Photologness...

 

 

Feedback welcomed etc.

[hide=Cat]

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[hide=Orchids]

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[hide=15th August batch]

[hide=Flowers]

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[hide=Cat]

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[hide=16th August night shot]

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[hide=18th August Rusty Frog]

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[hide=21st August Cat is back]

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[hide=24th August Sunset]

Quite pleased with these, though 3 does have obvious focus/motion blur issue but for some reason I still like it. 2 is personal fav as it has the most movement and depth to it.

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[hide=27th August Stars]

I do believe I have just about cracked this night time exposure milarky; plus my first panoramic shot.

Link to panorama as it doesn't work nicely with forum

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[hide=26th Sept Sunset Grab]

Not editted yet (need to get my proper pc hooked up in new uni digs) and two shots as the lighter one shows the distant foreground I wanna bring out a little better (the light spots etc) and darker shows the sky colouring.

Not sure if it's gonna work out but it looked nice and I had the cam to hand.

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[hide=15th Oct Brick Work]

Not editted yet, want to crank it to bring out the hidden colours and crop it a bit; but found the constructuion and shapes with the slight reflective quality intriguing

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Most in higher res on my deviant art

How about profile pics of your cat? The vegetation and ground in your pics aren't interesting. Closeups of your cat's head, eves, or whiskers is what's usually most interesting.

Trying to get close ups of my cat with a suitable lens would be like camera suicide. She'd try to play with it or run away!

 

I see you're point about the plants etc, but I do like photos of animals in their environment kinda thing more than close ups as you get a sense of character and I don;t quite know why but I feel the third one invokes a sort of beatrix potter-esque feeling with the sort of pathway and fence behind (makes me think of an illustration which was in Peter Rabbit). So I guess that's a personal taste thing.

 

Oh and an edit is en-route; just uploading some macro work I did a bit later which has a few interesting shots at least (IMO)

Managed to get some close up macros of the cat without it being destroyed!

And a batch of flower macros.

Awesome. :)

I love the pictures of your cat, very well done.

 

The pictures of the flowers made me sneeze. :P

Added a new one tht I grabbed tonight, only reasonably shot I got out of further attempting to get night exposure down.

Some of these are actually really great :) Unfortunately, one of the problems I can see with quite a few of your photo's is focus :( Especially in the ones under Orchids, most of them are out of focus, or are incorrectly focused, so that the subject is not what it should be, which is a shame. The Flowers from the 15th are absolutely stunning though.

 

 

Also, with the night shot, compositionally it's really boring. The moon is smack bang dead centre, and in my opinion, this doesn't look good.

Agreeing with ouchy here, plus you can't really see that much detail in the clouds.

 

I also agree with Soa about the cat shots, but the newer ones are a bit too close, and still not really that sharp.

Sharpness is bound to be an issue with my cat, she doesn't stay still enough to get a 100% perfect focus; the shots are the good ones out of like 30 attempted shots which mostly are empty unfocussed frames or blurs of movement. But even so I'm pleased with the later ones, they aren't far enough off to look bad (IMO) and short of a miracle you're not gonna get better with my cat other than perhaps with a zoom lens from really far away; but she doesn't really sit in interesting poses/locations without interaction.

 

Yeah I agree with the orchids focus is a bit off; but meh I'm still very much learning so can't expect to be all perfect. Trying to get myself to take photos, even if they are boring pointless stuff I don't share, every other day atleast atm to get the practice.

 

Night shot yeah totally agree, I don't think its particularly great (though its my most fav'ed pic on deviant art) but I SUCK at getting night exposure right so I was just pleased that I got some of it to work. Couldn't really do much other than centre the moon in frame, as it was literally just a small crack in the cloud's with pitch black beyond; did try some horizontal shots but they all came out blurred/incorrectly exposed.

Maybe if you bumped up the ISO and stopped down the lens to increase depth of field (and used AI Servo) you'd get sharper shots. Dunno if that's any help.

I prefer to use manual focus, I know not everyone does.

But for me the fun in photography is not just the pictures but the art in taking the shot and working with the camera to setup the focus and the aperture and the shutter speed.

 

The Orchids atleast I probably could of done better with a large depth of field; cat shots deffo wouldn't of worked though as lower aperture would of meant lower shutter speed to get exposure right and slower shutter speed in that instanced would just increase issues with the cat not staying still.

ISO I leave it on auto and isn't lower iso better for sharpness anyway, after all higher iso increases noise doesn't it?

I'd recommend you get a manual focus screen for your body as the standard screen isn't geared towards manual focus.

 

My idea of stopping down was to include boosting the ISO (maintaining the shutter speed) and increasing the depth of field - limiting the effect of poor focusing.

 

Higher ISOs do produce noisier images but a noisy image is always better than a blurry out of focus or shaky image.

I don't use the screen, I use the viewfinder

I don't use the screen, I use the viewfinder

 

There is a focusing screen in the viewfinder. That's what I was talking about. In my body it's just a case of pulling the old one out from above the mirror and putting a new one in. But I don't know it's as simple as that for your body.

How is not geared toward manual focus?

The whole point of the SLR format is that the viewfinder image is what the lens is seeing no?

So how can the viewfinder be adversely effected by manual focus opposed to auto-focus?

How is not geared toward manual focus?

The whole point of the SLR format is that the viewfinder image is what the lens is seeing no?

So how can the viewfinder be adversely effected by manual focus opposed to auto-focus?

 

If you've ever used a non AF SLR you'll notice that the viewfinder is completely different to you camera's.

 

The MF screens generally take advantage of our vernier acuity - our ability to determine alignment. So it splits the image up and if the image is focused you'll see a single image but if it isn't in then you'll see a displaced part of the image in the ring (microprism screen) or prism (split prism).

 

There's some good info here:

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focusing_screen

Oh I have seen some stuff about them before, aren't such focus screens heavily flawed in use with long zoom lens and kind of a hindrance in terms of doing short depth of field/layered shots where the entire shot is unlikely to be in sharp focus and in terms of compositional creative the in-focus area is liable to be off centre

Oh I have seen some stuff about them before, aren't such focus screens heavily flawed in use with long zoom lens and kind of a hindrance in terms of doing short depth of field/layered shots where the entire shot is unlikely to be in sharp focus and in terms of compositional creative the in-focus area is liable to be off centre

 

I don't see why they'd be flawed when using longer lenses but there would be an issue with focusing and recomposing (something you could avoid by using AF and selecting the AF point you need)

Oh I have seen some stuff about them before, aren't such focus screens heavily flawed in use with long zoom lens and kind of a hindrance in terms of doing short depth of field/layered shots where the entire shot is unlikely to be in sharp focus and in terms of compositional creative the in-focus area is liable to be off centre

 

I don't see why they'd be flawed when using longer lenses but there would be an issue with focusing and recomposing (something you could avoid by using AF and selecting the AF point you need)

 

From what I read with the slower lens such as zoom lens at wider aperture such focus screens go near black and thus make it near impossible to use.

Oh I have seen some stuff about them before, aren't such focus screens heavily flawed in use with long zoom lens and kind of a hindrance in terms of doing short depth of field/layered shots where the entire shot is unlikely to be in sharp focus and in terms of compositional creative the in-focus area is liable to be off centre

 

I don't see why they'd be flawed when using longer lenses but there would be an issue with focusing and recomposing (something you could avoid by using AF and selecting the AF point you need)

 

From what I read with the slower lens such as zoom lens at wider aperture such focus screens go near black and thus make it near impossible to use.

 

Well that's true (kind of) the slower lens lets less light through (especially at narrower apertures) and it can be very hard to use. But for stationary subjects you can focus wide open then stop down and shoot. That's what I do with my cheapo macro lens (but I don't have the manual focusing screen - so I expect a lower number of keepers, but stopping down gives me a better keeper rate).

I think, based on how I use my camera, a mf screen is gonna be a greater hindrance than it is an aid to me. As it's predominantly only the macro shots I am still have substantial focus issues on (and even then not 100% consistently) the few zoom lens shots and standard lens I'm not finding any huge difficulties.

Anyway todays random shots added cause I was quite pleased with them, the later 3 especially.

I'm Orbiit on DevArt, btw. :)

New photos added, was interesting trying to balance exposure of bright sky and dark-ish cat; as you can see in 3rd some went blown out beyond recovery.

Last 3 are personal faves.

Some new sunset grabs added.