chasing the focus

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.

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…

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 winter continues…  It has warmed up a bit but the snow blanket keeps getting thicker as we speak. I took this photo a couple of weeks back – it’s been too cold to go out there with my camera, so I’m digging into my archives.

Sick of this continuous icy coldness and all-covering whiteness I dove into my archives. Ahhhhh… only to be there with the pooch…!

This is not a technically perfect photo – actually far from it. But I like it anyway… The feathers are as I found them: Each clinging to its own stone. There’s another feather photo here. I took these in September of 2008 when spending a couple of days in Otaniemi, Espoo.

Another wintery picture of our younger pony girl – this time on the horse :)

Yesterday I missed at least two potentially great photos. The first one was on my way to work – I was late already so I didn’t stop… The row of maple trees down the road was covered with frost, the light came beautifully from behind them, through thick mist so that there was no distraction behind the maples as usually there is.

The second one was this pic. I was coming home from the camera club board meeting. The mist floated on the main street so that it covered a lot of the distractions and was like a soft blanket under the Christmas lights. I was busy going home and the traffic was pretty heavy – so I thought I’d come back later when hopefully the traffic would be a bit lighter. Only, two-three hours later when I went there was pretty much no mist left. So learn this: No matter how busy/tired/lazy/what ever you are, if you see a photo-op – then STOP and take the picture!

I think this is more or less (probably less) decent but in no way brilliant – not even good. I just couldn’t get the focus right, again. Also I couldn’t get a shot with no cars in it (probably should go there at 4 am instead of 10 pm) and the neon lights are just plain ugly. And someone, please teach me how to get decent photos of lights? So that they don’t become blown-out blobs in the middle of pitch-dark blackness… However, this photo is pretty much unedited: I only cropped it, added the copyright text and did a slight sharpening/contrast boost with unsharp mask.