Skip to main content

Fun, fun, fun in the s...now?

It must be time for sledging!


And an opportunity for some "action photography" for daddy, of course!


We went to Longley Park just because it's round the corner. The hills were mostly still covered, although some areas were starting to melt already. Mind you, with the way it's been coming down we'll probably be able to go again this weekend.

As the kids readied themselves for their first descent, I readied myself by setting up the camera. I used the EF 28-135mm for this one so I could zoom in for close-ups without risking getting whacked with the sledge. At f5.6 it was wide enough for a bit of DOF fiddling so it's all good.


I also opted for AI Servo focus, which is Canon speak for continuous autofocus. The autofocus point can be set manually, so while tracking you could, for instance, choose to keep the top left corner in focus which is handy for tracking a sledge while keeping the other side open for good composition.


Another thing I took opportunity to play with is the lovely high dynamic range afforded to me by the 15 megapixel sensor and RAW image format. It's really easy to pull out the sky detail while not losing anything in the foreground.


Keeping in mind my recently learned mantra "focus is for amateurs", I took a chance and tracked some high speed sledging with a slower shutter and no flash. Motion blur is not just evident; it adds to the picture. It would have looked a bit weird to have a completely frozen image with this much movement in it.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
4 comments
Read more