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Photo of the day: January 2013
- Thread starter avro707
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Must have been at about 8am on a bit of a frosty morning. It was just pure luck that the horses where there.
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New Forest National Park in England.
http://www.newforestnpa.gov.uk/about-us/area
I think your set-up may have been OK John. I'm not sure what focal length you were using with your 55-250mm or how close you were to those bees but I'm wondering about the f/18 aperture you used.
Example: If you were at the full 250mm at 15 m from the bees (?) and using f/18, your depth of field would be approx. 2.5 m which may have been far more than you needed for a cluster of bees. At the same focal length and distance, f/4 would have given you a depth of field of approx. 0.5 m which may have been enough and of course would have brought your ISO way down into the 100 to 400 range.
p.s. Enjoy the warmth...we've been down to -10 C and the snow plows are out.
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Howdy Peter, I was at full extension from about 1.5 metres away. The full frame occupied about 20cm of width in reality. Any less than f/18 and I had too shallow a DOF. I understand the principal you are illustrating about DOF and distance from the subject matter, I was closer to start with at full extension and had a tiny DOF. Maybe this is a time for a f/2.8 200 or 300mm lens and backing away a little more?
Is the problem perhaps that you were too close for the lens, so it wasn't a shallow depth of field that was your problem, it was just out of focus?
Isn't that the secret of good lighting... to make it look natural and effortless?
And some are more Technicolour than others...
I would say that the IQ is probably only better wide open. The 50mm is really nice stopped down.
In this situation moving to the 50mm would have given you a deeper depth of field than the telephoto and you could have probably afforded to stop up to f11ish and get the same DOF as in the current shot. That would have allowed a lower ISO (the noise is visible to me at ISO 3200). Alternatively you could have tried filling in which your flash.
I was pretty sure it wasn't a technical mistake on your part. Your DoF would be very shallow at 1.5 m.
Of course the 2.8 lens would help (I got a Nikon 70-200 2.8 VRII for Christmas...it's wonderful!
). In the meantime, the only other suggestion I have is to back away, open your aperture a bit more to lower your ISO and crop-zoom. Not the best solution but I find that a crop-zoom usually yields better results than an ISO that's very high.Cheers and Happy New Year John,
Peter
Isn't that the secret of good lighting... to make it look natural and effortless?
And some are more Technicolour than others...
Image
Sometimes you just get lucky. I took the shot from a moving tour vehicle on the safari tour at Disney's Animal Kingdom. I actually got a few shots of various animals on the tour that I liked, too, but there wasn't time to plan them. It ended up being a bit like shooting sports, though with the action not so fast, a bouncy ride as you try to shoot and no control of where you were when you shot. I set shutter speed to 1/500 and aperture as open as I could on my kit lens. I let the ISO roam free for exposure.
Thanks acearchie, I'll try the 50mm next time they are on mass like this. I suspect I'll have to be ridiculously close and have to crop quite severely afterwards. It will be interesting to see the difference though. I didn't even think of a fill flash! I'm too fixated on natural light shooting.
I was pretty sure it wasn't a technical mistake on your part. Your DoF would be very shallow at 1.5 m.
Of course the 2.8 lens would help (I got a Nikon 70-200 2.8 VRII for Christmas...it's wonderful!
Cheers and Happy New Year John,
Peter
It was me trying to get too much from this lens I think. I'm going to try acearchies suggestion of fill flash next time. I have a wireless flash for this.
I'll have to dream of the 2.8 for a while longer yet I'm afraid. Other lenses to buy that will get much more use from me initially.
Happy New Year to you and yours Peter.
It was too shallow a DOF, if you're too close the lens can't autofocus. I was about 10cm past the minimum distance for it to autofocus, once locked on, I'd tweak it manually to where I wanted the focus to be. It was hard though, as it was such a shallow DOF and they kept moving the whole time which didn't help things at all.
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If you have Photoshop you could easily mask the bird and the post it is on, then blur the rest softly.
[QUOTE
If you have Photoshop you could easily mask the bird and the post it is on, then blur the rest softly.[/QUOTE]
Thanks John...I do have photoshop but am a complete novice with it. I'll read up on some tutorials and see how I get on. If it's not a complete disaster, I'll post the results up in a few days (If that's not against the rules?)
If you have Photoshop you could easily mask the bird and the post it is on, then blur the rest softly.[/QUOTE]
Thanks John...I do have photoshop but am a complete novice with it. I'll read up on some tutorials and see how I get on. If it's not a complete disaster, I'll post the results up in a few days (If that's not against the rules?)
Last night I got back to a beach I took a shot of and shared here maybe a month or so ago, this time at sunset and high tide. I now want to go back and do it again but light-paint the jetty ruins.
60D, 50mm f/1.8 II, ISO 100, 20 seconds, ND 4 & 8 filters.
60D, 50mm f/1.8 II, ISO 100, 20 seconds, ND 4 & 8 filters.
