Fallen Leaf Portraits

Every year there's a day with freshly fallen leaves on the ground after a rain. This year I used my 5D Mark III and 100mm Macro lens to get some shots.

For the first time ever, I submitted a bunch of photos to Shutterstock and they were all accepted. Here are some of my favorites.

All images were made at f/8 and ISO 400. Shutter speeds differed as the lighting changed due to clouds, being under trees, etc. The image stabilization on my current macro lens enables hand held closeups at some pretty slow shutter speeds.

1/125th second

1/30th second

1/60th second

1/60th second

Nighttime Sports with Canon EOS 80D

My last remaining Canon EOS 7D body, although it has (comparatively) a low shutter count, is now a seven year old camera model and in many respects technology has moved on. This, combined with the autofocus issues I've been having with it and my 70-200 f/2.8 zoom, prompted me to semi retire the 7D - again.

I wanted to see how Canon's newest APS-C body, the 80D, handled the high ISO and low light autofocusing issues that sports under the lights brings. I was very happy with the noise at ISO 4000 with this camera and the autofocus performance was better than with my 5D Mark III.

I used manual mode and f/2.8, 1/750th of a second and ISO 4000 for the entire evening. When I last shot on this same field, I used f/2.8, 1/1000th of a second and ISO 6400 with my 5DIII. I ended up having to darken many of those images.

Some downsides of the 80D are it takes the camera a while to write the 24MP files to the SD card after a burst so you might have to wait to review images. I usually use Canon's DPP version 3 software because I'm used to it but I have to use DPP version 4 as version 3 won't process 80D RAW files. And on my 2010 MacBook Pro it's slow. Very slow.

Here are some shots from the game followed with a 100% crop to show the noise level. Processing was with default settings. As always, if you click on an image and then click on it again you will see the photo at the resolution I uploaded.

Going Back a Couple of Weeks

Back on September 19th, I shot a nice sunset down at the Hudson River with my usual five file bracketing for HDR processing. There were some nice images but I was frustrated that some of them where I intentionally included ducks in the foreground weren't coming out well.

While in Maine, I realized that somehow I had changed the default on my HDR software so that it didn't do de-ghosting. Today, I went back and reprocessed a couple of the sets of files with ducks in the foreground.

The first two images I posted to twitter at the time and they are followed by the newly processed files with de-ghosting.

Some More College Soccer

For a night match last week I chose to shoot with my 5D Mark III and 70-200mm f/2.8 lens. I figured that with the full frame camera I could shoot at 6400 ISO and still get clean images while still being able to crop for tighter photos. That all worked out fine. I was having issues with auto focus, though.

A lot of files had no active focus point indicated when I was reviewing the files. So, either there is an issue with my back focus button or I was not keeping it pressed sufficiently. My subsequent testing didn't indicate any obvious issues with the button.

I had a fewer number of images than usual to add to my gallery at http://trulandphoto.zenfolio.com/hwsoc2016. As usual with sports under the lights it's best to shoot in manual mode, in this case ISO 6400 and f/2.8 at 1/1000th of a second. If anything I had to reduce brightness and/or highlights on some images. Here are four from the match.

Back to Sports

After a great long weekend shooting scenics in Maine, it was back to college soccer yesterday as I headed to True Blue weekend at Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York. The match was between the Hartwick Division 3 women's team and fellow Empire 8 member Houghton College.

I was eager to see if my massive autofocus microadjustment after my last soccer shoot fixed the focus issues or just moved them from far to near. Generally, the autofocus was much improved, the only issues seemed to be that some images made at 200mm were focusing in front of the focus point rather than behind, as before. There were no issues with focus at shorter focal lengths.

So I think I'll back off the -18 adjustment I made a bit to -16 or so and see what that does. In any case here some of the shots from yesterday. All were made with my 7D and EF 70-200mm f/2.8L lens. 35 shots from the game were added to the gallery at http://trulandphoto.zenfolio.com/hwsoc2016.

105mm, f/2.8, 1/2000 sec., ISO 200

200mm, f/2.8, 1/2000 sec., ISO 200

200mm, f/2.8, 1/1000 sec., ISO 200

200mm, f/2.8, 1/2000 sec., ISO 200