Tugboat Roundup 2017

The annual Tugboat Roundup in Waterford is an event I have enjoyed shooting every year since 2013. You can read blog entries from 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016.

Equipment I've used in the past has been a 5D Mark II and 70-200mm f/2.8 zoom in 2013, two 7D bodies with Sigma 17-50 and 50-150mm f/2.8 zoom lenses in 2014, my 5D Mark III with a 24-70mm f/2.8 zoom and 7D with 70-200mm f/2.8 zoom in 2015 and 5D Mark III with my 24-105mm f/4 zoom and the same 7D setup in 2016. This year I used my 5D Mark III and the 70-300mm DO zoom I've been mentioning recently.

While the early arrivals came into Waterford Harbor under cloudy skies, it was bright and sunny by the time the stragglers showed up. Here are some samples. You can view the entire 48 image gallery here.

The DO Zoom at 70mm

This morning I decided to take the 70-300mm DO out on the 5D Mark III and leave it at 70mm for testing. Since the lens has a zoom lock at 70mm to keep the lens from extending when being carried, this is convenient and easy. The main purpose for the test was to evaluate this rather strange lens at its smallest size and shortest focal length on a full frame body, pretending it is a prime lens.

While at 70mm this lens has a maximum aperture of f/4.5, I shot at f/8 both for depth of field and image quality. I bracketed for HDR on all these scenes except for the barge, which was moving. I processed that single file in the HDR software anyway and cropped it to 16:9, thus removing water at the bottom of the image.

More With the Two Body Setup

I've made some more shots with the 5D Mark III/24-105mm and 7D/70-300mm setups. These are at canal Lock E4 looking at E5. These are single image photos processed from RAW with Canon's DPP software.

EOS 5D Mark III and EF 24-105mm f/4L IS USM at 24mm

EOS 5D Mark III and EF 24-105mm f/4L IS USM at 105mm

EOS 7D and EF 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6 DO IS USM at 70mm

EOS 7D and EF 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6 DO IS USM at 300mm

And here is the wide composition reshot as a five file bracketed sequence.

And here's a different composition of the scene at 45mm.