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November 26, 2001 Slow Shutter Speeds and Long Lenses. We began class with Bob, a guest, who talked about his new 400 mm f/2.8 lens and what he has learned about how to use it and how not to use it. Key to his presentation was the avoidance of using the dagerous shutter speeds with long lenses. Whether you are using a 400 mm f/2.8 lens, or a 200 mm f5/6 lens, you will have degraded image quality if you use shutter speeds in the 1/30 to 1/4 second range. Mirror slap in the camera at these shutter speed will cause some blurring of the image. There are two solutions this problem. If you have mirror lock-up on your camera body, use it for these shutter speeds when using any lens 200 mm or longer. If you don't have mirror lock-up, avoid these shutter speeds. I was shooting a fall landscape in Colorado with a 300 mm lens. I had focused on a group of trees across a valley so depth of field was not critical. My meter reading was around f/8 at 1/8 second. I took a couple of photos at that setting. Then I changed to f/16 at 1/2 second. The 1/2 second shots were sharp and the 1/8 second photos were slightly blurry. I did not have mirror lock-up on my camera body at the time, and 1/8 second was not a good shutter speed for a long lens. We looked at slides of reptiles, amphibians, and birds and talked about how to photograph these creatures. Reptiles and amphibians requite a slow ground level approach and an animal that is not too nervous. I have had some frogs flee when I was 20 feet away and had other frogs in the wild let me creep up to within inches. Bird photography is tough to do except for large birds used to a human presence (like at city, state, and national parks), or in aviaries where you can get close to the smaller birds. These are the places learn bird photography. One of the few places to photograph small birds in the wild without superlong, megabuck lenses is Point Pelee National Park in Canada on a spring fly day. Point Pelee is about one hour southeast of Detroit. If you catch a good day in mid-May the phtography can be great. You can get to Point Pelee's web site from my links page. I recommend three excellent bird photography books and one on photographing reptiles and amphibians elsewhere at this site. For our in class project, we tried painting with light using flash or flashlights. We also did our weekly review of student work. Next week, Dec 3, will be out last class. Bring some of your favorite slides from this semester and some goodies or soda pop to share. |
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December 1, 2001 |
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Copyright © Jim Doty, Jr. All rights reserved. |
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