Despite still being unusually busy with real work I've managed to make a little progress with a couple of ongoing projects. Both provided hard learned lessons. For my visit to document a fishing tackle business that is shortly to vacate the city centre premises it's occupied for 42 years I was uncertain what to expect, so I went 'loaded for bear' as the Yanks might say. In English I took everything except the kitchen sink.
I thought that space might be cramped, so packed my ultra, ultrawide zoom. I thought it might be dark, so I took along my flash gun and a modifier. I also had the usual couple of fixed focal length lenses and the mid range zoom I use at the poultry shows. As it turned out the wide zoom, which I hardly ever use, and the flash, which I loathe using, turned out to be the most useful combination. Some of the rooms were extremely cramped, and some so dark I didn't know what I was photographing until I looked at the screen on the back of the camera!
I keep reading about using artificial light on t'internet but always end up doing what the experts decry. Putting the camera in P mode and the flash in Auto using TTL metering. Apparently TTL is rubbish... The one thing that I have learned to do is bounce the flash off the ceiling. Most times this does what I want. All I use the flash for is to provide enough light to get a decent exposure. I'm not trying to be 'creative' with it.
There was one place, on the stairs, where I did have to get a bit clever. With the speedlight in the hotshoe there were dark shadows cast no matter where I aimed the light. So I took it off the camera to point in a more useful direction and fired it remotely using the camera's built in flash. After a few attempts the picture worked out OK. For some of the photos I did something even more unthinkable to the lighting experts. I used teh pop-up flash on its own! There are times when a light that is almost on the lens's axis is what's needed to avoid awkward shadows. The pop-up flash does a decent job.
The pictures which I didn't use the wide angle/speedlight combination for were mostly taken with the other camera fitted with my 50mm lens. Sometimes with flash mostly without.
I'm getting more used to breaking my 'rules' these days. Not only am I willing to crop pictures, I'm also willing to move things rather than photographing them as I find them. This old telephone was too interesting to photograph the back of, so I turned it round and cleared away some clutter. daft as it might seem, I then put it back as I' found it! There are a lot more photos from the visit, but I'm saving them for another time.
The main thing I learned from all this is that apart from being able to 'get it all in' I don't like using the ultra, ultrawide. I don't like the way, as with all zooms, I find myself using the two extremes. In this case the wide end looks too distorted, and the long end is never long enough. As I didn't get to make use of it's fast aperture, and I almost came to like using the flash, I've decided that this lens shall go. I'll use my slower ultrawide zoom instead, either outdoors without flash or with flash when inside. If I need wider than 24mm without flash I'll use my 20mm lens as I have done at the poultry shows and sales.
Saturday was a day of thick fog pretty much from dawn until dusk. So I got work done. Sunday didn't start off much better but I headed for the beach just the same. This might become a regular Sunday thing. Or probably not knowing how I change my mind and get sidetracked. Luckily the fog cleared as I neared the coast, but there didn't appear to be much going on. There was, however, a horse box in the car park. No horses in sight though. The tide was a long way out and some tiny specks on the horizon to the south. Horses. I wandered out towards the sea.
There weren't even any dog walkers out on the sand. I made some pitiful attempts at capturing the emptiness of the shore. All got deleted, either immediately or back home. The further out you go from the sea wall the more and more sparse the marsh grass becomes. It breaks up from one continuous mass into isolated clumps of gradually decreasing size. Of course this is actually the reverse of how the sand is colonised. I took the picture below to, hopefully, illustrate how the colonisation begins with one plant taking root. Sand then build up around it and more plants join in. The clump expands and eventually joins up with a neighbouring clump. Eventually the clumps homogenise and the land marches seaward.
In this case the mist was beginning to roll across the sea to provide a soft background to isolate the plant against. I had to get a low angle in order for the leaves to break the horizon line. Simply shooting from a standing position wouldn't have made a picture conveying space and distance.
Gradually the horses, which turned out to be one ridden pony and another pulling a trap, got closer. After being approached by the two timid, but pretending to be brave, springers accompanying the horses I asked if I could take some photos. Apart from the pleasures of trying to photograph animals, which take direction less well than humans, I made one big mistake. It's a mistake that zoom lenses tend to force on me. Zooming in too tight.
All the stuff you read about composition tells you to frame things tight to keep unnecessary stuff out of the frame. They never tell you that you can frame looser to get necessary stuff
in the frame. Framing looser also gives you more scope for levelling horizons if you tend to lean a bit. Even with the in-viewfinder level indicator I still mange to end up with a sloping horizon far too often.
Again I've gone for a 5:4 ratio as it just seems to work for these beach portraits. As is often the case I managed to get some bits right in one frame and some wrong, then swap them round in another frame. In the first picture the framing and the dog's pose are good, in the second one the horse's pose and the rider's expression are. On balance I've gone for the second shot. Trying to time the shots for a horse with a dog on it's back was worse than photographing twitchy chickens!
They're both better than some frames I shot!
On the bright side I'm slowly getting better at giving people (if not animals) directions for how I'd like them to pose so I can get the pictures I want. Partly that's because I'm forming a better idea of what that is.
