When in doubt, repeat yourself

There was a local poultry show back in September which I'd intended to go to, not so much to take photos, more to hand over a couple of books to someone. Unfortunately I felt dog rough and couldn't face even the ten minute drive let alone being cheerful and taking photos. The next show, and last for this year, was on Saturday gone and I went along there, making a late start through idleness. I didn't have a burning ambition to take more poultry pics to be honest. By the time I arrived most of the birds had been penned. I'd only have been repeating the usual pre-penning rituals any way

The only interesting thing was that since my last visit to the club's exhibition hall it had been extended. That at least gave me something new to record. Albeit in a fairly meaningless way unless the photos are put alongside 'before' pictures. The join can be made out in the outside shot.

Inside a store room and an office had been constructed.

The old photo 'studio' had been retained and mounted on the office wall. There's still no dedicated photographer to take 'professional' photos though. I'm not volunteering, even if my lighting skills have improved!

On the subject of lighting, I'd forgotten how awful the strip lights are in the hall. It took me a while to get back in the groove of keeping my shutter speed below 1/100th of a second to avoid the strobing colour changes. A shutter speed that isn't quick enough to freeze chicken twitches!

After a a short while fruitlessly trying to find a fresh angle on the judging I came home to await delivery of a new-to-me lens.

This interlude gave me a chance to change lenses on my cameras as something else I'd forgotten was how cramped the space is between the rows of pens. I put on a wider zoom as my main lens and pocketed the handy 20mm just in case. Then when the new lens arrived I stuck that on the second body to take it for a play.

Judging was almost over when I got back to the show but there was still nothing fresh to get me interested. I amused myself by seeing how the new lens performed. It's the first macro lens I've used which focuses quickly enough to use as a non-macro. And at 90mm it's a little bit more to my taste than the loathed 85mm I'd traded in for it. Even if I don't use it much as a non-macro I've got the close up facility back after parting with my previous macro lens. Not something I use much for 'serious' photography but it is useful for product type shots for my business. It worked OK on the chooks.

And outside.

Post show it was another case of the same old pictures of people putting chickens in boxes and carrying boxes.

The best I could manage was to get a slightly different angle. I'd actually taken a photo of the drinking cups because I'd not seen any old metal ones before, then I noticed birds being put in a box and went a bit wider hoping to time something right. I nearly managed it.

As a test for getting to know some new gear the outing was worthwhile. That's about all I can say though.

There won't be any more poultry shows, or auctions, for some time now. Avian flu has entered the UK for the winter and all poultry gatherings were to be banned until further notice two days after this show. This is hitting the show world hard with these bans becoming an annual occurrence as the two biggest national shows, and many big regional shows, take place at this time of year.

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Two steps back

At least the rain did a bit of a disappearing act this week, which made a change. I still didn't manage to find much time to get out and about. When I did it was doing the same old rounds and finding little had changed.

The egg signs do change and there was sad news to record.

 
Like most of the pictures I've taken of late it is nothing more than a record of things. The same applied to a chance to photograph some sheep up close. I managed to fool the Zwartbles into thinking they'd get some food when I stood by their field gate. As always when there is a gate or ditch in the way viewpoints are limited and you end up with photos of sheep but not pictures. Certainly none worth posting in a blog that's supposedly about photography.

On the moss all there has been to see is the standing water. Which is slowly receding. I've made a few pictures which might come in useful if I ever get down to rounding them all up and putting them in some sort of order.

This implement has caught my eye many a time. The play of light over it made for a slightly better picture than most I've made of it.

Tired of the moss and lack of farming subject matter in general I went back to walking along the canal. There's not much there that I haven't taken photographs of before. Still, sometimes a change of lens makes you see things differently. Not all that differently perhaps.

Having to poke a lens through a metal security fence rather limits your compositional options. I managed to make this one work out pretty much the way I hoped it would. Although taken by the canalside it might find its way into the moss/veggie project.

In desperation I've been adding a few pictures to what I was thinking of as my 'Home Range' project but which might now become my 'Walking Distance' project. The random sightings of 'stuff' I see as I wander around the parish.

The church included.

A couple of times I have gone out late in the afternoon looking for sunsets. A sure sign of desperation. When they don't look like materialising I give up early. Wander off and see them develop when I'm too far away from where I hoped to photograph them to go back. I don't have the patience required to wait for the perfect light for landscape photographs. Which is probably a good thing. It means I sometimes stumble on more interesting pictures.

Sprouts, beef cattle and chicken sheds. All gloriously back lit. Much better than yet another sunset picture in the traditional style to my mind!

Another of my perennial subjects is that of privacy and security. I took advantage of the low angle of the setting sun to lift this picture a little.

Then back to more water lying on the fields.

All in all pretty grim. The new lens is growing on me, but despite my initial enthusiasm at getting rid of the blue hue I find myself still struggling with it, and despite my best intentions finding the 35mm end just a little too long. However, I prefer it that way to having the permanent temptation of 24mm. I certainly don't feel I'm missing the 150-300mm range though. Which is definitely a good thing.

All I have to do now is learn to love the 85mm focal length - at the third attempt. If I was sensible I'd stick with a 24 to something or other and get on with it. But I do like using two cameras with two fixed focal lengths at time. More so when in a restricted space such as an auction mart though. Out in the wild a zoom is more practical. especially when you have obstacles between you and the subject. When I'll get the chance to go to an auction mart remains to be seen. Poultry sales have been hit by a double whammy of virus restrictions. Covid-19 for the humans and avian influenza for the birds. Trying times all round.

 

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What's it for?

Sometimes a photograph best serves as an illustration. Without any accompanying text the picture of sheep in a field of red cabbage is pretty meaningless.

Sheep grazing on red cabbage deemed aesthetically unfit for supermarket sale

Add a caption and it becomes a comment on the currently hot topic of food waste. And the sheep do seem to enjoy eating red cabbage because there isn't much of it left a month later.

The weather has finally started to perk up. With the sun shining I went for a wander to look at a barn out on the mere which I last photographed in 2012. Of course the weather changed and I got stung by a couple of hail showers. probably because I hadn't put a waterproof jacket on.

The last time I photographed the barn I use my newish toy - the ultrawide zoom. This time I used a standard zoom. The results are less dramatic, but I prefer them. getting rid of that lens was a good move. I must get rid of the cheaper, not-quite-so-ultrawide zoom I replaced it with.

I was so unenthusiastic about going to the poultry auction today that I overslept. It was only the prospect of one of the mart café's bacon and black pudding barms that drew me. This time I stuck with the 35mm on one body and the 70-200 on the other. I'm growing to like the longer zoom, although it's lack of close focusing continues to annoy and frustrate. Even so the pictures I like best were taken with the 35mm.

That said I might have been better off using the 28mm. Certainly not anything wider. When it comes to getting good depth of field (by which I mean a lot of it rather than a little) 35mm is where it starts, with 50mm tending to be a bit lacking when forced to use wide-ish apertures. Increasingly I'm finding 35mm to be a sweet spot lens.

For getting in close, and making it look like you are, I do think that 28mm is the limit. At 24mm anything close to the lens at the edge of the frame starts to look distorted. If that's a face it ruins a picture for me. I prefer to have the frame cut the face rather than have it look like it's been stretched.

These low viewpoint pictures were taken using the flippy screen again. This time the face detection was quite useful as the people were the important parts of the pictures. It did a remarkable job and I can now see why some photographers like it so much they buy mirrorless cameras so it works through the viewfinder.

Having things cut by the frame edge is often said to be a compositional fault. Yet it was embraced by painters as one of the earliest influences photography had on that medium.

Another photographic trait is the capturing of figures in what might be considered awkward poses. This also appeals to my current way of thinking about making pictures which have 'life'.

While what goes on at the auction hasn't changed some of the faces have. Which is a good enough excuse to keep going back.

Having arrived with just fifteen minutes to go before the auction was due to start I'd missed most of the penning of birds, which is when most activity takes place. I did get one frame which I like. It has that circular sort of composition I often seem to use. Unconsciously, I must say.

I watched another Youtube video this evening. Silly me. The Youtuber (as I think they are called these days) was wandering around, camera in hand, talking about the compositional elements he was looking for as he took photographs.Some of the pics were pretty good (some were not - that's photography), if a little clichéd,, but I didn't always see how the lines he superimposed on them actually applied. And when he said they didn't use the rule of thirds I could see how they did! It was a load of bollocks to promote his big compositional theory.

You can take any picture and draw lines on it to prove anything. What you need to do is develop an instinctive understanding of when a frame 'works'. But also bear in mind that, like the sheep picture at the start of this post, a picture can also be informational and it's content more important than its structure.

The other week I accidentally shot a frame in the dim light of the wood with my camera set to ISO 100 and my usual walking around settings. It came out almost black on the rear screen! It was only a grab shot of some ducks - I hadn't seen ducks in the wood before - so it wasn't a loss. I didn't delete it because I thought it might be interesting to see if it could be 'recovered' in Lightroom. It could. And I was surprised how little noise there was.

I'd read about this so-called 'ISO invariance' on the web but never paid it much attention. At the mart I thought it would be a good chance to have a more serious look into this.

The above was shot at ISO 125. In Lightroom I boosted the 'exposure' buy 4.67 stops, and pulled the highlights back. At 100% what was in the shadows is pretty damned clean.

Most of the time I can live with the noise I get at high ISOs for my purposes. But this could be a trick worth remembering at some point in the future. The drawback is that on reviewing a picture you can't tell what it all is!

After a couple of hours I thought I'd go look at a sheep dog trial for the afternoon. By the time I got there it was over. Fool. I should have hung around at the auction.

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Change of tack then back to the old routine

It's not like me to be indecisive or change my mind, but... After ditching the original reedy idea I went back to take a different approach. Then I went back again, and again. Gradually a direction was arrived at as I played around with focal lengths, shutter speeds and exposure. I think I have made progress to the stage where I should be able to sort out enough pictures to make a zine which is coherent. Because this is 'art' I am feeling free to crop and process the hell out of the pictures I've taken! This is a taster.

What I did find was that after an hour of playing around, sorry, experimenting with techniques, I started to tighten up. Hence the return visits over successive days. Even after my brain has frozen from pursuing one direction I can open up to other picture making chances. There is a stack of drainage pipes which I have photographed before, but armed with a 20mm lens I tried something different. It's landscape photography, but not as we know it.

All this messing about was just filling in time until today's poultry show and auction. After my experience at the sheep sale the other week I was determined to do this with the 28/50 combo and nothing else. I started out well enough using the 50mm to get this chicken pimping shot and a few others.

The 28mm wasn't getting much use, I reckon because there was a lot of space to work in. Despite this it was the 50mm I swapped for the dreaded 70-200mm. That lens works well for photographing the judging when there is room. Much as I wish it didn't!

I found it a struggle to get anything much I was happy with. No doubt I could have repeated picture ideas I'd done before, but that seemed pointless. If it was a paying gig to record the events then fair enough, do the greatest hits routine, but when the project is broader than the one day's going on I can't face covering the same ground.

After the judging was over I had a look in at the auction, swapping back to the 50mm. Again there wasn't anything fresh apart from a change of roles for some of the staff. I can't find a way to revitalise my approach.

Part of my difficulty, I'm sure, is the gloomy nature of the mart. There's never enough light to get enough depth of field for the kind of pictures I like to take. It's no problem for the fast-lens-wide-open-all-the-time crowd, but for the "f8 and be there" mob which I belong to it's hard to get to f4 most of the time without either losing shutter speed or the ISO hitting five figures. It's not too bad in the sale ring with its new lighting, but in the other sheds it's a nightmare.

I've a choice of poultry or sheep next weekend. I think the chickens will have to do without me. Then again, I've got a bit stale of the sheep front too. How do some people manage taking photographs of landscape all the time?

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Out of adversity?

The lack of ideas continues, as does the repeat visits to places in the vain hope that I'll find something worth photographing. With the weather still refusing to settle any sunny day has been seized as chance to get out with a camera. Even though I know I'll be wasting my time as far as getting anything useful goes.

I drove to the auction mart a week ago and didn't even get the camera out of the car. The sun was making a rare appearance so I headed to higher ground. For once I found some sheep action of sorts. But not enough to make more that casual shots. Although the tup's bum picture has something going for it. I determined to stop going on these wild goose chases.

A couple of days later the sun made another appearance as did the undomesticated geese. It's strange that I find it impossible to make decent pictures of places I like being in. There must be a project to work on about the moors, but I'm buggered if I can find a ket to unlock the box it's in. You might imagine a neolithic burial site would kickstart something, but it's just a ragged pile of stones. The best I could do was contrast the ancient stones with the transmission masts which also echo the dead pine trunks in the middle distance.

Friday had another sunny afternoon, which is short at this time of year, and I ended up at the sandplant.where nothing much had changed. I'd set out intending to look for sunset sheep and only had the telephoto zoom with me, which limited my options. There are no sheep at teh sandplant so what made me go there is a head-scratcher.

I found some sheep elsewhere, but the sun decided to set behind clouds and the light was grim. The sheep weren't playing ball either. I got home earlier than intended so dropped the big camera off before going for fish and chips. I stuck the Fuji in my jacket pocket and tried it for some night time pictures. Where there was a bit of light it worked OK. While I'm not a big fan of its files as a rule it does do black and white conversions I like. This messy picture (with self-portrait) has given me some ideas for the future.

On Saturday morning it was a struggle to get out of bed and go to the poultry auction and show. I really wasn't in the mood. Repeating myself at the auction wasn't going to happen. My daft idea of shooting the show entirely in vertical format was forgotten. It was hard enough to see any pictures. Arriving after most birds had been penned might have had some bearing on that. I did manage to get a picture which gives a better idea of a chicken being put in a pen than any I've managed before. Which was a small victory.

I still like using the flippy screen for low angles. Rather belatedly I have realised that the focusing issue is best overcome by prefocusing and waiting for action to come to me. The hit rate is much better that way.

Not being interested in the auction I was resigned to getting pictures of the judging. Despite the much increased entry for the show over previous years there didn't look to be as many judges! This can be a subject where the longer zoom can be useful to blur a background.

In this case there wasn't much background to blur.

Pictures like this are very much dependent on gesture and expression  of judge and bird to lift them above being ordinary.

Although these sort of pictures are nice enough a wider lens used closer, as always, draws a viewer into the scene. In most judging situations the best place to be would be in one of the pens looking out!

A better opportunity came after the judging was concluded and one judge was mentoring someone else. I rattled off a lot of frames on this, always trying to file the frame with shapes and gestures.

I even tried the flippy screen , but I think the eye-level pictures worked better in terms of engagement.

When it comes to detail shots it's pretty much impossible to find anything new. Variations of repeated themes from past shows are inevitable.

There can be novel effects of light and shade though.

I might not have been in the most enthusiastic frame of mind for taking pictures at the show, but I still managed to come away with some that are worth adding to the files. A larger selection can be found here.

One thing I did want to record at the auction, if nothing more, was the new line of cages in the cattle pen section. Poultry sales must be doing well for the mart to add more permanent cages. I tried to take some pictures of the sale in this area but it proved tricky. Getting in position before the throng arrived would have been the best plan.

Perhaps the lesson from this is that if you stick to it and take enough pictures some of them will be OK. Another manifestation of the 'working through' a period of being stuck. If you don't take any pictures none of them will be any good!

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