Ringing in a new year with a "blue moon"

As the party goers were pouring back onto the streets of Toronto after the stroke of midnight, I looked up into the overcasted sky. The moon appeared different. It was bright and turned the sky blue. It's rare to see a blue moon on New Year Eve.

I took a couple of shots at 17mm, f/2.8, ISO 800.

P.S. Besides this blue moon, this is also this "Blue Moon" by The Marcels, 1961. Enjoy!

Tamron's Vibration Compensation (VC)

My first post of 2010.

I mentioned earlier that the Tamron 17-50mm I just bought has Vibration Compensation (VC). I also mentioned that through the viewfinder, you can see the image jerking a little when the VC mechanism kicks in. Normally, this is fine, but when I used the delay timer on my camera and flash, the jerking caused major problems. I am not certain which component (delay timer or flash, or some specific settings) was causing problems, but see it for yourself. Below are crops of photos I took last night.

For these shots, the camera was placed on top of a backpack as I did not bring my tripod along. The flash was my SB-800 speedlight. The camera was set to slow+rear sync with the flash. I set the timer to 10 seconds, just long enough for me to run into the picture.

This crop of a photo, shot with VC, clearly shows the jerking:


On the spot, I initially attributed the blur to a possible camera shake as the camera was placed on a backpack with a big speedlight flash on the hotshoe so it could have been unstable. However, three consecutive shots gave the same result. It dawned on me then it could have been the Vibration Compensation -- yes, VC should not have been turned on in the first place, but with the Nikkor 18-200mm VR lens, I never had problems leaving VR on on a tripod.

Here was another shot without VC:


Know your gears. Know their quirks. Know their limitations.

Happy New Year! Happy Shooting!

The big lenses

Sometimes, it's great to have that long telephoto lens. They are heavy but they are worth the weight sometimes.

On my hike yesterday, I came across a family of deers. There was no way I could shoot anything decent with my Tamron 17-50mm or my Nikkor 18-200mm. They were way too far away, probably 200m from where I was, in the meadows in a clearing at the bottom of a hill -- I was at the top. I had thought of bringing my Tokina 80-400mm lens along for this hike and lucky me, I got to use it once.

400mm, f/5.6, ISO 800, 1/400 secs:

doe in the centre, 100% cropped:

The photo above was shot with manual focus. The auto-focus had trouble finding the sweet spot, as shown in a 100% crop of an auto-focus shot below -- there were just too many things in front of this buck below:



I had also thought of climbing down the hill to get closer and shoot with the Tamron 17-50mm to get a really sharp photo but as one can see, they were observing me as I was observing them ....

Tamron 17-50mm Di II VC, part III

I visited the Tiffany Falls and Sherman Falls yesterday in Hamilton. It was a drabby day. The sky was gray and snowing. There was not much to shoot as everything looked like a photo from the past -- black and white. I wanted to test out the Tamron outdoors though so I took a few pictures. I like this lens. The photos are sharp.

50mm, f/2.8, ISO 200, 1/250 secs:

50mm, f/29, ISO 200, 1/2.5 secs:

20mm, f/9, ISO 200, 1/20 secs:

The start of a day

So this morning I woke up early, quite early in fact. It was barely 4:30am. The music I left playing last night was blaring into my ears so I guess I had to wake up. The morning feels so quiet after I turned it off just minutes ago. Anyways, I am contemplating at driving out to Hamilton this morning to do some hiking and winter photography. I had planned to be at a certain location by 9am but there is only one thing ... rush hour traffic. I might have the day off but the world is still running on its own accord. It takes 40 minutes to get to this one location but I'd be in rush hour traffic if I leave at 8am. I might sit in traffic for 1.5 hours, not something I'd enjoy. Maybe I should leave at 7am. Hmmm....

I'm also still tired. The Sound of Music did not doze me off immediately last night so I was up until 12am. I'm going to take a nap now.

NAS restored

Almost two months ago, my NAS that I built with 4 x 300 GB SATA drives died. After trying out three power supply units from old hardware I have, I thought the NAS motherboard got fried. Last week, I decided to visit craigslist.ca and found a PIII machine someone wanted to dispose of for $10. The bonus there was that this PIII runs at 1GHz while mine runs at 450MHz. A rather adventurous drive into Etobicoke and one and a half hour later, I came back home and fixed the NAS. I was lucky enough it was just the power supply unit. Apparently, all the power supply units I had tested with were broken too. Great.

The NAS is up and running. Backups are running as usual and I have access to all my pictures again.

I did not move everything over to the PIII I bought for two reasons: there are fewer RAM slots in this PIII than in mine and while a 1GHz boost would be nice, 450MHz is sufficient, and don't want to fix it if it ain't broke.

White Balance

Well, this is something I have to remember the next time I shoot anything, especially indoors -- set the proper white balance setting! Now, it sounds like a rather easy thing to do. After all, there are preset options for sunny skies, cloudy days, shades, incandescent lights, fluorescent lights, etc. but indoors, guessing what type of light bulbs are being used can be difficult. There could be a mix of incandescent and fluorescent light bulbs in use at the same time and even the bulbs could be coloured. I'm trying to stay away from guessing so if your camera has a custom "PRE" white balance option like the D80 has, that's what I'd use.

On the D80, I get to the PRE option by holding on the WB button and using the rear dialer to change the WB options until it reads "PRE" on the LCD.

To set the right white balance for the current light condition:

• Hold the WB button until "PRE" on the LCD starts blinking
• Hold a white piece of paper (I used tissue paper) in front of the lens and focus on it in the centre of the viewfinder.
• Depress and release the shutter button to take a shot of the tissue paper.
• The LCD should then read "good".
  

Leave the white balance setting at the "PRE" option and start shooting. If you move to an area of the house where the lighting changes, repeat the steps above to reset the white balance.

If you need to use flash, repeat those same steps above to set the proper white balance with flash. If you did not reset the white balance with flash but are using flash, the picture will turn out very cold blue.