Some gull shots from my local park. dial up warning

[flamin lib]

This is a lot harder than shooting race cars, even formula 1 stuff. Race cars only move in two dimensions, these guys can go anywhere and it's hard to frame them, for the autofocus to keep up and even when it does the shutter lag lets them move out of the focus range.

[blueraven95]

1. I love the second to last one

he looks so angry (I'm anthropomorphizing)

I think these are wonderful!

[flamin lib]

2. Gulls are not the most even tempered birds!

And according to the producers of Alfred Hitchcocks "The Birds" not the sharpest knife in the drawer.

[Blue_In_AK]

3. These are awesome...

Very nice. I like the second and third from the bottom the best.

[flamin lib]

4. Thank you. It goes back to shooting it by the pound. In the film

days I always advised people going on vacation to buy their film by the pound. "I'll take five pounds of Kodachrome and three pounds of Kodak 400 please . . ." "Do you want processing envelopes with that?"

Several hundred exposures and a few acceptable frames. Digital is SOOOOOOO much cheaper than film! Whatever shortcomings it has are far outweighed by the advantages.

[Blue_In_AK]

5. Exactly why I never got into film photography.

:) I could probably do it now knowing what I know, but I would have wasted a fortune learning.

[DS1]

6. a few of mine from Gloucester, MA

changing of the guard


wheee



permission to buzz the tower is denied, the pattern is full


another patrol

[flamin lib]

7. Nice. I do enjoy the challenge of framing and focus.

With formula 1 you focus on a spot on the track and follow the cars into position releasing the shutter an instant before they hit the "sweet spot" so they'll be precisely in focus when the mirror goes up.

Ya' can't do that with birds 'cause they aren't stuck on a track.

Shoot it by the pound, or in digital terms by the milliamp hour until the battery runs down.

[DS1]

8. In these cases, or photos, I was using the Canon Digital Rebel

which has a 1/3 second delay between pressing the shutter and the actual exposure. That's why my shots are either early or late. Birds are hard to track and shoot when there's that much of a delay.

My next set will be much better.

[flamin lib]

9. All SLRs have a shutter lag issue. It just takes time for the mirror to

flip and the curtain to move. Back in the day Canon offered a pelical mirror; a semi transparent mirror that didn't move. It split 1/3 stop into the viewfinder and the rest onto the film. No mirror lag at all. Not perfect but faster than anything other than a viewfinder camera like a Lieca.

The Oly in Continous AF mode will anticipate where the subject will be based on movement before shutter release but that assumes the subject is moving in a predictable manner and it got a good lock to start with and the lens can react that fast. 'Way too much ass for u and me.

Perhaps the next technological step will be some sort of live view that doesn't need the pentaprism for focus or metering. After that we'll have to look for an LCD shutter which will give infinite flash sync and even shorter response times. LCD shutters have been in the works since the '80s but there wasn't a justification for the expense because the rest of the system was so slow. Now there isn't a reason not to build the shuteer into the sensor. Just the newbies to camera design haven't looked at history yet. Miataini had it all figured out long ago, just not the justification to build it.

Can't believe I'm sayin' "back in the day" . . . God, I'm old.

[DS1]

10. the shutter is on its way out

they're getting CMOS sensors to where they can be on then off as fast as the shutter used to be, or faster. The first Rebel, which I was describing had about a 1/4 second lag. My 5D has a 0.133 second lag. It's noticeably faster.

[jhain]

11. Good job!

Even Jonathan would be proud.