Category: Photo of the Month

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Photo of the Month – March

Nikon D200
Nikkor 105mm f/2.8
105mm, 1/80 Sec at f/8, ISO1000
Processed in Adobe Lightroom V3.6
On a Mac MacBook Pro, OS-X 10.7.3

With the Spring weather the Crocus and the Daffodils were coming up in the garden.  As soon as I had a spare minute I popped outside with my Nikon D200 SLR and the Nikon Macro Flash Kit.

I grabbed a quick couple of shots before the wind drove me back indoors, it was just too windy to accomplish the critical focus that macro photography requires.  Once back in and with the shots safely on the computer I soon spotted my silly error.  The day before I had been shooting in some difficult and dull conditions, and I had left my ISO set to ISO1000, when for a shot like this with flash I could easily have gotten away with the base ISO.

After a shoot, its always a good idea to reset your camera back to your standard settings.  A lesson I should have learn’t many years ago.

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November’s Photo of the Month – Film

Last month’s Photo of the Month, is unusual in one respect, it was taken with film.

It was not the shot I was after, the conditions were not right, but I still thought it was worth a record shot.

This is a low quality scan of the original slide, but it gives you a basic idea of what the real image is like.

There are lots of arguments over what is better, film or digital, and many get caught up in the technology race and the race for more megapixels.

What people seem to forget is that for the majority of people, who have no intention of producing prints larger then A4, then 6mb is all you need.

The other point is that film and digital are not the same and are difficult to compare, they act differently at the extremes of light and dark. To a lesser degree it’s like arguing between Oil Paintings and Watercolour Paintings.

If your producing an image for a job then you tend to use the quickest, easiest and most cost affective method.

An Estate Agent wanting a picture of a house to help sell it, is not going to use Paint or Pencil, but may have 100 years ago, technology moves forward. Today it’s likely to be a digital compact.

If the image is personal or ‘art’, then use what you most enjoy or is most suitable for the effect you want to achieve. Pencil, watercolour, oil, chalk, charcoal; film in all its different sizes, colour, black & white, negative or slide; Digital, whether a cheap camera phone or a hundred thousand pound digital scanning back on large format.

Digital is not better, it’s different.

Shoot/Draw/Paint More, Enjoy and lets not argue over what is ‘best.

Now where is my iPhone, that sunset is stunning.