On Fri, Jun 19, 2009 at 12:31:26AM -0400, Doug Franklin scripsit: > Graydon wrote: >> What I've been finding is that no amount of careful propping on terrain, >> breath control, etc. really helps with being perfectly still for >> *range*; > > See, that's a big difference right there. The stuff I shoot, cars at > high speed in close proximity, leaves lots of room for "acceptable > error". Critical focus doesn't appear anywhere in the lexicon of > someone standing ten or twenty feet from cars going past at a hundred > miles an hour (no joke). I'm lucky if the whole damned thing isn't an > overwashed watercolor of abstract blurs.
*chortle* The only point of commonality seems to be the over-washed watercolour; I'm generally after small birds, who aren't sitting still on a branch that isn't holding still, and because the branch range of motion is large with respect to the size of the bird, actual in-focus is a function of guessing where bird and branch are going to be. I don't do as well at that as I should best prefer. [snip] > The stuff I shoot, I dial in enough DoF to take care of it and shoot > like a madman. At the 'nearer infinity' end of the focus range, DoF > isn't an issue at any "reasonable" f stop. Shooting flowers in the > front yard, I care about DoF and critical focus. Shooting race cars a > few feet away from me, I just try not to get killed. May you continue to experience success! >> I get maybe one in five right on hand-holding 800 or 500 mm mirror >> lenses; I can't imagine a heavier lens makes this easier. Autofocus >> probably would. > > Sheer physics means I wouldn't find much use for really long glass at > the track. Yeah, I would get another hundred shots, but I'm doing > three or four thousand shots in a four-day event anyway ... and > "close due to magnification" shots just don't have the same "soiled > underwear" feel that actually close to the action shots do. Or maybe > it's just me. There's bound to be a degree of emotional association with the circumstances of taking that shot; that happens when taking the flower pictures and the bucolic landscapes, after all. Though I think there is a subtle set of cues that let people know if the image was taken with a short lens or a long lens; I'm certainly much more impressed by short-lens bear pictures, for example. (For some value of impressed that involves questioning sanity...) > 16mm at ten feet fighting the aerodynamic wake is just ... uh ... > exciting ... yeah, that's it. Exciting. Just /slightly/ less > exciting than being the guy creating that wake. Road Atlanta's turn > six is just ... uh ... exciting. So, what you're saying is that if you could have a remote camera pod -- tripod, camera, 3 axis powered pan/tilt/roll head, safe remote operator location -- you probably wouldn't take it? -- Graydon -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
