Friday 28 February 2014

Macaw

This week I practiced my bird photography at Adelaide Zoo; birds in flight is so challenging, though I did get a reasonable image in the Macaw Freeflight Presentation; more practice needed.
Macaw in flight©Christine Linton

Macaw looking directly at me©Christine Linton

Friday 21 February 2014

Unknown seed

At the Adelaide Botanic Gardens, you can always find something unusual.  I went into see the Amazon water lily, and found instead this fantastic seed head hanging from a plant that is unknown to me (and I couldn't find the label).
unknown plant seed©Christine Linton
It looks to me just like the leg and foot of some T-Rex-type dinosaur!  You can see the flowering part of the plant in the background.
Technical details: Aperture Priority, F/2.8, ISO 100, shutter speed 1/30.
More photos of my trip can be seen on my other two blogs:
http://craftconversations.blogspot.com/ (coiled fern that looks like a textile)
and on



Thursday 20 February 2014

Dandelion seed head

I found this perfect dandelion seed head before any dispersal of the seeds; how lovely weeds can be!
dandelion seed head©Christine Linton
Technical details: overcast sky, used auto white balance: Aperture Priority, F2.8, shutter speed 1/30; AF 1 area.

Sunday 16 February 2014

My first bee

I was lucky enough to notice this bee busy pollinating a hibiscus this morning.

bee on hibiscus
©Christine Linton
Technical details: Aperture Priority F2.8, ISO 100

Thursday 13 February 2014

Bird photography

Sometimes, as an amateur, I can get a better shot of birds in action with a movie and then capture a frame from it in the computer software.  Birds are quite challenging to photograph if they're not just sitting still somewhere, and a bit of action makes a photo much more interesting, not just another bird sitting there.  In this shot I took a movie down at Henley Beach where some gulls were fighting over food on the beach, and captured this frame as my favourite action shot from it.
Silver gulls at Henley Beach, fighting over food©Christine Linton

Photographing from the heart

I read this phrase recently in a post by Rob Sheppard and it seems to mean this:  photograph things that mean something to you.  (By the way, read his post here, very interesting.)  My take today on this is that I am so relieved to have pouring rain after our recent bout of heatwaves, and I have been taking shots of water on the concrete where it is making ripples in the rain.
Ripple on concrete©Christine Linton
Technical details: Aperture Priority, F2.8, shutter speed 1/500 sec, ISO 800, AF 1 area, white balance - auto

Time lapse photography

I've been working over the last 6 weeks to get a progressive picture of my ginger lily flower opening.  Last year the only flower was eaten out by insects before it could open.  Six weeks ago I took my first photo of the flower stalk:
10th January 2014, ginger lily flower stalk ©Christine Linton
Every day or so I have photographed the developing flower - and now just as it is starting to look like it will open fully, we have had pouring rain:
13th Feb 2014, ginger lily flower stalk bent badly by heavy rain! ©Christine Linton
Technical details: Aperture Priority, F2.8, shutter speed 1/160, ISO 100, AF 1 area.

Monday 10 February 2014

Reflections in water

I recently took part in a day-long workshop with Rosey Boehm and recommend her workshop; I learnt so much about how to use my new camera.  Not just the technical stuff, which is definitely important; she took us through the settings on our cameras and how to use them to the best advantage as well as explaining things I didn't understand from the manual and clarifying things that were still a big foggy.  But just as important was the attitude to photography - finding what is going to be a good photo and what isn't; taking into account the light and how to work with it; and composition, mainly before you take the photo but also how to crop to best advantage.  Terrific stuff!
Here is the photo I took with all that in mind - actually I did crop also with her advice in mind too.  There was a bit too much plain blue sky and a bit too much vegetation at the foreground; also on one side was a large area of algal bloom in the lake, which unbalanced it.  All those I cropped.
Wetland lake at Lochiel Park©Christine Linton
Technical details: Aperture Priority, F.2.8, shutter speed 1/1000 sec, ISO 200, Auto focus 23 area, white balance - auto.

Sunday 9 February 2014

Eye focus

I've been practicing focusing on the eye of birds.
Ibis©Christine Linton
Technical details:  Aperture Priority, F2.8, shutter speed 1/1300, ISO 800, AF 1 area, white balance - cloudy

Thursday 6 February 2014

Rundle Mall Fountain

Today, being in Adelaide, I took the chance to photograph the Fountain in Rundle Mall before it is moved as part of the "regeneration".
Rundle Mall Fountain
Shutter Priority, shutter speed 1600, ISO 400, white balance - daylight
©Christine Linton
I wanted to try my faster shutter speeds on falling water, to get the separate drops - and it worked, I was so pleased with the results.  It was bright sunlight, soon after midday, meaning the water at the base is overexposed; and you can see the fencing behind where the work is going on.  I managed to avoid passers by which is unusual, I got lucky there.
Rundle Mall Fountain
Shutter Priority, shutter speed 1600, ISO 400, white balance - daylight
©Christine Linton
This photo above, I set the AF to 23 points, and the photo below the AF to 1 point - I can't really see any difference myself.
Rundle Mall Fountain
Shutter Priority, shutter speed 1600, ISO 400, white balance - daylight
©Christine Linton

Tuesday 4 February 2014

Shutter speeds outside

Yesterday I went out to experiment more with shutter speeds, shooting down by the river, and I found that I needed to change the ISO to get better results.  I wanted to shoot the water flowing over some rocks.  I found that I had a reasonable result with the shutter speed at 1/1500th - but there was a big difference between the results before and after changing the ISO.
first try, shutter speed 1/500th, ISO 100

This was of course too dark.  So I changed the ISO to 800.
2nd try, shutter speed 1/500th, ISO 800
Better, but still a bit dim.  So the ISO went to 1600.
3rd try, shutter speed 1/500th, ISO 1600
That gave me an image true to the early evening light at the time.

I did go on to increase the shutter speed to 1,000 and 2,000, but that is another story.



Sunday 2 February 2014

Experimenting with photographing moving things at different shutter speeds, the only convenient thing in front of my armchair was the pedestal fan:  this swoosh effect came from the effect of the fan oscillating towards me when I had a long shutter speed of one second, causing all that overexposure.  But I liked the swoosh from the centre of the fan upwards!
Technical details: Shutter Priority, shutter speed one second
F8, ISO 800, AF 1 area, white balance - auto