Post by ChrisB on Jul 14, 2018 23:51:49 GMT
I dropped Mischa off in Lancaster this morning, for her usual Saturday morning life-drawing session. She tells me that it's for keeping her artistic talents sharp and keenly honed, but I think it's just an excuse to look at willies)
Anyway, I had a new lens to try out - a Takumar SMC 55mm f/1.8 from 1973, which arrived yesterday. So, I went to the market square to see if I could find anything interesting to snap at.
The place was pretty busy, with lots going on, including a charity fundraising performance by a rather superb guitarist.
Apparently, the watermelon was good too!
I wandered off to see what else what afoot and found a guy in a dress making massive bubbles.
Lots of fun was being had by all.
It was so entertaining that I stayed for almost an hour.
Trouble is, as you can see from the last picture, I was finding this spectacle was tricky to photograph effectively with a fully manual lens. I tried all sorts of things to do it justice. I'm still learning the technical aspects of photography, and though I hope I have reached a point fairly well past point and shoot, I still have to scratch my head a bit to solve new problems.
The action was so unpredictable that I needed to be in focus almost anywhere - unfortunately, I didn't succeed very well in the image above with the little girl. My solution was to use the depth of field indicator on the lens - the first time for me. I first set the lens to f/1.8, focused on something way beyond the guy making the bubbles and then selected f/11. Checking the depth of field scale, I could see that this enabled me to have everything from infinity to about 2.5 metres in focus, wherever I might point the camera.
This is great!
There's a slightly surreal sci-fi or religious cult flavour to a lot of the images that I shot, due to all of the reaching towards a 'thing'. There's a distinct Harry Potter-ishness to the out of focus image of the girl that I posted earlier, which is why, despite it being technically crap, I love it!
Some of the images need to be viewd in pairs, like these two.
When I got home, I discovered that this technique has a name - it seems that I have discovered how to use hyper-focal distance. Nice!
Lessons that you learn for yourself are always the most rewarding, don't you think?
Anyway, I had a new lens to try out - a Takumar SMC 55mm f/1.8 from 1973, which arrived yesterday. So, I went to the market square to see if I could find anything interesting to snap at.
The place was pretty busy, with lots going on, including a charity fundraising performance by a rather superb guitarist.
Apparently, the watermelon was good too!
I wandered off to see what else what afoot and found a guy in a dress making massive bubbles.
Lots of fun was being had by all.
It was so entertaining that I stayed for almost an hour.
Trouble is, as you can see from the last picture, I was finding this spectacle was tricky to photograph effectively with a fully manual lens. I tried all sorts of things to do it justice. I'm still learning the technical aspects of photography, and though I hope I have reached a point fairly well past point and shoot, I still have to scratch my head a bit to solve new problems.
The action was so unpredictable that I needed to be in focus almost anywhere - unfortunately, I didn't succeed very well in the image above with the little girl. My solution was to use the depth of field indicator on the lens - the first time for me. I first set the lens to f/1.8, focused on something way beyond the guy making the bubbles and then selected f/11. Checking the depth of field scale, I could see that this enabled me to have everything from infinity to about 2.5 metres in focus, wherever I might point the camera.
This is great!
There's a slightly surreal sci-fi or religious cult flavour to a lot of the images that I shot, due to all of the reaching towards a 'thing'. There's a distinct Harry Potter-ishness to the out of focus image of the girl that I posted earlier, which is why, despite it being technically crap, I love it!
Some of the images need to be viewd in pairs, like these two.
When I got home, I discovered that this technique has a name - it seems that I have discovered how to use hyper-focal distance. Nice!
Lessons that you learn for yourself are always the most rewarding, don't you think?
