Wednesday, November 11, 2009

peace be with you

back no more

I usually like to make small items stand taller in pictures. More often than not, I would lie down next to small things on ground, rather than shooting downward. It gives a totally different perspective--what they would appear to be if we were to stand face to face with them--as well as the stature denied to them in their daily encounter with us.

This picture was taken for a reason. I wanted to see how sharp the lens is at the telephoto end--200mm. A shutter speed fast enough is the counterweight to the loss of sharpness due to the subject's movement as well as hand-shake. Generally, with a fairly steady subject, the rule of thumb for hand-held shooting is the speed being at least as fast as 1/focal length second. That is to say, for instance, 200mm shot should be done with at least as fast as 1/200s. Here, with VR on, I settled for 1/125s.

With the motion blur at the minimum (I hope), the result I think is decent. I have done a bit of cropping in the post-processing. The resulting 'bigger' image exhibited more noise (from ISO 400), especially in the background blur (bokeh) area, so I applied a small amount of noise reduction on it.

Location: Carlton Gardens, Melbourne, VIC, Australia
Camera: Nikon D300
Lens: Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 VR
ISO: 400
Exposure: 1/125s
Aperture: f/5.6
Focal Length: 200mm
Filter: N/A
Flash: No
Tripod: No

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