More Shots from the Hip

Here I am in The Eternal City. The place is full of Roman ruins, ancient statues, Renaissance art and armed police officers.

And the latter have handguns on their hips. I tried candid photographs at the airport, bu a combination of low light, fast movement and a desire not to be arrested produced blurred and generally useless pictures.

But here's one taken outside the Capitoline museums. There are thousands of cameras all around, and I was some distance away. Check out the minuscule depth of field.

Nikon D300s
Tamron 200-400 at 400mm
F/6.3
1/250
ISO 200

More bunnies to hug

So there I was in Dubai Mall. For once, camera in hand. Ironically, the shop was not "Lapin" (which is French for rabbit as any fule kno), but about two doors down. No grief; indeed actual approval from the nice lady in the shop, to take photos.

Nikon D300s
Nikkor 18-200 @ 80mm
1/30s & F/5.6
ISO Auto 1600

Shot with available light, this cute stuffed rabbit is poking out of a carrier bag as if it's about to be taken home and hugged by a small child. I wanted to blur the otherwise possible distraction in background, and I think I achieved this. The subject is a bit central, but a crop to put the rabbit to the left would have lost great chunks of carrier bag, and the subject would have been looking out of frame if it had been too far to the right. So bullseye it is. Tweaks are limited to cropping and just a little colour enhancement.

The light streaming in from the shop front looks, and indeed is, natural daylight.


Nikon D300s
Nikkor 18-200 @ 170mm
1/30s & F/5.6
ISO Auto 1400

This one is hopefully reminiscent of the shelf in a nursery. The huggable stuffed bunny is next to something "ABC"; as indicative of childhood as anything else available. I did not set anything up, which is why the irritating picture frame is in shot. Post-processing is limited to cropping, abut of colour palette enhancement and a small rotation.

The light is almost all artificial tungsten shop lights.


Nikon D300s
Nikkor 18-200 @ 112mm
1/30s & F/5.6
ISO Auto 560

This luminous rabbit should be suitably disturbing for small children.

Illuminated by tungsten house lights plus lit from within.

With all the shots, I used ISO Auto to control shutter speed to 1/30s in order to hand-hold the camera. This avoids both camera shake and the tripod police.

Paul's LETTERS

I've been in Blighty for a week. At least, that was the plan. The unexpected extension to my stay because of a volcanic eruption has been a mixed blessing. I've found time to produce a couple of offerings on this month's subject, and these are produced below for your comment and criticism.

Rural Letter Box

Nikon D70s
Nikkor 18-200 @ 200mm
F/8
1/125s

Spring in England. I framed the little letter box with daffodils and trees, using reduced depth of field to avoid the bright yellow flowers from distracting too much from the main subject.

A piece of Victoriana

Nikon D70s
Nikkor 18-200 @ 62mm
F/5
1/180s

One of the remaining Victorian post boxes. Also note the Ordnance Survey benchmark on the brickwork below the box itself. This is located on a quiet corner in Plympton, just down the road from where I went to school all those aeons ago. The picture is tightly cropped to eliminate distracting plastic bag rubbish and hideous garden gnomes in the garden to the left.

Baby on board

Nikon D70s
Nikkor 18-200 @ 26mm
F/4
1/20s

I borrowed the scenery from some good friends. Photographers with young families will find this scene all too familiar. Hand-held at 1/20s to exploit natural light (aren't VR lenses great?) and a low child's-eye-view.

War Cry

Nikon D70s
Nikkor 18-200 @ 120mm
F/5.6
1/125s

Lots of letters here. There's the print in the paramilitary publication, and also the hoarding advertising the computer games shop where the soldier is standing.

It can be difficult to get long shots like these in a busy pedestrian precinct. Enormous numbers of shoppers conspire to walk in front of the camera at the very moment the shutter button is pressed. This is the only one where I was able to crop out all pedestrian clutter.

Bookshop

Nikon D70s
Nikkor 18-200 @ 112mm
F/5.6
1/125s

Lots of books, which of course contain millions of letters, in Waterstone's bookshop. I should have liked to true-up the vertical on the left-hand side as it's an architectural detail, but unfortunately I'm away from home and without Photoshop. A slightly wider version caught the sky that was a boring flat grey rather than glorious blue. Hence this close-cropped image.

Mini me

I have got my first couple of 'Miniature' photos in early. There were some plans involving Grand Stores and some macro extension tubes, but these plans went awry after visiting the shop. In brief, a Nikon D70 won't talk to its lens through the tubes, no matter what the catalogue might say to the contrary. Neither will a D40, D60 or D80. They work fine with a D300s, but this seems like a very expensive solution to a simple problem.

Options for macro lenses do not necessarily involve buying macro lenses. An adaptor ring enables a normal lens to be turned around so that the light flows backwards and the lens focuses on a very close subject. Extension tubes push the lens further away from the camera's focal plane, again decreasing the distance between subject and lens. Neither of these worked for me and my antediluvian camera, so I ended up going more expensive.

I now own a nifty fifty F2.8 with a macro facility. Two birds crushed to death under the same oversized boulder.

So this morning I wandered around the back garden, snapping at anything that didn't fly or run away.

Flower

Nikon D70s
Sigma 50mm macro
F/4
1/3000s

The shallow depth of field on a macro lens means that it's impossible to get the entire surface of one of these flowers in focus without aiming straight down at it, or else stopping down the aperture and having a long blurring shutter speed. So I shot from further away and got some bokeh background.

Fruit

Nikon D70s
Sigma 50mm macro
F6.7
1/180s

Shot looking upwards at these mysterious fruit. The tree is in the back garden, but I haven't the foggiest idea of its species. Regarding the photo, this one is the best of several attempts. Sign of the amateur: confessing to getting duff pics!

Mini mall

Nikon D70s
Nikkor 18-200 at 32mm
F4.2
1/45s

Heavily photoshopped with successive bands of Gaussian blur to fake the minuscule depth of field normally provided by macro lenses. The effect is, I hope, to make this aisle in the Mall of the Emirates look like a detailed model.

"Whooo!" not "Whooom!"

Nikon D70s
Nikkor 28-200 @ 170mm, F/5.6
1/160 sec
Built-in flash

I promise this is the last of my 'Animals'.

Camera-mounted flash produced all kinds of red-eye problems, so I did the dirty deed with that Adobe software. Cropping, and shrinking aside, I also took Richard's earlier tip to boost the colours, just to see what would happen.

Off-camera flash might have been the way forward, but I didn't have the kit with me. It was a day trip to a theme park, falconry centre and petting zoo. The birds of prey were not part of the latter.

Actually, when zoomed into the original the detail isn't particularly sharp. I'm hoping that by reducing the resolution in an 800x600 no-one will notice.

Sharjah: a model town

Here is a little piece of extracurricular activity. While I was up on the roof looking for 'Buildings', this image ended up in the camera. The original idea was to show the white law court buildings over in the distance, but what I've produced here is more fun.

Photoshop Elephants 2 proved nowhere near as co-operative as CS3 in the online tutorial, but I did what I could by selecting areas and increasing the Gaussian blur as I moved further away from the sharp area. It's not quite right: there are some issues with lighting columns and trees that should not have varying blur along their lengths, but this is a first attempt.



Incidentally, Sharjah doesn't have a cathedral, so in the strictest sense of the word it isn't a city.