At the Races

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We went to the local track on the Bank holiday to lose a modest amount of money and, for me, to take a few photos. Well – about 550. First the excuses, as none of the resulting shots would make the grade for stock. It was a little overcast, so the high speed shots I took were all in the ISO 400 to 500 territory. I’d also hoped to take a few snaps somewhere near to one of the jumps, but we were confined to the single enclosure which probably spanned a couple of hundred metres of the flat part of the track.

Some passable results. First up, some high speed shots. Everything was taken on shutter priority [including the motion blur pictures below]. I don’t think there’s any point in messing around with shooting in RAW when you are going to be firing off a lot of pictures, and then not really make any significant adjustments in post.

1/1000 sec at 250mm, ISO 500 at F5

1/1000 sec at 250mm, ISO 500 at F5

1/1000 sec at 100mm, ISO 500 at F4.5

1/1000 sec at 100mm, ISO 500 at F4.5

A couple of motion blur shots:

1/80 sec at 105mm, ISO 100 at F9

1/80 sec at 105mm, ISO 100 at F9

The choice of 1/80 second was an educated guess based on having a couple of attempts at taking shots of cars over the last few years. Not great luck with composition in both of these, but it’s always going to be a lottery with so many subjects in play.

1/80 sec at 105mm, ISO 200 at F10

1/80 sec at 105mm, ISO 200 at F10

Bit of a nudge on the saturation and curves [auto contrast]. Finally, and primarily to reinforce the investment in the tablet [!], the obligatory colour popping shot:

1/1000 sec at 160mm, ISO 500 at F10

1/1000 sec at 160mm, ISO 500 at F10

Trip to New York

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I had a work trip to Jersey last week. I was last there in January and had to go to the office for a 7am call. When I looked back from Jersey to the sunrise over Manhattan, I kicked myself for not taking my camera – it was spectacular.

I got a couple of reasonable shots this trip, but came to the conclusion that my hacked tripod wasn’t a runner. I was never able to find an imperial measure bolt that fitted my Manfrotto head, and so have been using a pretty low tech piece of cardboard to take the bolt I was using up a fraction in diameter to make for a reasonable fit. Unfortunately, setting the position of the head, and then using the live view at full magnification [something I routinely do for night shots], I could see the image drifting ever so slowly.

I’ve heard it said more than once on podcasts by professional photographers that if you are contemplating getting a tripod, you might as well go ahead and get a good one. It’s a false economy to buy a series of increasingly better ones – which I did. So a quick trip to the trusty J&R’s, and I had furnished myself with a Manfrotto 732CY carbon fibre number. I didn’t get the chance to use it this trip, but it’s a good balance between packability and load bearing capacity [3.5kg].

1.3seconds at F14, !SO100 at 105mm

1.3seconds at F14, ISO100 at 105mm

The shot above has been through the mill, as the original was a bit hazy, with much lower contrast in the clouds. I’ve used Silver EFEX Pro, with a preset called High Structure. I’m not sure if this is one of the installed presets or something that I downloaded. I’ve then gone back into Aperture and tweaked the exposure up a few clicks. Actually, it’s worth having a look at the original shot straight out of the camera:

1.3seconds at F14, ISO100 at 105mm

1.3seconds at F14, ISO100 at 105mm

I might try going further north in Jersey if I try to take another shot of the Empire State. The picture above is looking diagonally across the water, and going closer to parallel might reduce the haze.

30 seconds at F6.3, ISO100 at 24mm

30 seconds at F6.3, ISO100 at 24mm

The shot above might be a bit better as a narrower crop. The water is dead space and, despite a bit of dodging and burning, the sky isn’t up to much either.

Go Ping!

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A search of Google [UK] of ‘colour popping images’ today is returning my shot of Ping on page 2 of the hits:

Go Ping

So if you could all search for the image and select it a few hundred thousands times a day, between us we can move him on to page 1 🙂