A Bit Of Everything

What with a baby on the way, hospital trips to sort Devon out, oh and a bit of work, it’s not been a photo blog summer. So I’m just going to put up a sequence of one-off photos which have absolutely nothing to do with each other at all, except that they were taken by me. So let’s kick off with an experiment I did one summer’s evening:

Nikon D300, Sigma 10-20mm EX lens at 10mm, 20 secs at f 4.5, ISO 200, on a tripod no flash. This was a long-exposure test I did one evening after watching the farmer cut the big field behind our house. It was a lovely peaceful evening and I decided to play around with some of our garden lights.

And now for some mugs:

Nikon D300, Nikon 24-70mm f 2.8 lens at 50mm, 1/320 at f 2.8, ISO 200, hand held no flash.

And here’s Marie’s bump, 8 months in, August 2009:

Nikon D300, Nikon 24-70mm f 2.8 lens at 52mm, 1/20 at f 2.8, ISO 1600, hand held no flash. Practising low-light, slow-shutter handheld photography with my best lens, the hefty Nikon 24-70mm 2.8, ready for when the baby’s born.

This is a shiny Mini on a wet early evening stroll around Stamford:

Nikon D300, Sigma 10-20mm EX lens at 10mm, 1/30 at f 9, ISO 800, hand held no flash.

Here’s our future ASBO trying to look tough:

Nikon D300, Nikon 18-200mm VR lens at 95mm, 1/13 at f 5.3, ISO 250, hand held no flash.

And a wall somewhere in deepest Rutland, lovely high resolution shot that I got about right:

Nikon D300, Nikon 24-70mm f 2.8 lens at 24mm, 1/160 at f 9, ISO 200, hand held no flash.

This is our beloved stray cat Lucy, moments after she first appeared in our lives – sitting atop our secret garden (pre-decking), half-chewed ear, crying out for food (which we gave her):

Nikon D300, Nikon 18-200mm VR lens at 200mm, 1/4000 at f 5.6, ISO 400, hand held no flash.

And to finish, here’s Marie and her family, on Grandma Anne’s birthday a couple of years ago, in a reet good carvery somewhere in West Yorkshire:

Nikon D300, Sigma 10-20mm EX lens at 10mm, 1/60 at f 4, ISO 200, hand held with flash.

Jasmine The Giraffe

 Having a baby includes – for some people – identifying an important set of colours. Marie, my wife, is one of those, and one day she brought home a small toy giraffe which she a) named Jasmine, and b) stated that Jasmine’s colours would be the colour of our baby’s room and all accessories. Naturally I agreed to this. What do you think I am, stupid? And here, photographed in all her green/pink/blue finery, is that very Jasmine: 

Nikon D300, Tamron SP AF 90mm f/2.8 Di Macro lens, 1/1000 at f 10, ISO 320, hand held no flash. I had this picture blown up onto canvas, and it now hangs on the baby’s bedroom wall. For this I used the pin-sharp Tamron 90mm macro lens, and took it up to our decking on a sunny evening. I kept it a secret from Marie until yesterday – she loved it and I am now spending the brownie points thus achieved by watching The Ashes and The Open Championship golf…

Mum To Be

The baby’s due in 9 weeks, and here’s what Marie’s Mum and Dad have been doing for us this weekend:

Nikon D300, Sigma 10-20mm lens at 10mm, 1/25 at f 5, ISO 400, hand held no flash. One beautifully-decorated baby girl’s bedroom, courtesy of J&B Decorators (John and Bev).

The cot was bought by my own Dad and Mairi – thanks to the extended baby support team, Scottish division. Yet to appear: the wardrobe and dresser, the edging to the new wooden floor, and the baby’s mattress. We are, as they say, getting there. Doesn’t she look happy? This pic is straight out of the camera, no tweaks at all.

[UPDATE ONE WEEK LATER]

And here’s the finished article, this morning:

Nikon D300, Sigma 10-20mm lens at 10mm, 1/60 at f 9, ISO 200, hand held no flash. Note butterflies on curtains. Humphrey the new elephant at extreme top left. Jasmine the giraffe’s new alter-ego, Jasmine 2, on the (sloping) book shelf top right. We’re going to redo the shelves. As I’ve said before, she’d better be a girl…

A Little Old Manual Nikon Lens

A couple of weeks ago (see Here) I wrote about my middle-aged trip to a camera fair, and subsequently buying my first second hand lens, an old manual focus Nikon 100mm f2.8E prime lens. Using a manual lens, instead of an autofcus one, feels a bit like cooking a meal with ingredients instead of buying a meal at a restaurant. It’s slower, and there’s more chance it will go wrong, but there’s a greater sense of accomplishment afterwards. Of course, you can manual-focus an autofocus lens, but that would ruin my analogy.

Ken Rockwell, one of the web’s most popular / infamous commentators on camera stuff, reviewed the little Nikon 100mm here:  http://tinyurl.com/aefuar. “A great little lens: sharp, fast, and tiny.” Sounded good to me. It’s apparently the lightest telephoto lens Nikon has ever made, and is famous for being sharper than lenses costing 20x as much. At £40 (the price I paid at the camera fair) it’s a real bargain.

So I put it on my D300 and started to experiment:

Nikon D300, Nikon 100mm f2.8E prime lens, f-stop unknown, 1/3200 sec  at ISO 800, hand held no flash. Just mucking around on the kitchen windowsill with some coloured glass ornaments, trying to see how sharp I could get it. Pretty sharp, is the answer. Yes there’s me going on about sharpness again, but show me a photographer who doesn’t covet it.

Here’s the same thing, but with a green theme:

Nikon D300, Nikon 100mm f2.8E prime lens, f-stop unknown, 1/1600 sec  at ISO 800, hand held no flash. Notice the high ISO, like the last one – that’s the D300 working hard to make it easy for the photographer. From these two pics, I’d say it’s definitely been a bargain at forty quid. 100mm is a good focal length for portraits, so when the light’s good this summer I’ll point it at some victims.

I got a bit carried away, getting all abstract:

 Nikon D300, Nikon 100mm f2.8E prime lens, f-stop unknown, 1/320 sec  at ISO 800, hand held no flash. I haven’t worked out yet how to get the full EXIF data (the f-stop details) out of this lens, maybe you can’t. The above three pix were probably taken at f 2.8, looking at the amount of blur in the background. Nice colours here.

By the way, this is what the 100mm f2.8E lens looks like:

OK enough with lenses, back to photographs…

How Slow Can You Go?

It’s useful to work out how slow you can hand-hold a shot and still get it sharp. Here’s when I discovered my personal limit:

Nikon D300, Nikon 50mm f 1.8 prime lens at ISO 640, hand held no flash. The one on the left is sharp, the one on the right, isn’t. So, 1/30 is as low as I can go. Take a deep breath, hold it, and press the button…

“Bokeh”: When Blur Can Be Sharp

Stand by for some extreme photographic navel-gazing.

Even completely out-of-focus pictures can take on a strange kind of sharpness:

Nikon D300, Nikon 50mm f 1.8 prime lens at f 1.8, 1/640 sec, ISO 250, hand held no flash. I focused the stubby little 50mm lens on something close to me, and then re-composed the shot so that the scene in the viewfinder – looking out of our living room window on a sunny Saturday lunchtime – was completely blurred.

The result: something for which camera people have a weird word, namely “bokeh”. It’s the Japanese word for “blurred” or “fuzzy”. And it proves that, even in a picture which is deliberately 100% out-of-focus, you can have sharpness. Look at the bokeh circles in the picture above, created when the lens detects little points of light and, because it is focused elsewhere, translates the light points as blurred circles – which themselves have sharp edges. You need the right lens, and camera geeks the world over love to “compare bokeh” produced by one lens or another. This inexpensive 50mm f 1.8 Nikon prime lens produces bokeh as good as any lens in the world, in my humble opinion.

Navel-gazing [ENDS].

The Lights Fantastic

Late November 2008, late Sunday night drive back home from Marie’s parents’ place in Barnsley. Marie drove, Devon snoozed, I kept the conversation going and played around shooting car light trails:

Nikon D300, Nikon 50mm f 1.8 prime lens, 3-second exposure at f 11, ISO 400, hand held no flash, through the windscreen somewhere on the A1 southbound. Experimental. Release the shutter, then rotate the camera in circles … push it forwards and backwards to create the 3D effect, or just let the cars come towards you … lovely depth to this one, I shot around 30 different exposures.

Here’s another nice crisp one:

Nikon D300, Nikon 50mm f 1.8 prime lens, 5-second exposure at f 14, ISO 400, hand held no flash. Great fun to try this out, you have no idea what’s going to happen. Sometimes, you just have to play with colours…

Neither of the two images above have been altered in post production apart from a tiny bit of sharpening.

Sun’s Back Out, Camera’s Back From Nikon

So I went nearly five weeks without my camera – by the end I was caressing my lenses, re-arranging the straps on my camera bag, feverishly posting on message boards – anything to have a bit of camera action while the people at Nikon (actually H.Lehman in Stoke on Trent) fixed my faulty pop-up flash, and re-calibrated the focus.

My wife is sick at the moment, struck down by hyperemesis (ie: permanent, severe all-day morning sickness – yes she’s pregnant), so this is not the time for long, ambitious photo shoots. I struck out for the back end of the garden, instead, and to test whether Nikon had really fixed the focus, here’s our little camper van at the top of our back steps:

 Nikon D300, Nikon 24-70 mm f2.8 lens at 48mm, f 8, ISO 200, hand held no flash. Blue and green colour channels boosted slightly in Lightroom, sharpened a fraction in Paint Shop Pro. We both have a mild thing for VW camper vans, this one’s pottery, sadly there’s no real one in the driveway yet. One day maybe. Seems the D300 is back on form, although the camera man is a bit rusty…

Light Painting: 1

Devon and I did an experiment the other night, and here’s what happened:

Nikon D300, Nikon 24-70mm at 70mm, 25 sec exposure at f16, ISO 640 (my mistake!), tripod, no flash.

Then I ran around the tree for a bit, that’s me, the ghost, just to the left of the trunk (not fast enough, obviously):

Nikon D300, Nikon 24-70mm at 57mm, 30 sec exposure at f16, ISO 200 (that’s better), tripod, no flash.

And finally we had the name-writing competition:

Nikon D300, Nikon 24-70mm at 38mm, 30 sec exposure at f16, ISO 200 (that’s better), tripod, no flash.

Filled a pleasant half an hour for me and Devon. Another time, we went out and shot traffic trails, more of which another time…

Scottish Breakfast

Better put a first picture up …

 Why not a gadget, my life is full of them anyway. All strictly for productivity purposes, naturally.

Nikon D300, Tamron 90mm DI Macro f2.8 prime lens, 1/1000 at f4, ISO 400, hand held no flash.

I had a couple of hours to kill in Glasgow Airport, so I settled into a Wetherspoons for some breakfast, and amused myself by taking pictures of what was on the breakfast table. Just another weirdo with a camera. People ignored me. I was experimenting with my new Tamron macro lens, which has turned out to be an excellent buy. I’m still getting to grips with it, but it produces quite beautiful results fairly easily. I had plenty of time to think, and compose, and I was quite pleased with the results straight out of the camera.

Nikon D300, Tamron 90mm DI Macro f2.8 prime lens, 1/100 at f3.2, ISO 400, hand held no flash. The magazine is ‘Sight And Sound’ – I’m into cinema.

Nikon D300, Tamron 90mm DI Macro f2.8 prime lens, 1/320 at f3.5, ISO 400, hand held no flash.

Most things were blue and moody that morning:

Nikon D300, Tamron 90mm DI Macro f2.8 prime lens, 1/40 at f3, ISO 400, hand held no flash.

But there were other colours around:

Nikon D300, Nikon 50mm f1.8 prime lens, 1/40 at f3.5, ISO 400, hand held no flash.

Bacon, eggs, toast, tomato sauce and a bit of pepper. Hot cup of tea out of shot. Bring it on…