You might not imagine that the Cribbs Causeway retail park in Bristol would be the most romantic or picturesque venue for photography. But using the same filters and settings as I described in my previous post, I managed these shots.
Today I decided that I wanted to go out and take a photo of blurred pedestrians walking down a street, using a slow shutter.
I’d never tried this before but I thought I knew what to do. I used both of my ND filters (an ND4 and an ND8) to limit the amount of light coming into the camera. I didn’t know which settings to choose on the camera so before I set out I had a fiddle with the settings in the well-lit office. On my trusty camera, a Fuji S9600, using the lowest sensitivity (ISO 80) and the smallest aperture (f/11) I was able to get a shutter speed of 25 seconds without overexposing the shot. I reminded myself that outdoors it would be brighter, and perhaps I would have to use a shutter speed more like 5 seconds.
It turns out in the end I wasn’t able to have a longer shutter than one second. I’m still reasonably pleased with the photo, though. Shame there weren’t many people about.
The moral of the story is: The sun is much, much brighter than you think!
This is also a decisive question – boiled or scrambled? Eggscellent.
From Stu:
“This week, your challenge is to take a picture of a creepy-crawly – spider, insect, etc. Preferably a real one, and preferably close-up enough to make out detail. Preferably artistically pleasing rather than just a documentary shot.”
I hope this picture of a couple of flies on the job will suffice!
I’ve been playing with my new slide scanner. The typical image quality is demonstrated below.
The colours are nice but unfortunately I can’t seem to get it to work at full resolution. I’ll keep plodding on. Worse yet, the auto-loader isn’t particularly good at all – the screenshot below shows the tray of 50 slides I scanned overnight. Look how many failed to load properly!
This week’s challenge was to create a storyboard, composed of 3 to 9 pictures.
This is my first attempt, based on an initial idea. I may have another idea before the week is out – if not I’ll submit this instead.
Don’t laugh at my editing skills – I’m still a n00b at GIMP and so after adding the frames using a wizard in GIMP I booted into Windows and used Microsoft Publisher to stitch them together…
This week in Stu’s Tuesday Challenge we were asked to set a self-timer of 10 seconds, press the button, and get as far as from the camera as possible.
This is me riding my bike through the 1/3-mile long Staple Hill tunnel on the Bristol-Bath railway path.
It took quite a few attempts to get right, as I had no idea how far I could cycle from a standing start in 10 seconds – and I wanted to be in the perfect position where I was silhouetted against the light at the end of the tunnel, but not illuminated by it. I’m rather pleased with the result.
I also zoomed in a little, as (not wanting to sound boastful) ten seconds of cycling away from a camera without zoom would have made me a dot in the distance 🙂
This photo was taken in 1973. I’ve uploaded to demonstrate the quality of the Veho 35mm slide scanner I used.
Jonathan Gazeley 