Do you ever find yourself really liking some of your photos that are full of technical flaws?
As a non-professional, I have had more than my fair share of blurry images, missed subjects, out-of-kilter compositions, and poor exposures. Many of them are deleted as soon as I view them on the back of the camera. Sometimes, though, the mistakes yield such interesting results that I can’t bear to delete them.
I arrived at the beaver lodge at my local marshland before the sun had fully risen one morning this past weekend, hoping to see the beavers in action. I had my camera set on ISO 400 and it was wide open at F4, with the mode set for aperture priority. I hadn’t yet set up my tripod, which I was hoping to use, because I anticipated relatively slow shutter speeds.
All of the sudden I hear the sound of geese approaching and it quickly became clear that they were coming in for a landing in the beaver pond. Without really thinking, I panned the camera and started shooting as I tried to follow the geese as they approached the water. Most of the photos were totally unusable. There was so little light that my camera chose a shutter speed of 1/6 of a second. Even with image stabilization, that’s too slow for handheld photos.
There was one image, however, that I really liked. The head of one goose is relatively in focus and another goose is visible (although out of focus) in the foreground. The background is blurred from my panning action. Somehow it reminds me of the photos they used to show of the finishes of races in which photos had to be developed to determine who crossed the finish line first. In this case, the geese seem to be leaning forward towards an invisible finish line in the same way that sprinters do.
Clearly this is not a great (or even good) photo, but I like it, and maybe others will find it interesting too.
Photo finish
© Michael Q. Powell. All rights reserved.
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Mike Powell 
Photo finish
Posted in Art, Birds, commentary, Nature, Photography, tagged Branta canadensis, Canada Goose, Canon 55-250mm zoom lens, Canon Rebel XT, geese, Huntley Meadows Park, photo finish on December 17, 2012| 22 Comments »
Do you ever find yourself really liking some of your photos that are full of technical flaws?
As a non-professional, I have had more than my fair share of blurry images, missed subjects, out-of-kilter compositions, and poor exposures. Many of them are deleted as soon as I view them on the back of the camera. Sometimes, though, the mistakes yield such interesting results that I can’t bear to delete them.
I arrived at the beaver lodge at my local marshland before the sun had fully risen one morning this past weekend, hoping to see the beavers in action. I had my camera set on ISO 400 and it was wide open at F4, with the mode set for aperture priority. I hadn’t yet set up my tripod, which I was hoping to use, because I anticipated relatively slow shutter speeds.
All of the sudden I hear the sound of geese approaching and it quickly became clear that they were coming in for a landing in the beaver pond. Without really thinking, I panned the camera and started shooting as I tried to follow the geese as they approached the water. Most of the photos were totally unusable. There was so little light that my camera chose a shutter speed of 1/6 of a second. Even with image stabilization, that’s too slow for handheld photos.
There was one image, however, that I really liked. The head of one goose is relatively in focus and another goose is visible (although out of focus) in the foreground. The background is blurred from my panning action. Somehow it reminds me of the photos they used to show of the finishes of races in which photos had to be developed to determine who crossed the finish line first. In this case, the geese seem to be leaning forward towards an invisible finish line in the same way that sprinters do.
Clearly this is not a great (or even good) photo, but I like it, and maybe others will find it interesting too.
Photo finish
© Michael Q. Powell. All rights reserved.
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