Seasons Greetings to everyone! All the best wishes for a fine year end, I hope it’s a happy and memorable time.
For this entry, I’m posting an image I made for an LVS online course assignment. I started taking courses in digital photography there when I bought a used Canon EOS 10D DSLR (digital single lens reflex-big, heavy body; interchangeable lenses) camera from an old friend, who swore it was driven only on weekends by a few students who needed a digital loaner to use while taking a course at his California central coast photographic institute. I hadn’t used my old nikons for much more than taking pictures of my Hallowe’en pumpkin carving since the early 1990s and was sorely in need of an interpreter for the digital device. The digital controls take a lot of getting used to ( I still keep trying to twist the base of the lens where the old lenses had the aperture control, now located on a dial function on the body) and the classes get me outside and looking for compositions in the yard. The assignment that led to the picture above was to take a two images of the same thing to compare image sharpness. For one image, hand-hold the camera and take a slow exposure; hold it as steady as possible. For the second image, mount the camera on a tripod, if possible lock the mirror up, attach a remote switch to the camera, and with all of these precautions against camera vibration, record the image. …discuss…
I walked around the house, looking for something to shoot in the same yard that had supplied the images for the previous two or three courses, and an old trowel on an expanded mesh iron patio table caught my eye. With the two leaves along the handle, it made a composition I liked, not using the whole trowel but sort of nudging the ‘inner gardener’ to think about a garden lying fallow, absorbing nutrients and resting. To take the portion of the handle and blade that I wanted, I had to place my left elbow across an old terrarium that was next to the trowel. This allowed me to hang the camera down from above, while I stood on tiptoe, and tried not to breathe. Feeling (over)confident about the support, I set the camera to record enough depth of field, pushing my exposure down to 1/30th of a second, a good deal slower than the 1/160 sec. arrived at by the common rule of thumb for sharp pictures: use a shutter speed at, or faster than, 1/focal length of the lens. In the small LCD display on the camera, it looked to me like I had my shot. It wasn’t until several days later that I would come back with the tripod to take the same subject with the camera on the tripod…and discovered I couldn’t! The tripod legs spread wide enough that when the camera was at the right height, they hit the side of the table and could not be moved into place. I had to settle for an unprepossessing image of more of the trowel, the leaves losing their framing effect, the added attraction of the very old, very cracked water sealing putty and filthy glass of the bottom of the terrarium. It was very ugly and I have not posted it, but it was undeniably tack-sharp! On comparing the two in Photoshop at full size the difference became quite apparent. So, I’ve become a tripod enthusiast. I’d be even *more* enthusiastic with one of the new carbon-fiber lightweight tripods but maybe if I keep doing “curls” with my old, heavy, tripod I can stay strong enough to use it.
Yes the picture is a bit ‘muzzy’; I still like the ‘feel’ of the image.
Holiday Cheers!
pete
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