Macro: Bee & Lavender

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Just a quick experiment from the weekend:

1/50 sec at F10, ISO 100 at 100mm

1/50 sec at F10, ISO 500 at 100mm (with flash)

The ISO setting was a mistake, got to admit. It’s only the second time I’ve done that, where I’ve taken some potentially interesting shots and got home to discover that the ISO was turned up to 11. The first time was a day trip to London, and got home to ISO 1600 on my 400D and totally unusable results. The results from a trip to the back yard are a little less traumatic :). The higher ISO is handled better on the 7D, but it’s still a bit noisy at 100%. I quite like the shot. The composition is always a fluke under these types of circumstances, and the lavender in the top left foreground is a bit distracting, but the focus on the bee is pretty sharp.

I’m going to start experimenting with much faster shutter speeds with the flash on faster moving objects in the sort of light these pictures were taken. Compositionally, this is better, but there at 1/50 second, there was enough light to expose the residual smudges most notable on the bee’s abdomen:

1/50 sec at F9, ISO 500 at 100mm

1/50 sec at F9, ISO 500 at 100mm

Yum Yum. But…

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1/125th sec at F9, 100mm at ISO 100

1/125th sec at F9, 100mm at ISO 100

My new iPad arrived on Friday. I went for the baseline spec, partly on price, but principally because I intend using it at home [no 3G], and reckon that I’ll rotate content off it regularly enough, especially video, not to feel constrained by the capacity.

I wonder how many people up and down the UK sparked up the Times application this morning and, like me, were annoyed to find that it doesn’t include the The Sunday Times. Having had a couple of days to play with the thing, my general impression of the software is that it’s overpriced. The Times app is quite nice, but makes up for any deficiencies by virtue of having fantastic content. Its pricing policy is another matter altogether. I’m hoping that there will be some sort of in-app purchase to pick up the Sunday Times. I’m not particularly interested in reading a paper every day – which is what the £9.99 will transform into, a monthly subscription.

I’ve written before about the novelty tax that I felt consumers are being asked to pay for eBooks, and the fact that it irks me to be expected to pay more than the commonly available price [i.e., Amazon or supermarkets] just to have the dubious honour of reading an electronic copy of a book.

The iPad takes this one step further: we have a direct price comparison to draw on with an existing market, for iPhone apps. So we have a screen resolution penalty to pay on top of everything else?

Hopefully the prices will calm down in a couple of months….

Back to Sandy

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I’ve been down to Sandy, or more specifically the RSPB HQ, about 6 or 8 times in the last year or so and probably had my most successful shooting this morning. I decided to my modify my usual mode of operation [walk and hope for the best] by camping out in the hide for a couple of hours, basically because I had a hangover and didn’t fancy a 3 mile hike largely unspoilt by photography. I’m reasonably pleased with the results although a decent shot of a woodpecker still eludes me. The one in collection of shots here decided to put in an appearance when the light faded particularly badly. Shooting handheld at 400mm isn’t terribly forgiving: anything at less than 1/200 second is guaranteed to be a write-off.

I’ve modified my set-up for the wildlife: centre autofocus, plus a reverting to jpeg: I’m never really going to push the pixels around that much with a wildlife shot, so there’s no point in shooting RAW.

Every time I come back from a session like today, I think I should flick over to shutter priority [I always shoot in aperture priority when I’m not doing something manual because of the flash] and set the ISO to auto but I’ve never experimented with it to see how smart it is at choosing the lowest possible setting for a given exposure…