might as well face it you're addicted to nikon

i have been having fun discovering some of the different things that can be done with a digital SLR camera.

as i mentioned in previous blogs i have been trying to learn how to capture birds in flight. there is a park along the waters edge that has a lot of airborne avian activity. my last attempt of bird in flight or BIF photography was thwarted by an overabundance of human traffic. the poorboi suggested that i needed to get an earlier start to my shooting day, he actually suggested a 5 am start... and no, i have no idea when he started smoking crack. although i was at the water's edge earlier than the time before i was still sawing logs at 5 am.

there were more birds out and about when i got there but they weren't necessarily flying. it was closer to 10 am before the birds actually got active. i did have a couple of new challenges that day; first it was a fairly overcast morning which was causing me a lot of difficulties with exposure settings and if that wasn't enough the auto focus feature on my zoom lens went tits up. up until that point the simple act of tracking the bird in flight, the art of keeping the bird within my viewfinder was almost more than i could handle. unfortunately with the AF on the fritz i was forced to rely on my ability to quickly master manual focus BIF photography. as there were 140 shots attempted and only 20 that turned out, i guess i didn't master it all that quickly.

lather that evening i decided to mess around with a little long exposure photography and specifically a technique called 'painting with light'. the basic premise is that you shoot at night with your camera set up with an exposure time that lasts several seconds. if your shutter is open long enough you can actually shoot pictures in the dead of night. the paint with light part comes into play when you move a flash light, torch or other device of illumination over areas of your subject. those areas can get a glow quality to them which can really make an interesting and dramatic image.

it is also possible to get the trails of light within the shot, the trails come from whatever device you chose to light your subject.

i was outside between the hours of 10:30 and 11:30 pm and i was well away from the street lights. i was shooting in an area that was really quite dark. up until the point where my eyesight finally adjusted, a good 30 minutes after i started, i'd been tripping over every single thing around. for future endeavours i will ensure that there is clear space within a 3 foot radius of where i intend to work and around my subject.

yesterday's subject of choice was my motorcycle and i was quite amazed at how clear the images were, even though it was pitch black out i managed to photograph some very dramatic looking blue skies.

here are some of the shots from yesterday's shoots. i do hope you enjoy.