Larry Colen wrote:
As I've mentioned, John was kind enough to loan me his 16-50 for
photographing belt tests at my dojo. I must say that I really like
the lens.
I took some time yesterday afternoon to practice with it which was
very helpful as I learned how to take advantage of things like the
quickshift focusing. Being able to choose, on the fly between manual
and auto focus is a very big help.
I was also quite impressed with the speed of the autofocus. Autofocus
seems a lot more usable on it than on a lot of my other lenses. Then
again it may have been more of a case of subjects dressed in black and
white in the middle of an empty floor. Even so, there are some shots
where it looks like it may have focused on the lines on the floor
where the mats join with each other. Or that may be a case where I
prefocused, locked focus and the subjects moved, as folks practicing
martial arts are wont to do.
The lighting last night was less challenging in that I wasn't shooting
into a lightsource. On the other hand with just overhead lights I had
to push the ISO and shutter speed a lot harder to get the exposure.
I'm not completely satisfied with the image quality I got last night,
but I still think I got some usable shots, and if it was easy, then
anyone could do it.
I'm putting the photos from all the days of testing into one collection:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ellarsee/collections/72157623371212307/
100220 were shot Saturday about noon with various primes mostly around
f/3.2
100222 were shot Monday evening with the 16-50 wide open at f/2.8
All of the photos were shot using a monopod.
If anyone has any suggestions or tricks for getting things to come out
clearer, I'm very interested.
As an aside, after giving one of my prints to a friend, I called up
another friend I used to work with at the same place to tell him to
check it out. It turns out that he was taking a break and doing a
little photowalk on the Coyote Creek trail. So, I grabbed the K20 and
16-50 and headed out to practice. JB had his D700 and 70-210. There
were a couple of times where we were discussing shots where my lens
was too short and JB let me take a couple of frames with his camera.
One thing that I noticed in retrospect was that his camera just got
the exposure right, so he just left it on auto exposure, where with
the K20, my routine is hit the green button, do a test shot, and
correct. I may leave it there for a while, but as soon as the
lighting changes I have to readjust.
Granted, there have been a few times that the histograms and blinkies
have shown blown highlights on my camera that ended up not being much
of a problem once I processed the raw. If I could get those to work
with the raw data rather than the in camera jpegs, I might trust the
autoexposure metering a lot more.
A world away from your Red shots, Larry. But still, decidedly sensual.
D
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