Wrapping up April

This has been a pretty bad month for blog entries. Yesterday, I was on and around Peebles Island with my 5D Mark III and EF 70-200mm f/2.8L lens.

No extenders, just the native lens and a polarizer filter for the water tower and moon shot. All these shots except for the single deer image are HDR processed. I bracketed the usual five file over and under 1 and 2 EV. I left the 2EV over exposed file out of the processing though when processing in Photomatix Essentials.

Multiple Exposures with the 5D Mark III

I haven't taken the opportunity to play with the multiple exposure mode on the 5DIII yet but I used to enjoy using this technique with my old Minolta X-700 film bodies. With the X-700s you had to hold the film rewind button while moving the film advance lever so that the camera thought film was being advanced but it (mostly) stayed in place. You had to reduce exposure by one stop for each of the two exposures and you would get a properly exposed image of the two subjects.

With the Canon 5D Mark III, there's a multiple exposure mode that has lots of options but I chose the simplest - two images, combining exposure. The camera saves the two RAW files and combines them into a third RAW file, saving the original two. The one thing you can't alter in the combined file is white balance so care needs to be taken that it's accurate rather then relying on auto.

In the following instance, the auto white balance was a little cool and when I switched to cloudy in the DPP software for the individual files it was better. The multiple exposure image was stuck with the auto white balance, though, so I boosted saturation a bit to compensate. The single images have WB corrected to cloudy.

EF 100mm f/2.8 Macro at f/8, 1/180 sec., ISO 800

EF 100mm f/2.8 Macro at f/8, 1/125 sec., ISO 800

On Peebles Island with the 100mm Macro

It's been a great few days here in Upstate New York with high temperatures in the 70s and lots of sunshine. This morning I walked around Peebles Island with my 5D Mark III and my EF 100mm f/2.8 Macro lens.

Macro lenses are great because they focus close and also will focus at infinity. When I used my 70-200mm zoom and 500D closeup lens for closeups, I'd have to keep taking the lens/filter on and off as the lens will only focus close up with the filter on.

Each of these three shots are cropped a bit, and the Canada Goose shot is cropped quite a bit. 100mm is not really a wildlife focal length.

f/11, 1/180 sec., ISO 200

f/8, 1/750 sec., ISO 800

f/8, 1/500 sec., ISO 400

This next two images are a single file followed by a four file HDR processed image with the normally exposed image file and files exposed -1, +1 and +2 EV.

f/8, 1/350 sec., ISO 800