Resisting the temptation, I grabbed the opportunity to take a few photos while in Muscat last weekend. Three are reproduced here for your delight or abuse. I trust I'm allowed to submit more this month, should the opportunity arise?
Concrete DolphinsNikkor 18-200 at 36mm
F4.5
1/2000s
Definitely an obvious candidate for 'Three'. There are numerous concrete statues along the corniche in Muscat. Al Bahri Road, N23 37.27' E058 33.78' if anyone's particularly interested.
The enormous shutter speed was to allow a large aperture and thus throw the background out of focus. I also did a little post-processing here and there to increase the blue of the sky slightly, plus the usual cropping and reduction to 800 pixels high. The top dolphin is a bit dark, but I didn't want to blow out the highlight on the left dolphin. My attempts at dodging and burning were less than impressive, and are not reproduced here!
Corniche by nightNikkor 18-200 at 62mm
F5
2/3s
Taken in pretty much the same location as the Dolphins, only later and looking in the opposite direction. I took loads of these, trying to get the full moon just above the fort. Having failed to bring my tripod, all were hand-held or propped against walls, and most attempts were horribly blurred, incorrectly exposed or both.
I played around with ASA 1600 as well as ASA 200, but got a lot of noise on the images. The photo presented above is the best of the bunch, cut to portrait in order to emphasise the fort and the moon rather than the row of shops reflected in the sea. Usual cropping and image reduction, and I also had to go over the sky and clone out various random pinpricks of noise. They look like stars, but are single spots of cyan or magenta...
It would have been nice to get some features on the moon's disc, but I failed to capture anything on any image.
What about 'Three'? Count the antennae on the fort.
Junk shopNikkor 18-200 at 65mm
F5
1/30s
This place was a veritable Aladdin's cave of Arabian-inspired rubbish, somewhere in the covered souq. There are three khanjars, which gives me the excuse for the photograph. (There are also three scorpions in shot, but that isn't why I took the photo.) I shot with available light and with flash; the version without flash looked more pleasing, so that one makes the cut.
A more general shot of the shop front is shown below, just to give you an insight into Clutter: Professional Edition...
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Tripods I don't know about, but there were no problems with photos in the covered souq, except once. I was trying for three khanjars hanging in the front of a khanjar shop (short DOF to have the hundreds on the back wall out of focus) and some unknown person repeated, "No pictures."
ReplyDeleteI think someone thought I was trying to take pics of ladies; actually I was shooting over their heads. The photography policeman never identified himself.