chasing the focus

Wow, almost a month since my last post here! Well, it’s been way too hot for me to do anything, especially go out with my camera. I don’t do well with heat! But the other day my husband called me from the yard – he had found a huge bright green catepillar. After some searching I identified it as a privet hawk moth (Sphinx ligustri, syreenikiitäjä) catepillar. It becomes a huge moth when “grown up“.

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.

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.

The animal theme continues…

The basic rule when photographing animals or kids or other subjects smaller than you is to get down on the same level as they are. But of course sometimes you can break that rule, too. Not because you’re too lazy to bend your knees but because you want to express something else with your photo.

This is Moriz in the doggy park. The photo says exactly what he is like, it sort of expresses the essence of this little sweet pooch :)

May I present to you – this is Rööm. She’s an Estonian horse, a beautiful small mare, 5 days old in these pictures. Her name is Estonian and means Joy (Riemu in Finnish).

The proud mom is a bit protective and with all the little people in the riding school there was no other option than trying to catch a couple of frames in bad conditions – but they came out allright anyway, considering. I’m hoping to get more pictures, better ones, some other day!

Clicking any picture takes you into my horse picture gallery.

I’ve been sort of hibernating and so has my camera. But today was a warm, beautiful sunny Saturday. For once the glorious weather came in the weekend! So I took my camera and went out. I didn’t go outside our own gate and still managed to find many delightful things! (Click an image to go into the original gallery)

Yes, the winter has been hard. Long, cold and hard. And it shows in the things that come out when the snow finally melts.

But the bikes have been deported from the greenhouse where they spend the winter. Hubby has started making room for potatoes and other growing stuff.

It’s finally warm enough for the pooches to be outside without their wooly sweaters. They love the sun and the warmth :)

And they shed……..

There’s still a lot of snow left so I had to do some shovelling to get where I wanted to…

…but it was worth the effort because I found these

and these

and these!

Gotta love it, don’t you think? :)

Today I actually pressed the shutter a couple of times. To be honest, I had to look for a while before I managed to locate my 50 mm lens… But the occasion was this handsome boy who turned four years old today :)