When I’m taking photographs, I’m normally kind of old-fashioned. My camera is set to take a single exposure, which I carefully try to frame in my viewfinder. I also try to think about the end result right away, and sometimes set the camera to show me the image in black & white, sometimes with contrast raised a bit, or even simulating some filter in front of my imaginary black & white film camera. Sometimes when I’m in a really kind of nostalgic mood, I even change the aspect ratio to 3:2, like normal 135 film rolls had, or even to 1:1 like square roll film.
Of course, when taking both a jpg and a raw image at the same time, you can still reverse everything from the raw later. But that’s another story, and I usually don’t do that.
With an approach like that, I took a photo of Tuna the cat yesterday evening, when she was sitting in front of our veranda door, looking out into the dark. I know that cats see much better in the dark than us humans, but still I sometimes wonder what she might see there. Anyway, I liked the reflection of the cat in our veranda door, where she had some kind of brighter background, so you can see her ears. This was composed with an in-camera 3:2 crop, contrast +1 and a simulated yellow filter:
In the company where we now look into the garden, we have an egret, also known as a great white heron. Sometimes it’s even two of these, but most of the time just one. That bird goes fishing in the 3 small ponds we have there, and I’ve tried to take its picture with my long zoom lens. That’s a 40-150mm/f4-5.6 lens, still from the Four Thirds system, which can be used with autofocus on Micro Four Thirds via an adapter. My attempts so far were not very good – that lens was optimized for phase autofocus from a DSLR, so focusing it with the mirrorless cameras’ contrast autofocus is kind of slow.
So today, looking at the birds outside which were eating sun flower seeds from our small bird house, I thought about that lens again. And I knew I could forget autofocus – much too slow for these. So I did what I normally never do: I took my tripod and mounted the camera onto it with that zoom lens set to 150mm, and set the camera to manual focus, and to high speed serial exposures. It can do 7 or 8 images per second that way; forgot (because I usually never do this). So with that kind of “spray & pray” approach, I shot through our window. Every time a bird was landing, eating, and flying away again, I pressed the shutter, and so I got 110 or so images of which I threw away 108 already.
Here are the remaining two, cropped to 1:1 in post:
Like I said, I usually never do this, but that could be an approach to get a good enough image of our heron, so maybe I’ll take that lens and tripod to the company again.
Thanks for reading and viewing.
