October was a little thin on the photos front. The weather wasn’t cooperative at all, and with the lockdown still in place, I couldn’t go to many places outside the farm. On the farm itself, I spent a long time chasing birds trying to get some nice shots of them. Sadly I really struggled to get close enough to get anything in good detail before the bird would fly away. This made me decide to look for a larger zoom lens (which I did end up getting, although it didn’t arrive until christmas).

So I ended up taking more shots of flowers and other things than birds, though not for lack of trying.

Flower shots

I spent quite a while getting used to taking photos at such a close range. I found the bees quite tricky to catch, as they are so small and fast it can be difficult to focus on them properly. On top of that, I also struggled to get a fast enough shutter speed to freeze their wings while keeping a high enough aperture to keep all of the bee’s body in focus. I found that even at f/5.6 sections of the bee would be out of focus. Going up to f/8 helped with this, although this then lowered the shutter speed a bit.

I probably could have pushed the ISO here to get a faster shutter which would have meant I had to rely less on the bees staying still for a good frame. That would have given me more usable frames overall, and might have let me get some shots of them in mid-flight. Not sure if my camera’s focus tracking would have allowed for that though :D

On the post processing side, I learned a bit about masking through trying to bring out the yellow of the bees, without affecting the green of the plants in the background. I’m fairly happy with how it worked, and now I know much more about how to tweak the colour/exposure etc of a subject separately from the background.

Animals

My most available subject while the weather was average was my girlfriend’s cat, Savage. He’s a handsome boy.

Neither of these are very impressive, but I love how (to me) they capture the essence of cats - both the sitting there watching everything going on, and the lazy lassitude of a sleepy cat.

I think this one needs more post processing. Maybe some more contrast, something to make the bird stand out more from the background. Currently its a little bland and not very distinct. I’m not really sure what to do to fix it though.

This is a bit of a foray into portraits. I really liked how this shows the attention of the dog, mixed with his closeness to his owner. Technically, I also quite like how the blur works. It’s really important to get the eyes in focus for a portrait, which is the case here, although I think I probably should have gone for a slightly higher aperture to get more of his head in focus - though this works too. This session + a few others really showed me the difference in sharpness between the fixed prime 50mm lens and the zoom lens at 50mm. While its not so noticable here, when you zoom right in and compare the two lens, you can really see a difference in sharpness. The edges are just better defined on the prime. Pretty great for how cheap it is.

Closing thoughts

Nothing too groundbreaking happened this month, just a small improvement in post processing techniques.