Photography from A to Z Part One

B is for Bee

Righto lets kick this blog off and what better way to start than with a couple of photos.
The sun was shining today as Spring is working it's way towards us here in Auckland so I thought I'd pop down to the local domain and see what I could find.
The flowers are starting to bloom very nicely and of course mother nature is busy at work, with the hard working loveable Bee being the number one harvester,

Both these images where shot with a 28-300mm Canon L lens at 200mm, on my 7D (note the 7D has a 1.6x so this works out at 320mm).
I would have like to have got closer to the subject but I'm sure the park ranger is not to keen on having the general public trundle through their new spring flower gardens.

So it's a start perhaps tomorrow I can look for a subject starting with the letter C, but hang on what about A??, ok i'll start from the beginning then

Camera Settings F5.6  1/160 -0.33 exposure ISO 200

 

A is for Aircraft

Yes I know A comes before B but it was an after thought, besides what's wrong with bucking the trend we all like to be different :).
This photo is of a trusty North American Harvard in which New Zealand is lucky to have approx 12 air worthy planes from the  1940's, still in flying condition.
They are very popular at air shows around NZ and have a very distinctive sound.
This particular plane (no 92), holds a special place in my heart as I had the pleasure in flying in this beauty over Auckland in 2013.
This shot was taken about 6 months before my flight, and I had only just purchased my 7D a few months prior. My previous camera was a Canon 450D which served me very well.

Learnings from this photo was definitely the shutter speed, and the single point focus. Previous shots leading up to this had the subject too dark and the prop was fully stationary.
However this one came out well as I opted to go with Single point focus, and dropped the shutter speed down to 1/200.

Camera Settings F8 1/200 ISO 400 AWB 300mm (480- on 7D)

 

 

C is for Car

With so many of these objects around it's hard not to snap the odd car now and again. The two images I have here are chalk and cheese. The Ferrari photo has had some post processing done but it was minimal. I can tell you that a lot of the style, detail and colour shift etc came from experimenting with HDR.

The only Photoshop work was the number plate blur, removing me from a nasty reflection in the front fender and the removal of an onlooker who’s head looked like it was stuck to the roof of the van in the rear of the shot. The rest is pretty much a custom camera scene setting whereby I adjusted saturation, contrast and a tweak to the colour tone settings.

Add finally 3 bracket shots 1 step either side of the centre and that's it.

The second shot of the mini in the field is a slot more straight forward. Just compose and point and click.

Tripod, HDR, exp +1,0,-1,  1/120 F4 ISO100, 35mm Custom Scene

 

Sigma 17-50mm F2.8  1/80 ISO 200