air.

A lemur jumping off the top of its house.

Elina holding hands with a wallaby.

Owls are such posers.

This photo was really dark, but trusting my histogram, when I brought it into Photoshop the detail came out far better than I was expecting.

An otter staring at his own reflection.

This lion was sleeping right next to the fence, then woke up and stuck his head up just long enough for me to take a photo.

This was through glass, but luckily it didn’t get in the way of his eyes.

This was just a gull, but I took this photo after it had just snatched some food and flown off with it.

Helsinki Zoo has some wonderful bears.

A feature that many sports photographers like to take advantage of is back button focusing. I was trying this out at Yorkshire Wildlife Park recently and it has its advantages. The idea is that you can use a button on the back of your camera to focus, rather than have the camera focus when you press the shutter button half way down.

The advantage of this is that you can focus when you want to, and then not worry about the camera re-focusing if you take your finger of the shutter button.

For example, I often press the button half way down to get my focus, then re-compose the shot because I don’t want my focal point to be right in the middle of the frame, then take the photo. This means I have to keep my finger on it the whole time, and need to re-do these actions if I want to take additional shots. With back button focusing, I focus using the button, then point the camera somewhere else and take as many shots as I like.

Some cameras let you re-assign the exposure lock button, but your higher end DSLRs will have an “AF-ON” button you can use to activate the auto-focus without having to re-assign a button – useful if you use exposure lock as well. In which case, all you need to do is stop the shutter button activating the auto-focus. I’ve done a video showing you how to do this on the Canon 6D…

By the way, the video is the right way round, it’s just the thumbnail that is wrong.

I wasn’t particularly impressed by the Helsinki Sea Life Centre. It had some cool animals in it, and you did get to walk through a tunnel with sharks swimming over your head, but it was fairly small and over quite quickly.

The first photo is a shoal of piranhas. They just sit there waiting for something to happen; it’s quite unnerving. I took a video.

A dolphin skeleton. They don’t feel much likes the clowns of the sea when you see how many teeth they have.

Every single diorama in this museum depicted one animal eating another.

The history of life exhibit finished by talking about modern times – including a chainsaw, skateboard, first aid kit and mobile phone.

Roughly translated, this means “an exhibition on animal poo”.

Finland do many awesome ice cream flavours. They do some interesting ones too. Here is Elina eating a Salmiakki ice cream, and in Laitila we found a tar flavoured one.

Cathedral in Helsinki harbour.

Helsinki Cathedral.

View of the harbour as we took the boat to the zoo.

The Elina shop, were I took Elina for her check-up.

They don’t seem to have KFC in Finland, but they do have SFC.

The Finnish Parliament building.

Finland’s coastline as we flew home.

Finally, some panoramas…

Helsinki harbour. Click for full size.

The view from the observation point at Helsinki Zoo. Click for full size.