Well, here's something:
Today, I volunteered to help during my sister's kindergarten field trip to
the park. My main duty was to help manning the 'parachute,' as it's
called. For those unfamiliar with it, it's a 30' round brightly colored
nylon thing, with cotton handles around the perimeter and a 1' webbed
hole smack in the middle of the whole thing. You grab the handles and
wave, so air rushes into it, inflates the huge thing, and then the wee
ones run under it. Silly, actually, but the kids love it. I got sore arms
<G>.
Anyway, I also has some small bits of time in between when the kids'
groups were going from one activity to the other, so I decided to pack my
28/3.5. Thanks to what I had read the day before, I kept aperture at f/8,
put on a PL filter, T32 on min setting for fill, and set out. Of course,
shutter at 1/60 due to synch. Film: Superia 400. Used hyperfocal, because
there would never be time to focus properly, and kids would be far enough
to make it work well (in theory, anyway--the prints will come and show me
what I did right or wrong :-))
Suffice it to say that it was an interesting experience; the worst part
was when my sis was in the parachute, and I wanted to get some shots of
her UNDER it, so I was waving this huge nylon thing against the hill and
wind with my left hand and winding and shooting with my sweaty right hand.
Harder than you might ever imagine, given that she won't stand still for
me, among other things. I ran off a series of shots so I would get at
least one reasonably focussed and sharp image. Other volunteers/parents
too had a nightmare--the kids would run away when they saw a camera.
This was my first time seeing this park's other side, ironic when I live
less than a mile from it. Really nice pond with ducks, fishes, and the
pond has a little tier for water to run down to a lower pond.
I decided to return with other lenses later, before dusk. Even with 200/4
AND 2x T/C (on tripod, of course), the ducks were rather far. There was
some light available, so ambient light only exposure would be like 1/8sec.
A no-no. SO I used flash. Since there's no TTL flash metering, I
bracketed a bit, making sure that some mischievous mallards didn't spray
my glass with water or coming pecking at me <G>. Then I put on the wide
and took two shots of the pond, reflecting the trees, twlight, and the
almost full moon. One at 3.5 and one at 8--the slow shutter in the latter
would give a nice reflection in the water because of a breeze, and the
former's faster shutter will hpoefully freeze reflection in the water.
Then bracketed the almost full moon (200/4 and t/c, with MLU), at 1, 1/2
and 1/4 secs because I couldn't read the meter, which also decided it
would conk out becuase the camera was at a sharp angle. I tried to remedy
it by setting it vertical with 50/1.8, cap on, finder masked, meter on.
Nada.
Well, I hope that didn't bore you. I really hope the shots (day and
evening) come out well, given that I didn't meter, and used a wildly
guesed fill. We'll see :-)
--
http://student.ucr.edu/~siddim01/
see it as it is, in its random and messy state, but chock full of stuff
[1] let's see how many of you get his obscure referenc <G>
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