The bobby hat
Feb/28/10 23:05 Filed in: Photo
shoots
Sometimes a photographer is just SOL ...
There are a few factors that work against making this a nice shot worthy the "other side" section of my gallery. Let me explain why....
First, there was the ISO setting: it was set to 400. Not a good thing. Not horribly bad, but not good either. It just adds to much digital noise to an image, so I would have been limited with editing steps in the darkroom. But that would have been ok, if it would have been the only bad fact. There was more:
Second, I had to shoot from a far corner, to not to be seen by the clerks. This made me have to use the 150 mm zoom setting, which is not a horrible thing per se, but due to the light conditions in the shop, the cameras' program mode (I had to use it, remember?) chose 1/50 of a second for a shutter speed. Now, that does not go well, even with every bit of image stabilisation used. As you might know, there is a rule of thumb saying, that the shutter speed for a handheld shot should not be slower than the zoom value of the lens used. This is an old rule of thumb and might or might not be true. Fact is that when I am shooting still subjects (and I mean still, like brick walls etc, not trees. Trees move even in the mildest wind!) I get along with a shutter speed a bit higher than 2/3 of my zoom value. Meaning, that in this particular situation, I should have shot at 1/100 of a second. And when I say that I 'get along', I mean that - it's far from ideal. Here is an interesting and brief discussion about recommended shutter speeds. A quick read which I would recommend.
When I opened this image to work on it, I immediately found that the police star is out of focus due to camera shake and due to the low f-stop. And there is image noise on top of it all. All of this you can see at my 100% crop on the image to the left. So, that was that - this shot will just be a nice trip memory but will never make it to my galleries…..
But it was worth a try, right?