Camera Club Outing

Yesterday evening one of our camera club members generously opened his home to camera club members, so that we could shoot the scenery across the valley ... and try out some of his very cool gear!

I started off by experimenting some more with hdr since the conditions, with the haze and the setting sun shining right in our faces, really lent themselves to it! Here are a couple of results (shot with my Canon 7D with the 24-70mm 2.8L lens):



See these two photo's on my Smugmug page.

Then I got to play! Phil had a 600mm telescope set up on a very sturdy tripod, so we attached my 7D to that and I spent the next hour or so having a blast!

Of course, shooting with such a long lens means that the very slightest movement throws off the sharpness of the photo, so these aren't great. Really need a cable release for the shutter for this type of photography ... oh boy, the wish list is getting longer!

Here are some of the shots I took with the 600mm telescope, all at iso 200, manual focus, with the subjects' distances vary from about 10 meters to about 1+ kilometer from where we were standing. Amazing!

Can't resist sprinklers! Across the valley. 1/1000sec

It was fireweed (about 10m). 1/500sec

Senior cat (about 20m). 1/125sec

Looking behind me (about 40m). 1/800sec

A bit of side lighting (about 20m). 1/250sec

Did I mention, I can't resist sprinklers? Across the valley. 1/1600sec

And now for something completely different! This is an hdr I attempted with the telescope. Not sure what happened, but it didn't work too well! I was about to delete this image then thought, "No, it looks like one of those artificially-coloured images from back in the day when photo's were on glass slides!" What do you think? I'm not sure if I love it, or if I should have just nuked it and forgotten about it!