Finally made it to the end of the year! The 2021 lockdown in Auckland finally ended on the 15th, which meant that we could finally leave the city and head down to Rotorua to see my parents for Christmas. What a long time coming that was. While the lockdown was an interesting change of pace, and allowed me to do some things that I wouldn’t normally have had the chance to, after 3 months it really felt like it was dragging on and nerves were starting to fray.

This month I also got a new lens! A Canon 100-400 II 4.5-5.6L. This thing is crazy, the stabilizer is amazing even at full zoom, and the resolution is so good. This is my first L lens, and it makes my other lenses seem cheap and plasticky in comparison. The whole thing feels really solid and well made. Sadly I missed the Tui season, but I’m eagerly awaiting it this year. There’s a sneaky kingfisher out at my girlfriend’s place that I’d love to get a good snap of in the meantime.

Since I spent half of this month in Rotorua, most of these photos come from down there. Most of these are actually just sillhouettes.

I was really looking forward to trying out some more astrophotography, but I ended up just running out of time due to all the related christmas activities. But there’s always another chance

Blue Lake

I included this one because it frustrated me when I got home and realized that I had missed the focus… I used to wide an aperture here, which meant the focal plane didn’t cover all three sticks. Or possibly the focal point was just a bit too far. I’m not really sure if there’s a good way around this without checking each shot at full zoom on the camera.

One thing I have found that helps a bit is Magic Lantern. This is an enhancement to the default Canon camera firmware, which allows you to do all sorts of things like adding zebra stripes for overexposure. ML has a handy setting that adds little red dots to the focus point of the image in review, so you can see fairly well which points of the photo were actually sharp. It didn’t help too much here, but I think it has made an improvement in my focusing since you can very quickly see if the shot you just took nailed it or missed.

This very heavily edited, since I was going for a retro kind of look. Like something you would find in the attic from 30 years ago. Did it succeed in that? I’m not sure, but I like the look of it. Maybe it could be slightly brighter and more bloomy.

This photo is actually a 2 row pano. Partially because I wanted to try using 2 row panos, and partially because I only had my 50mm lens with me and that was the only way to get the frame at that distance. I think it actually came out pretty well considering, though you can definitely see some weird stitching artifacts if you look closely. I think this photo would have worked better with a higher aperture as well, since I feel that including the background as part of the focus would make the whole thing more cohesive and tell a better story.

Something I need to work on more is visualising how I want the blur to come out. I’ve noticed I have a tendency to default to a larger aperture than is always required. Something for me to think about.

Sunset silhouettes

I didn’t have too much of a chance to use the new lens for much, but I found I could get some interesting shots of the sunset standing in my mum’s front door. Using a long telephoto lens gives you a chance to line up some nice stacked layers when going for a sunset, instead of just getting the sky.

These two are examples of that. I like the direction of these, but I think they probably need more editing to be best. The left one I would try and smooth the roof ridges so it looks more like the ground instead of a roof, and reduce the shadows so the bottom bit is fully dark instead of looking underexposed. The right one I would match the colour of the right side vegetation that was in front of the treeline to make it blend in.

The same applies for this one.

This one is the same - the bottom edge should be darkened to blend in with the treeline, as well as darkening the trees a little bit to pure black. Other than that, i’m not sure what else I would change - I really like the colour and composition.

Closing thoughts

Focus issues and aperture values are something that I still need to watch, though I feel like I am getting better at it. I still have a lot to learn with using longer focal lengths - composition and usage, but also mundane stuff like storage and carrying it, that thing is a beast.