Photos Photo of the Day

Olympus E-3 / 25mm Zuiko / F/2.8 ISO 100

 

Both on K100D Super with Sigma 70-300mm APO blah blah blah.

Not sure if I am quite as keen on the first shot as the second. Don't think it'll be getting put up on my site to be hooonest.

 

finally got back into some more concert gigs:

 

Another robin, and wonderful blue sky

 

Taken a month or so at Rockingham on a Red Letter Day, driving the R8 around in the wet. The traction control stopped me binning it on several occasions

 

Cattle grazing in The Manger near Uffington, Oxfordshire. Me and my gear got very wet in the making of this photograph, but it was totally worth it.

I metered this ray of light as it moved across the rolling mounds in the background and waited for it to (hopefully) position itself above the grazing cattle. It did and the exposure proved to be a good one - it was gone in a matter of seconds and then started to howl it down again.

 

I thought I recognised the location. We used to picnic up in the fort at the top as kids, back when we lived in Abingdon. Good shot there.

 

And some edited of the above

Flower thing.

Bird Feeder.

 

Dandelion is great.

 

One more concert. These are Will Hoge, who came dangerously close to overshadowing the band they opened for.

 

and the headliner, NEEDTOBREATHE, it was incredibly poor-lit (looked great to the crowd but not to my camera)

 

I'd say it looked pretty damned good to your camera. Great shots!

 

Thanks. I try not to shoot above ISO 2000 but had to for the second band and was a challenge, even at 3200.

 

What body/lens? I'm sorry if you've already mentioned it, I have terrible memory

 

For concerts, I take the Nikon D700 with nikkor 17-35 f2.8 and 70-200 f2.8

 

Cool, thanks.

 

Hey, it's not art unless you suffer for it. Nice shot!

How is it working with a light meter in the field? Do you find that the exposure calculated by the meter is different from the in-camera exposure? If so, is there a noticeable improvement?

 

It's a pretty cool location, yeah - I've visited it a few times before, but never with a camera. I think a lot of it came down to the light - it's a very flat scene without good light. I've got a few images that show this, but I was lucky to get a few shots with very good light as well - that's the nature of the mixed conditions we had on Sunday.

Haha, too true - some of my favourite images were when I got soaked through. It just adds something else to the shot.

The light meter is one of convenience more than anything - it'll give the same readings as the camera's built-in spot meter (I use it as a reflective spot meter, rather than an incident light meter), but there's no longer the problem of having to meter various parts of the scene, assigning them to zones, working out filtration and then having to recompose an image quickly in changing light such as what I recorded in this image.

Instead, I can compose the scene, gauge filtration requirements and effectively wait for the light with meter in one hand and cable release in the other. I've calibrated the meter to my camera, so that the readings will be the same as the camera without filters attached. I've then got to calculate exposure based on filter factors, polarisation (if using a polariser) and ND grad filters. Quite often the correct exposure, based on my interpretation of the scene - assigning surfaces or light values to zones using the Zone System - is not the average exposure recorded by the centre-weighted meter in the camera.

I typically leave the camera's meter set to centre weighted because that's what I'll use if I do need to record an image quickly. An average exposure at least gives you the opportunity to salvage something in post processing (that's probably a little harsh) and should record a decent amount of dynamic range - it'll give you something to work with. Sometimes I'll still use exposure compensation if there are particularly bright or dark areas that I want to move into a different zone, though.

 

Um, so you've got the D700, and stuck to Iso 2000? Or are you saying you like to stick to that and lower generally, but didn't for the convert? You lost me. I mean if it's the former, why not just go higher, how big were you going to print/process?