Merry New Year - 2014

Merry new year to everyone and anyone who stumbles across this post!

Best wishes for a smooth & straight (but amazing) road to the horizon of 2014.

.... and yes, my new years resolution is to take more photos and blog more often! (again) 



ISO100, 16mm, f/7.1, 1/250s, -0.6ev, circ plrsr

US Tour 4 - Grand Panoramas

Three more images from the US tour, this time Panoramic format composites of the Grand Canyon.
We toured all around it, but all these are from the south rim, when we had quite a lot of mist, cloud and heavy showers passing through .. a relatively rare event.  It was all sunny by the time we got to the north rim and the vistas were just not as dynamic.

Really like the lower two, but the huge 2nd pan is definitely my favourite with the sunlight casting all kinds of interesting light in and around the vast landscape, from shadow to light rays to touches of highlights on the right, it "reads" really well. 

The third was taken with the advantage of being able to stay until Sunset, once most of the tour buses had headed off.  The storms that had closed parts of the National Park earlier (wandering desert cliff-tops isn't healthy in a thunder storm), had drifted away to the north east horizon, providing a fantastic backdrop sky to the glowing canyon walls, which were all the more warm tinted thanks to the cloud of hair spray and diesel fumes that linger over Los Angeles to the west.  I also love the hazy light in the left of shot too, which retained a lot of natural light and detail - often you would have needed to lighten this artificially, but I guess the grazing Sunlight must have been being diffused off of the clouds and cliff face.  Buckets of texture, detail, depth, colour and contrast make it another favourite, even without any real focal point.



Composite of 5 images at ISO100, 16mm, f/11, 1/80s, -0.6ev  

Composite of 12 images at ISO100, 32mm, f/9, 1/50s, cir plrsr, highlights reduced in Lightroom 

Composite of 4 images at ISO400, 35mm, f/10, 1/80s, -0.6ev, circ plrsr

Homage to Ansel Adams

 

A few more shots from the US tour while I'm decorating and doing the whole Christmas thing.  Hardly had a chance to play with my 5D3 since I got it, thankfully these US photos were already processed for the most part and ready to post.  The top three are a humble attempt at a salute to Ansel Adams or more like a mutual sharing of the awe that Yosemite national park afflicted both of us, a truly stunning place that I could easily spend a lifetime photographing. 

 

The 4th and 5th are from the Grand Canyon national park, usually it's a sacrilege to remove the amazing colours, but I think these two particular shots benefit from the removal of the distraction of colour.  Note that I have more canyon shots to follow that will be complete with magnificent colour, they will appear at some point soon. 

 

 

 

ISO200, 35mm, f/9, 1/320s, -0.7ev, circ polariser (whoops, not sure why not ISO100) Cropped. 
Yosemite National Park, for once some midday Sun wasn't a terrible thing, casting shadows on the mountain face and highlighting the textures

ISO100, 35mm, f/7.1, 1/160s, -0.7ev, cropped
Morning Sun rays radiate through the rising mist and trees in a fleeting display of natures subtle beauty.  Spotted while driving into Yosemite Valley, I had just barely enough time to pull the car over, run 100m back down the road, take the photo and then it was gone.  Perhaps Usain Bolt might have managed a nicer shot, but I was happy with it.

ISO320, 130mm, f/8, 1/250s, -0.7ev
Not particularly my favourite shot, but a nice reminder of Ansels use of the rising moon in several of his images.  The original, taken at Mammoth Lakes, had crazy colours so vivid it was hard to keep from turning it black and white, to avoid the wrath of the many members of the Photoshop inquisition incorrectly murmuring "hhmmph, too much saturation".  Fortunately I like it's simple composition in mono anyway.

ISO100, 16mm, f/5.6, 1/250s, -0.7ev, circ plrsr
 An Eagle soars over a cloudy Grand Canyon, hopefully happy in its realisation that its living the dream!
The grazing sunlight, epic horizon-scape and passing model all make for a very imagination provoking image, for me anyway, but then I always dreamt of flying as a kid.   It was immediately tempting to break out the max-zoom with these guys drifting past, but it was so hard to capture the magic of such a vast environment with limited background, so I much preferred this than any of my 400mm captures. 



ISO100, 200mm, f/71, 1/500s, -0.7ev
Flipping the previous caption on its head, sometimes the best way of capturing an element of such a complex and huge landscape is with a zoom.  So swapping the usual 16mm for some zoom, I took this shot at close to sunset.  I'm always attracted to this style of shot in the UK, but usually with rolling hills, gates, trees and tractors, turns out the Grand Canyon is slightly different than Wiltshire ... and almost as beautiful!   ;o)



Canon 5D III First Impressions

Bit of a wordy post to give first impressions on my upgrade from 50D to 5D mark III.  I actually got a chance to wander with it and take a few photos yesterday, so I thought I'd hold off on more US photos for now and jump to some all new ones .. even if they are kind of experimental, to test the features and how it likes working with my lenses.  (Photos posted full size)

For the most part, as it turns out, my lenses seem to have breathed a sigh of relief!  No longer restricted by the apparent limitations of my trusty old 50D, the difference is pretty amazing, my 16-35mm II definitely feels a lot more at home.  Super wide is now properly super wide and 35mm just looks ... like a 35mm lens should, really looking forwards to using it on this camera.  16mm gets quite a bit of fisheye distortion and chromatic aberration in the corners, but Lightroom seems to do a pretty good job of countering it using its profiled lens corrections.  (See the tree photo for a wide open 16mm shot with high contrast edges and corner detail).  

The 100-400mm has obviously lost a significant chunk of zoom (full frame sensor vs 50D's smaller sensor with 1.6x "zoom"), but the images look so much better and seems to have alleviated the niggles that I believe plagued its relationship with the 50D (fringing and ugly bokeh).  I'll need to use it a bunch more to confirm though. 

One un-expected bonus is that auto-focus now works with my tele-convertor attached!  I think it only uses the live-view style contrast based (?) focussing, rather than the normal auto-focussing system, but it seems to get somewhere close pretty quickly, which is really handy. 

Physically the body feels very similar in size, almost exactly the same as the 50D, maybe a touch heavier, but the first major difference is the power switch has strayed over to the top left, from the bottom right, which will take a while to get used to.  I'm not even sure I like this either, as instead of being under my right thumb I now have to move my left hand off the camera to turn on/off - irritating if I want to turn off to change lenses in  a hurry etc.    The rest of the controls are fine, a few more buttons to learn, back button focusing sorted, loving the configurable buttons, zooming on images using the back screen is totally different and is also going to take a while to get used to, but like some of the measures they're added to stop settings getting knocked, with locks and more protection against eg. accidentally scrolling the dioptre adjustment or mode dial.  The depth of field preview button is in a great position too, after five years I never did get used to finding that button smoothly on the 50D, but sits happily straight under my ring finger on the 5D3, happy days.

The 100% viewfinder is a luxury I knew I'd love, (no going back now!),  spoilt.  So clear, bright and I finally have a battery indicator in the viewfinder!  (stupid little thing that I always wanted for weddings).  All those auto focus points to choose from too!  Brilliant.  I set the M-Fn button to swap focusing modes and have been playing a bit, seems to work great, but I really need to learn which mode to use when after relying for so long on single spot weighted focussing.  Demonstrated in the photo of the swans, I had been trying out the zone focussing on cyclists riding past (camera focuses on the nearest spot in whichever zone you have active), which worked brilliantly on the cyclists, but when some swans swam through a patch of light in the river it (correctly and very accurately)focused on the wing rather than the eye.  Doh!  I ended up doing this a couple of times, with a Blue Jay in a tree (focused on the branches) and a squirrel while crouched (focussed on the leaves in front), so its something I really have to get used to switching to for isolated subjects.

High ISO is .. interesting.  I haven't been blown away by its high ISO noise handling so far and it seemed a little keen to ramp up the ISO into the thousands a bit too readily I thought, but I probably just need to get used to it though.  See the streetlight at night photo for an example of ISO4000 image with no noise reduction.  Just happy to trust that it is a lot better the 50D was, but a little disappointed that I'll probably still have to de-noise wedding photos taken above ISO100.

Anyway.. I have to go for now .. more to come soon (along with some more US photos at some point!?)

ISO4000, 35mm, f/28, 1/30s, -2.7ev - example of high ISO noise (no noise reduction)

ISO100, 16mm, f/6.3, 1/100s, -1ev, lens correction (Adobe Lightroom)

ISO100, 400mm, f/5.6, 1/320s, -1.7ev  Example of 100-400mm lens sharpness and bokeh/smoothness

ISO320, 400mm, f/5.6, 1/320s, -0.3ev, Example of when not to use zone auto-focus (was playing with different modes and it focussed on wing instead of eye).  Very nice auto-exposure, bokeh and background water though  ... and auto-focus on the wing is very good too - shame about the rookie photographer!