Family, Photography and other misc news
Whats the best camera? The camera you have with you.
Is that the big heavy SLR hung round your neck, the latest mirrorless, the biggest baddest sensor with the most megapixels.
Well if you look at Flicker its the smartphone. Most phones now have cameras and we nearly always have our phones with us.
Well we now have a press release from Leica and Huawei. Huawei are the third largest smartphone manufacture and they have teamed up with Leica to produce the best smartphone camera.
On Monday we visited the Gainsborough Kennels belonging to the Lincolnshire Greyhound Trust to see some of their dogs available for adoption.
A local photographer has also kindly lent his time to take portraits for many of the dogs for the Trusts website. Pet photography can be tricky and like when working with young children requires lots of patience.
Currently Sox and Timmy are our two favourites, its just such a shame we cannot adopt them all.
All photography on this post copyright Field of Dreams – http://www.fieldofdreamsphotography.net
Nikon D800
Nikkor 300mm f/2.8 with TC17 Converter
500mm, 1/800 Sec at f/6.3, ISO160
Post Processed in Adobe Lightroom CC2015.4
On a MacBook Pro, OS-X 10.11.3
Well nothing has gone wrong on my laptop so its time to update my main machine.
The feature that I have wanted to play with the most is the new Boundary Warp, when creating panoramas.
When shooting handheld you always get a lot of white space. This means cropping and loosing some of the shot. Now with the boundary warp you can get some of that back. There will be a lose of quality and its up to you to decide if its worthwhile for a particular shot, but its nice to have the option.
I have a large selection of shots like above. I usually pass by here most lunchtimes. Each time I take a few snaps if the sun is giving a nice amount of contrast.
I keep a lookout for the man with the placard and a reasonable selection of interesting people at key points in the frame. I have a few shots that I am happy with but no knockouts yet.
This shot was taken today while I headed to the best coffee shot in Lincoln.
We had another set of Adobe updates recently and I have been holding off from updating. It seems it was a good idea as the update seems to have been deleting other application folders not related to Adobe.
Come on Adobe I used to trust you and update straight away, now its worry, I have to hold off, test on a spare laptop before risking my main machine.
The latest Adobe Lightroom has added an interesting new feature to those of us who create panoramic images by stitching photographs. Generally you will end up with white space resulting in having to crop tighter, but now you can use boundary warp to fill in the white space.
Now we are well past the winter solstice the days are getting brighter so its time to get some film loaded into the Leica M4 and shoot some film.
I’ll be developing the film myself and then scanning it.
So good light depending, we will have a few more film Fridays coming up.
I promised that I would get out to Hartsholme Park and finally I managed it.
The weather was pretty good so I could get away with 1/800 second or above, stopped down one stop and still keep the ISO within reasonable limits.
The first set of photographs I thought were great, but then I rechecked my settings and realised I had left the focus set to AF-S instead of AF-C. I have the centre button on my camera set to do a deep zoom, one quick click and I can check focus. Guess what? That spectacle sequence of herons in flight were all blurred.
I quickly changed my focus settings but the herons did not bank past me in the same that day. Oh well lesson learnt.
Modern high end digital cameras tend to have a focus button on the back. Grab any DSLR and by default it will focus when you press the shutter button.
Most people do not configure the rear focus button and if they try it out you find that it is difficult to work that way. The people that do use that method swear by it and in fast action shooting being able to focus and shoot independently is a definite advantage.
It took me a while to get used to it, so I forced myself to only shoot that way for over a year, I recommend you give it a try if you shoot action, but it will take a while to get the hang of it.
This weekend I will get out and shoot some wildlife.
So after a long day at work a bit of prep is in order. First of all equipment, a Nikon D800 and a 300mm f/2.8 lens, cleaned set up and ready for action.
Generally I have the focus set to the focus button and not the release. I’ll also be shooting in aperture priority, with, if the light allows, stopped down one stop, i’ll be using auto iso and configure it to not allow the shutter speed to drop below 1/800, that should freeze everything except birds in flight.
Lastly check out the memory cards, format them in camera and ensure the batteries are full charged.
As well as checking your camera equipment the other important part of this is the photographers clothing and footwear.
Standing outside in winter waiting for a shot can show up the extremes of the British weather. It could be a warm +10 C or -10 C, sometimes back to back in this changeable climate.