SOUTH DEVON PHOTOGRAPHY AND TUITION

How to Make the Most of an Airshow with only a 200mm Kit Lens

Airshow photography at best can be quite a challenging pursuit.  Sadly, in the UK since the Shoreham airshow disaster, it seems that the aeroplanes are flying much further away from the crowds. This makes a lot of sense for safety reasons. However as a budding airshow photographer, this also makes it harder to capture those all impressive shots. So how is it possible to walk away with some great looking images with only minimal kit?  Below are some ideas to help out.   1). The first thing to do is accept the advantages and the limitations of the equipment that you are using.  A 200mm lens is possibly the least requirement for an airshow.  This is not to say it is impossible to get reasonably creative shots from an iPhone or similar camera phone. The following photograph shows a 200mm Nikon kit lens (bottom of image) flanked by the type of lens (a Sigma 150mm-500mm) that would have been useful to take on an airshow shoot.   The Sigma 150mm-500mm is a great lens for airshow photography, but one thing that makes the 200mm lens ideal is its size and weight.  Having a camera lens that is light allows for […]

A Voyage into Timelapse

Undoubtedly one of the most powerful techniques in Photography is timelapse.  It allows the viewer to watch little snapshots in time condensed down from much longer footage. With extreme timelapse it is possible to capture tiny buds opening in the blink of an eye, instead of having to observe them for days on end.  It has often been said that a timelapse of the sun moving from night to day is the ‘holy grail’ of photography because of the technical amount of knowledge and skill required to capture it. For an inexperienced photographer it is a great way of getting to know your camera settings and understanding how light changing can dramatically effect the exposure of a photograph.  Below is  one of my first timelapses. It was shot using Aperture priority and I kept my ISO very low at 100.  My white balance was set to cloudy so that the tones were rendered warmer in the picture and I made sure that I used a tripod.  I set my timings so that the camera fired a shot every 20 seconds. Then I sat down and relaxed. The resulting images were then imported into iMovie in order to string the individual […]

The Beauty of Nature

When photographing wildlife and flowers, cameras that have crop sensors are very useful as they tend to magnify the subject. [Best_Wordpress_Gallery id=”6″ gal_title=”The Beauty of Nature”]