This weekend the poultry project progressed with visits to two very different auctions. Saturday saw a return to the auction mart for a sale of hatching eggs, dead stock and fowl. On my first visit I'd arrived too late for the sale in the ring, which is where the hatching eggs and dead stock are auctioned. The light was awful with all sorts of colour temperatures making getting a reasonable white balance was left to processing on the computer. even then it was a struggle that I just gave up on. I'll have another try if I ever use the pictures anywhere where it would be critical to have things more accurate.
28mm was just about wide enough to get the ring in from the top tier, and 100mm just about long enough to pick out people from a distance.
All the time I'm looking for pictures that tell the story, as it were, of what goes on. even then I find myself making pictures which are a bit different. The one below is such a picture. I'm not sure it works, but there's something going on that I like. It does show part of the lighting problem. A combination of strip lights and the red heat lamps is not good!
When that part of the sale was over it was into the main hall for the poultry, which this time included a number of ornamental game birds, and a pen of rheas which were so twitchy they made chickens look relaxed!
At the end of almost five hours I'd clocked up 340 frames (quite a few had been deleted at the scene) which were quickly edited down to half that, and further whittled away to make a gallery of 40. Not all 40 are that good, but they provide a flavour of the auction. The inevitable link to them is
here.
Sunday's auction was held by the local bantam society where this poultry mania started out. Instead of hundreds of birds there were maybe a dozen pens of pairs or trios. There were a few boxes of eggs and a mixture of dead stock that included old poultry prints and magazines, rat traps and even a bat box. It was worth attending just for the tea and cakes. Full set
here.
It's always a challenge to make good pictures of groups of people doing things. timing it so you capture two or more in positions which illustrate what is going on, without other people getting in the way, is a skill that I haven't mastered. I can imagine in my mind's eye what will make a good picture, but not only does it rarely develop, when it does someone else usually gets in the way! I spend a lot of time with the camera to my eye waiting.
A lot of the skill is anticipating when to take the shot. Despite SLRs having little delay between the button being pressed and the shutter firing, there is a lag between my eye and brain registering what is before me and my finger moving. I guess I could try shooting a burst of frames, but that is almost as hit and miss.
Another thing, which I think I am better at doing, is getting a rhythm in the pictures. When there are lots of people and other things in the viewfinder I do seem able to frame them up in a way that looks sort of composed. Not every time, but I am always aiming to have a balanced composition which the eye can look around. I know it goes against the simplification rule, but I think it makes for more engaging pictures - particularly of people - if there is a lot to look at. Maybe flicking through ken Grant's
Flock last night helped me out in that respect.
No more poultry events or a while now, so maybe this project will take a bit of a break. That might be a good thing to prevent me getting stale. It's certainly harder to find new subjects. Even so, both events have given me new ideas to work on. So maybe that'll be what I do next. Unless I start on another project...
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