chasing the focus

Long days with a lot of light – and short nights with almost non-existent darkness. And even that short darkness isn’t pitch black but dusky. Finland at its best. Beautiful.

Yeah, I know. I post a lot of horsey pics. But I don’t think anyone can ever get tired of those beautiful creatures! So here we go again: This is Essee (Estonian horse) and her two daughters. The black one is Ruusu (Rose) and the small one again Riemu a.k.a. Röömu.

I found a great photography blog via a friend. It’s called “Nikon Sniper” and authored by Stephen Baird. Having read his posts for a while today I’ve found that he not only has a fun sense of humour but a great attitude towards photographing. Already now he has inspired me a lot via his blog! At least go and read his text  “My General Guidelines To Photography“. It’s a valuable package to read, even if I don’t agree with all of it – but there are many ways to do this one thing, right? Like he prefers to shoot in shutter priority whereas I have my reasons to use aperture priority most of the time.

You want a photo too? Ok, here’s one. Taken in April, somewhere. And why did I post this pic? No reason. I just sort of like it :)

Looking at this picture on my computer screen my daughter said:
“Did you take that picture? It doesn’t look like one of yours. It looks like those example pictures in the cell phones – it’s so perfect.”

Not sure if that was a compliment or not…

Seems it’s been a while again since my last post. Sorry for that… I have been photographing some but never had enough energy or time or inspiration – or what ever – to prepare the photos for further use. However, here’s something.

In the summer mom always needs me to take care of her house plants when she vanishes into the country. This year she forgot to take her ultimate treasures – two miniature citrus trees – with her, so I moved them into my kitchen to make sure they won’t die while she’s away. And what do you know – one evening as I came home I was greeted by a strong sweet scent: One of the trees was blooming! And of course I had to photograph the flowers…

The first one is photographed with my Canon 7D using a Lensbaby 3G lens. That lens, unlike Lensbaby Composer, doesn’t need a special macro kit for getting closer to the subjects: By expanding the lens you can get the smallest focusing distance shrink. This is what I did in this first picture.

The second picture is also with the Lensbaby 3G but from a “normal” focusing distance.

The third photo is a sort of super macro: I used my excellent Canon 60 mm F2.8 macro lense attached to a Kenko 36 mm extension tube. The problem with a combination like this is that the depth of field becomes extremely limited. So here I used an aperture of f13 and it still wasn’t quite enough.

The fourth image is a traditional one – taken with a plain 60 mm macro lens. And truthfully – I find it rather boring.

Armas (=Finnish for “darling”) is a french bulldog. Here he’s watching a steeplechase competition at the riding school and enjoying the sun :)

The setting: Photographing horses
The gear: EOS 7D with a 70-200 f4L
The target: A hawk hovering above my head
The problem: Hawk is way further and somewhat smaller than a bunch of horses doing steeplechase. 200 mm isn’t nearly enough for photographing a hawk in flight – not even with a converter, which was safely tucked in my gearbag. Big help it was there, and should I have started digging it out of there the hawk would’ve been long gone before I would’ve been ready. So I had to make do with what I had.

This was the result:

Not really impressing, huh? Ok, so I wasn’t even expecting anything strikingly good with the gear I had. Just a decent photo that showed a beautiful hawk at flight. After some cropping, levels tuning etc. this was what I came up with:

Well, at least it shows the focus is where it should be and you can see it’s a hawk and some detail too. But it’s still not pretty and also it’s very boring. So I fiddled again and came up with something I actually kind of like. But still, next time I want to have that 700 mm f2.8 tube that only weighs about 200 grams!

So, here’s my compromise:

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This is Rööm (a.k.a. Riemu) again – now five weeks old, enjoying a beautiful spring evening outside with her mom.

I’ve been making a website for a friend and this image happened as a side product. The evening when this photography session took place in Helsinki-Vantaa airport was very gloomy and dark but I managed to get a couple of decent snaps anyway – and postprocessing helps, too.

This aeroplane was just about to leave from the VIP terminal, carrying Finnish figure skaters :)

Just a comfy sofa and this set – and isn’t life good?!