The shotgun barrels image in the slideshow below wasn’t my submission for the close up category, but other members of the Caterpillar Photographic Society said it should have been.
In the Close up category I had a few ideas of strange objects that I could take a close up picture of. Some of them, Hard Disk Drive internals, Shotgun Barrels, Flowers, a street sign that had “Close” on it, a cheese grater, a water droplet, some birds on a feeder and a ZX Spectrum keyboard.
As you can see from some of the images in this small slideshow, I spent some time on this topic.
With almost all of the photos on this category I was tinkering with my 50mm prime lens that I really didn’t know how to use but a couple of great things happened to help me learn about the Depth Of Field and also a feature on my camera when using Live View.
The shotgun barrels were my first attempt at using a very shallow depth of field (herein shortened to dof) and I managed to fluke a good one. It’s a picture of my Miroku 12 bore shotgun. You can see if you follow the link through to the flickr group that the very front of the barrels are in focus while just a very short distance up the length of the steel tubes it’s completely out of focus. I found this effect very effective and thought I could use it in other efforts.
The street sign was a light hearted attempt at going “outside the box”, yawn, and featured the word Close. The depth of field in here was played with and I learnt that a shallow dof was created at f2.8 and if I changed the f stop down to 4.0 it gave me a more pleasing photo. I didn’t use this photo as I posted it into the CatPS flickr group beforehand and thought it’d lost some of it’s impact.
The next photos I took were the cheese grater and it was a night time shoot with my ipad acting as a light-box underneath it to throw some cool colours up. I tilted the grater over my iPad and shot with a very shallow dof up the inside of the kitchen utensil. There were some good reflections in the sharp cupolas but I think that the scratches spoiled it somewhat so I decided not to use it.
The penultimate shot I’m going to describe here is the Gat Gun that we’ve all had when we were children as soon as we had the guts to go into the gun shop and buy one of the little .177 calibre toy guns. The gun is laying in the rear of the shot while the shallow dof is focused mainly on the centre pellet of five standing on a six yard target. The shallow dof then throws the targets in front and behind the central one out of focus and leaves you drawn to the pellets and the diagram. The shot was on the lowest f stop I get with my 50mm about 2.8 and the shutter speed 1/50th second. If you look at the front pellets of the five you’ll see that they’re also blurry, the dof was THAT shallow.
I mentioned a discovery about my camera above and it’s the way I got the focus smack on, on the centre pellet. To do it manually through the viewfinder was hit and miss using manual focus and the auto wasn’t that decisive either. That’s when I noticed the live view and thought I’d be able to do a better job of focussing on the lcd screen. Then out of pure flukeiness I pressed the + magnify button that’s normally reserved for chimping at images and to my surprise it zoomed in to 5x on the live view of the little pre-selected area. If I pressed the + mag button again it went to 10x and I could then move the little window around to find the object I wanted to focus on and then just twiddle the lens manually to get it spot on. Awesome!
The last photo that I’ll mention is the picture I entered into the Close Up category which is of a load of pellets arranged around a 6yd target. The centre line of the target containing the pellet on the bull was in focus and a shallow dof employed again, I was getting carried away, to keep focus on that slice of the picture. I used the zoom in on live view again to get the best possible focus. But then the battery decided not to last that long….
I didn’t win and the feedback I got here for changing from the shotgun barrels for the pellets was that I really should have stayed with it. What was I saying in the last post about choosing what pleases you and not others?
To summarise then:
- Get really close and look at angles you’d normally miss.
- Use light-boxes to illuminate for strange lighting effects,it makes some strange changes.
- Learn to balance the depth of field, really shallow doesn’t always make the most aesthetically pleasing picture.
- Read the camera manual properly and you’ll find those great features when you need them.
In the forthcoming post I’ll be a little briefer about the next topic that we featured which was “Night” (no flash allowed)
If you’ve any comments or criticism please feel free to leave it and I’ll take it on board or disagree with you, but in a nice way, not like the rest of the eejits on the web.
See you then.
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