Skip to main content

The Fog Descends

Today I went to Manchester, and it was very foggy. Fortunately I had my camera with me (I'm getting better at this "always have a camera" business) so I stopped in Derwent to take a few snaps. Obviously they are all low contrast and, well, covered in fog.

38mm, f11, 1/25th sec, ISO 100

This was my first opportunity to try out my new EF 28-135mm f3.5-5.6 in anger. It's a heavy beast, weighing down the front of the camera so it hangs vertically round my neck. I'd say it weighs twice as much as the body. But that's ok. It's comfortable to hold, easy to operate, and the autofocus is silent. Add to that the fact that it has optical image stabilisation via an in-built gyro and it's a lovely thing to use.

I switched to my EF 18-55mm on the way back. It's the kit lens that came with the body, but it's the most wide angle I have. I used it to try and take in the height of the trees. At a minimum focal length of 44mm (thanks to the 1.6x crop factor) the 28-135mm couldn't get them all in due to space limitations.

You can check out the rest of the flickr set for all the pictures I deem publish-worthy from my little outing. Here are a few samples.

 
 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Fairy Lights

Street lights at night can be very pretty. For someone who lives close to the centre of a large city, skirting round the edge of the town centre can provide a host of beautiful views at night. One advantage to using a wide open lens when taking these pictures is the capture of bokeh, or creative blur. An extreme example is shown to your right; a mass of coloured circles that roughly represent the city they are part of. A more subtle example, of course, is in the picture of the day at the top of this post. The lights cluster around the top of the leaves like fireflies, obviously part of a cityscape but at the same time abstract. The extreme out of focus image is a blurred version of the picture on the left. A view over Sheffield from Pitsmoor, looking up Netherthorpe Road and up to the university. Even when the buildings are focussed (roughly; I'm still practicing) the lights take on the shape of the lens's aperture. I try to incorporate some foreground focus wh...

Something is afoot - Opera Mini on iPhone

Strange things are afoot. 20 days ago, Opera submitted the iPhone version of Opera Mini , their mobile browser, to the Apple AppStore. 20 days later, it was actually approved, despite previous browser technologies and the like being rejected for "duplicating iPhone functionality". Strange indeed. Having used Opera Mini before on many different devices, both touchscreen and traditional keypad based, I have long appreciated its raw speed, excellent rendering engine and intuitive navigation controls. But can it stand up to Safari on iPhone for browsing excellence? The answer: sort of. The Good Like its predecessors, Opera Mini for iPhone is blazingly fast. Using Opera's own proxies, web content is compressed to within an inch of its life to reduce bandwidth requirements, and the browser itself renders what it downloads so fast that the likes of Safari just can't keep up. Even on a GPRS only connection it is almost as fast as Safari on 3G for largely text based page...

Juniper Network Connect on Mac OS X Snow Leopard

Juniper Network Connect is a very popular VPN client for corporate networks. It bootstraps from a Java applet and has native versions for Windows, Linux and Mac, and works very well. Unfortunately, it seems that Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and 10.6 Snow Leopard have some issues caused by a dodgy installation program. One common way to make it work is to enable the root user and log in with full admin privileges under OS X and install it that way. This is a sledgehammer approach to a fairly simple problem, opens up security issues, and didn't even work for me. I won't even bother exploring that route in this blog post. There are a couple of other things that can be done to make it work, though. If you upgraded from a previous version of OS X and already had the Network Connect client installed, you may just be suffering a simple permissions issue. These instructions are for Network Connect 6.2.0, but they might well work with other versions with a tweak. From Termin...