Gonzales Drift
More from Gonzales Beach, beside the glacial erratic of recent posts, looking west.
This shot was pushing it a bit with the slowest bracket at 1/8th of a second, hand-held. Lots of luck involved in getting it even this close to being sharp. Still not enjoying WP crunching of what was a better image.
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Canon 5D MkII, Nikkor-N 24mm/f2.8 lens, f 2.8, ISO400, 3 brackets, 1/30th, +/- 2 EV, hand-held.
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burnt embers 
Love this, it’s incredible! Great drama in the black-and-white processing, and the HDR really brings out all the subtle areas of high contrast! Great work here, my friend!
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Thank you Toad. That beach sure has a lot to offer.
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I am with Ken, I think the image looks fine. 😀
Don’t feel like a rookie, I always try to keep my iso low even though the 5dm3 can certainly handle high iso (as you have seen). I wish there was an internal indicator in the view finder to remind me to check my settings every time I start the camera as more often than not, I “forget” to change all my settings. I typically always shoot on manual ‘cept when I am walking about the streets in my weak attempt for street photography, then it’s usually AV as, to be honest, it’s just easier for a quick, on the go shot! 😀
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Have you made use of the custom settings? That could be one good way to deal with the settings I think. I have one set for video, but the other two I keep on meaning to set up – for instance one for taking brackets. Not having played with it very much I don’t know how well they work, though my understanding is that they remember every single setting at all menu layers and then you can just turn the knob to get that suite of settings. Great idea. And as for feeling like a rookie, every day I find there is something else I need to know and so many things I don’t that rookie status seems pretty apt, and no real shame in it either.
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I agree—all websites crunch images to some extent. Facebook is the worst! As I said before, only print (large size) could really do your images justice. This blog could help you to sell a photo-book!
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Thank you James. My own guess is that photo books usually don’t do very well unless they are absolutely spectacular, or of a particular touristy kind. I am not in the spectacular category, and I like to avoid tourist traps whenever possible – Victoria is over run with tourists for half the year and those seasonal changes define my own personal geography.
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And, I wish I knew more about what websites do when they crunch images, and if it is crunching at their end or as it goes out the door at my end, or if, for instance, my web browser encodes things in a way that influences the crunching at the other end, etc. I am completely ignorant of these things.
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I agree with Ken. Your hand stability is much greater than mine. 🙂
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Well, there is a large element of luck involved. I do have to throw quite a few out….
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That I understand. I always joke that I’m a ‘1 in a 100’ photographer.
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That’s a pretty good ratio I think.
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On my father’s pre-WW2 Zeiss Ikon I was lucky if my pics weren’t blurred when shooting at 1/25s and I thought I had a pretty steady hand!.
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The focal length makes all the difference – a rule of thumb I learned when I first got an SLR was to not handhold at a slower speed than the inverse of the focal length (is that the right description) – basically, if the length is 50mm, don’t shoot slower than 1:50th, if 200mm, not slower than 1/200th. But I am sure there are other factors. And now, there are terrific lenses with image stabilisation that allow handholding at much lower speed.
Is that Zeiss Ikon still around and useable? It might be fun to give it another try sometime.
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I believe that’s a pretty “standard” rule. 🙂 IS/VR certainly does help as does how you hold the camera, your stance, breathing, the alignment of the moon to earth, how much coffee you have had…I am certain the list can go on and on! 😉
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And, as I have mentioned elsewhere, I find a 2 second delay on the shutter really helps me to steady the camera after the motion of pushing the shutter – I can focus on being still, rather than on pressing the shutter. Probably is peculiar to my one thing-at-a-time kind of coordination (I suck at sports).
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Actually, the image looks fine as it is. But then, I don’t have your original to compare it to. And if you can hold a camera this steady at 1/8 sec. you’re doing pretty good.
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Thanks Ken – it lost a lot in the darker areas on upload, but I can live with these changes – compared to yesterday’s photo which lost a lot that I was sad to see go. I suspect a lot of my problem is with the nature of what I am uploading. Some kinds of pictures seem just fine – I have not analysed it much, but the ones with a lot of darker tones seem to fare the worst.
I was surprised how sharp this turned out – I sometimes push it a bit with the 24mm lens, hoping that 1/15th will be good enough (and 1/25th for the 50mm lens too). But this was one of the first times I bracketed at 2EV and I forgot how slow that was going to be for some of the images. I am finding that if I have a 2 second delay on the shutter release that I have time to steady the camera or otherwise focus on being still after the motion of pressing the shutter is over and this really helps me reduce the movement
In any case, I need to pay more attention to these things – for instance no need to keep ISO this low on my camera. I often feel like a rookie, even thought its been more than a year with this camera.
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