Saturday 13 February 2016

Sale time

I must be taking the poultry project a bit too seriously. I've been reading magazines and books about chickens as research! The benefit of this is that I have come across dates of shows and auctions in the region. Today I made a thirty mile trip to Clitheroe Auction Mart which was holding an auction of 500 pens of poultry and waterfowl, and the local poultry club was staging a show at the same venue. It would be possible to kill to birds with one stone...

Not knowing what to expect, or even if I'd be allowed to take photos, I was travelling light. Compact camera, DSLR and three fast single focal length lenses. I always thing that using a big, bulky zoom lens makes you stand out and get mistaken for a professional - or a camera polisher.

As it turned out a zoom would have been useful. Or a second body. That said in the auction mart I mostly used the 50mm. It did pretty much all I needed. A might be expected there were all sorts of people there, from aged farming types to hipsters. It would have been easy to 'bag' a load of shots of characters. But unless they're doing something it would just be an exercise in collecting to my mind. Like the so-called street photographers who snap away at homeless people. The whole point of photographing people at an event is to show them doing something. being on the same level as a crowd presents problems, which was why I concentrated on trying to catch the auctioneer in action. Easier said than done to get a good pose with everything around making the picture work.


In the show venue the judging was still going on when I arrived, which enabled me to take some new sorts of shots. Again the problem of getting a decent angle raised its head. But one truies one's best.


The egg judging is easier as the judges don't have cages in front of them, just a table you can get on the other side of. The idea here was to once more capture some action. Not easy when they were mostly peering at eggs. But some eggs had to be broken to be examined.


Being able to see through a show cage has its advantages. And when something pops in to the frame when you are not expecting it you have to react quickly at times. Mostly I mess up, but now and then I get lucky.


Messing up technically is probably my biggest fault. I caught some decent moments in teh judging, but what ought to have been in focus wasn't. Then there are times when I get the focus right but bugger things up by being stupid. I was trying to take some semi-posed 'portraits' today. The one below is sharp enough, I like the way I framed it, but there's half a blink going on. Had I taken two or three shots one would have been okay. Well, it might not have had a blink but I bet it would have been blurry....


I did take one picture a shortly before which was in focus and the judge had both eyes open, but I'm not sure a 28mm lens is right for full length portraits. That big head/tiny feet thing goes on. If my knees had more adjustment to them I could bend them and get my eye level lower to lessen the distortion. probably better all round to use a longer lens and step back a few paces! Unusually I have cropped this, and a few other, shots.


As usual, lessons have been learned. I got carried away with using high ISO values and closing the aperture to get more in focus. The results will be okay for web viewing, and will print to A5, maybe A4. Which should be fine for any use I intend putting them to. But in future I might restrict my ISO a bit more unless absolutely unavoidable. The lighting in the venues was a pain for white balance. Daylight through the skylights and horribly orange lamps. Flash would solve that, but it would draw too much attention - although I did use it for a couple of close up detail shots. The alternative, I suppose, is to convert everything to black and white. That has the added benefit of making the noise in some shots more acceptable. But colour is a part of poultry showing. Keep on struggling I guess.

Gallery of the auction here, and the show here.

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