shutterhack

Quoting a famous photographer James Balog:
About a week ago, I was in Connecticut photographing the largest oak tree in New England on this farm. The elderly man who was the farmer who had lived on this ground for his entire life--he was 80 years old--was very interested in tagging along with me because he was in a camera club and he wanted to talk camera talk.

He started talking about how they had this rule in the camera club that you couldn't show the presence of humans in the pictures, that you couldn't show anything. There couldn't be a wire or a phone pole, let alone any overt thing like a pasture or something.

And I said to him, "The whole story about this tree is the fact that this 400-year-old tree is standing here surrounded by forest that's been mowed down and the only thing that exists now is a pasture." That's the story. That's what's interesting--not hiding from the fact that that happens.

Labels: AF Zoom-Nikkor 70-300mm f/4-5.6G, Animal, Nikon D50, Philosophy of Photography, Photography

Posted by Mohd Fadzly Abdul Mubin at 6:06 PM | Permalink

Taken with a Nikon D50 and AF Zoom-Nikkor 70-300mm f/4-5.6G lens

Of all the things there are to photograph I find animals, birds and insects the most satisfying and the most difficult. They almost never do what you want them to and are most likely to do whatever you least expect. The best way to photograph animals is in the wild.

Manual Focus

When photographing animals you need a lot of patience, they either do nothing for long periods of time or they are so hyperactive that you can't keep them in the viewfinder. What you need to do is study the animal for a while and try to predict their next move. Birds will often follow a definite flight path so, if you can work out what it is, you can just wait until they fly past a certain point. I usually switch to manual focus when photographing birds as the auto focus can often end up trying to focus on the empty sky.
Long Lens

Animals, especially in the wild do not let you get very close to them so an essential piece of kit for photographing animals is a long lens preferably a zoom. I use a 75-300mm zoom and, more often than not, I end up using it at the 300mm end. Ideally I would like a 500mm lens but good ones cost quite a lot of money and you really need to use it on a tripod. The general rule of thumb for handholding without camera shake is to use a shutter speed greater than 1 divided by the focal length of the lens. So a 500mm lens should be used at shutter speeds greater than 1/500th of a second. With this in mind it's also a good idea to choose clothing that will help you blend in with your surroundings.

Labels: AF Zoom-Nikkor 70-300mm f/4-5.6G, Animal, Nikon D50, Photography

Posted by Mohd Fadzly Abdul Mubin at 10:33 PM | Permalink

Taken with a Nikon D50 and AF Zoom-Nikkor 70-300mm f/4-5.6G lens

Then, the wide-open chart should look as much like the stopped-down chart as possible (predicting consistent performance throughout the aperture range). The lenses that most closely approximate this description are highly corrected short telephotos of moderate aperture. Designers often have somewhat more money to work with when designing macro lenses, so macros such as the 100mms from Leica, Zeiss, and Canon, and the Zuiko 90mm F/2 from Olympus, probably can be said to have the best MTF charts I've seen.

Labels: AF Zoom-Nikkor 70-300mm f/4-5.6G, Animal, Nikon D50, Photography

Posted by Mohd Fadzly Abdul Mubin at 10:27 PM | Permalink

Taken with a Nikon D50 and AF Zoom-Nikkor 70-300mm f/4-5.6G lens

So far I've mentioned overall contrast and lens contrast. The final type of contrast we have to deal with is something still different from either of the two definitions above, and this is "local contrast", or tonal differentiation within certain specified tonal ranges. A film/paper combination whose characteristic curves interrelate in a certain way can yield high highlight contrast (i.e., not much tonal discrimination in the highlights, but a greater sense of "snap" in the gradation you do see) and low shadow contrast, or good shadow contrast and low highlight contrast. In lenses, local contrast issues are accounted for mainly by flare and veiling glare, and are affected mainly by lens coatings. A lens can have exactly the same level of overall contrast (i.e., it will transmit the same overall range from light to dark), but it might have much worse shadow contrast, for instance, in certain real-world situations. Meaning, there will not be as much separation between slightly different shades of gray in very dark areas of the picture. (Transmission of color is also very much affected by the efficiency of the coatings and the relative contribution of flare.)

The big question mark where local contrast is concerned is that almost all actual picture-taking situations allow flare and veiling glare (the latter an overall dulling or haze of the image similar to "flashing" an enlargement with a low dose of non-image-forming light, or fog) to contribute in varying amounts and varying ways. Despite lots of scientific research, there still seems to be not much way to quantify it exactly, or predict its contribution exactly with any given system ("system" meaning camera-lens/film/enlarger-lens/paper) in real-world situations. Flare is always present to at least some degree, but it is seldom present in exactly the same way in two different systems encountering two different situations.

Before lens coatings were invented, lens flare was a major determinant of image quality. The best lenses were generally the ones that allowed performance to remain high with the fewest elements, because there were fewer air-to-glass surfaces to create flare. This explains the lifespan of the exceptionally long-lived Tessar-type, despite its speed limitations. Lens coatings are of critical importance to modern lenses; virtually all zoom lenses and many highly-corrected multi-element lenses would be useless for general photography without them. Often, coating is what makes the most difference between an average lens and a very good one.

Have you ever noticed how many early 35mm photographers tried to avoid bright sunlight? You might be forgiven for thinking that the decade of the 1940s was entirely overcast (and not just by the world political situation). With experience as their teacher, many photographers in the '30s and '40s learned various clever ways of avoiding or minimizing high-flare situations. The amateur admonition to "never point the camera in the direction the sunlight is coming from" dates from this era. Such was life with "miniature" cameras before the days of multicoating.

Labels: AF Zoom-Nikkor 70-300mm f/4-5.6G, Animal, Nikon D50, Photography

Posted by Mohd Fadzly Abdul Mubin at 10:25 PM | Permalink

Taken with a Nikon D50 and AF Zoom-Nikkor 70-300mm f/4-5.6G lens

Labels: AF Zoom-Nikkor 70-300mm f/4-5.6G, Animal, Nikon D50, Photography

Posted by Mohd Fadzly Abdul Mubin at 10:22 PM | Permalink

Taken with a Nikon D50 and AF Zoom-Nikkor 70-300mm f/4-5.6G lens

Labels: AF Zoom-Nikkor 70-300mm f/4-5.6G, Animal, Nikon D50, Photography

Posted by Mohd Fadzly Abdul Mubin at 10:01 PM | Permalink

Taken with a Nikon D50 and Nikon 70-300mm f/4-5.6G lens

Labels: AF Zoom-Nikkor 70-300mm f/4-5.6G, Animal, Nikon D50, Photography

Posted by Mohd Fadzly Abdul Mubin at 3:20 PM | Permalink

Taken with a Nikon D50 and AF Zoom-Nikkor 70-300mm f/4-5.6G lens

Of all the things there are to photograph I find animals, birds and insects the most satisfying and the most difficult. They almost never do what you want them to and are most likely to do whatever you least expect. The best way to photograph animals is in the wild.

Manual Focus

When photographing animals you need a lot of patience, they either do nothing for long periods of time or they are so hyperactive that you can't keep them in the viewfinder. What you need to do is study the animal for a while and try to predict their next move. Birds will often follow a definite flight path so, if you can work out what it is, you can just wait until they fly past a certain point. I usually switch to manual focus when photographing birds as the auto focus can often end up trying to focus on the empty sky.
Long Lens

Animals, especially in the wild do not let you get very close to them so an essential piece of kit for photographing animals is a long lens preferably a zoom. I use a 75-300mm zoom and, more often than not, I end up using it at the 300mm end. Ideally I would like a 500mm lens but good ones cost quite a lot of money and you really need to use it on a tripod. The general rule of thumb for handholding without camera shake is to use a shutter speed greater than 1 divided by the focal length of the lens. So a 500mm lens should be used at shutter speeds greater than 1/500th of a second. With this in mind it's also a good idea to choose clothing that will help you blend in with your surroundings.

Labels: AF Zoom-Nikkor 70-300mm f/4-5.6G, Animal, Nikon D50, Photography

Posted by Mohd Fadzly Abdul Mubin at 3:15 PM | Permalink

A photograph is a picture made by photography. The term "photography" is not a reference to an idea or a picture making style. It is the invented name for a particular process. Sir John Herschel gave the world the word "Photography" out of thin air in front of the Royal Society at Somerset House, London, on the 14th of March, 1839. The key phrase is recorded in the minutes and it goes "Photography or the application of the chemical rays of light to the purpose of pictorial representation...".

That is where the matter lay for the next 170 or so years. All the works of Talbot, Weston, Adams, Cartier-Bresson, and millions of other sat neatly, certainly, and unambiguously within that understanding.

Now, of course, highly detailed pictures can be generated by painting machines (inkjet), or laser writers (Lambda) controlled by electronic files. These files may be derived, a lot or a little, from the digitisation of a lens image. Vulgar usage appends the term "photography " to this work even though it is a very different thing, technically and philosophically, from original photography.

In ordinary speech folks use the word "photography" to mean what it means now: any process that makes realistic looking pictures. That's not what "Photography" was invented to mean and therein lies the problem.

Now when I want to refer to pictures made solely by "the chemical rays of light" (for aesthetic or historical discourse, say) I can no longer use "photography" because that word now includes electro-mechanically generated pictures. In effect I've lost a useful word and don't have a effective substitute. It is tedious to have to specify the means every time; "chemical rays of light for the purpose of pictorial representation". And it is tedious to have to listen to that mantra every time as well.

In language usage always wins over definition but occasionally the users themselves lose when they are unable to say clearly and think clearly what they could before.

Labels: AF Zoom-Nikkor 70-300mm f/4-5.6G, Animal, Nikon D50, Philosophy of Photography, Photography

Posted by Mohd Fadzly Abdul Mubin at 3:10 PM | Permalink

Perhentian Island, Besut, Terengganu, Malaysia

Taken with a Pentax K100D and Tamron AF 70-300mm F/4-5.6 Di LD Macro lens

Labels: Animal, Pentax K100D, Photography, Tamron AF 70-300mm F/4-5.6 Di LD Macro

Posted by Mohd Fadzly Abdul Mubin at 6:34 PM | Permalink

erhentian Island, Besut, Terengganu, Malaysia

Taken with a Nikon D40 digital camera and Sigma 30mm f/1.4 EX DC HSM lens

Labels: Animal, Landscape, Nikon D40, Perhentian 2007, Photography, Sigma 30mm f/1.4 EX DC HSM

Posted by Mohd Fadzly Abdul Mubin at 6:29 PM | Permalink

Sasman has be trying to get the best of this Cattle Egret for months. I think this photo is one of his best shot of the bird. Now the swamp is gone to make way for some housing development.

Taken with a Pentax K100D and Tamron AF 70-300mm F/4-5.6 Di LD Macro lens

Some findings on the Cattle Egret

The Cattle Egret is a stocky species, averaging 51 cm long and weighing 200-600 g, with a short thick bill. The non-breeding adult has all-white plumage, a yellow bill, and greyish-yellow legs. When breeding, orange buff plumes develop on the back, breast and crown, and the legs become orange pink. The sexes are similar, but juvenile birds have a black bill. This bird will give soft kre calls in flight, and a gruff rick-reck on the ground.

The Cattle Egret is often found in dry grassy habitats, unlike most herons which are associated with shallow water. It feeds on insects, especially grasshoppers, and is usually found with cattle and other large animals which disturb small creatures which the egrets then catch. This species will sometimes ride on the backs of these animals.

Labels: Animal, Pentax K100D, Photography, Tamron AF 70-300mm F/4-5.6 Di LD Macro

Posted by Mohd Fadzly Abdul Mubin at 10:56 PM | Permalink

More commonly know as a magpie bird by the rest of the world.

This photo was taken in my backyard.

Taken with a Nikon D50 and AF Zoom-Nikkor 70-300mm f/4-5.6G lens

Labels: Animal, Pentax K100D, Photography, Tamron AF 70-300mm F/4-5.6 Di LD Macro

Posted by Mohd Fadzly Abdul Mubin at 10:33 PM | Permalink

This cobra was foundtrapped in a well by the graveyard near Ibzanis, Kuala Terengganu. It was left starving in the well until Sasman called the JPA to have it released back into the wild.

Taken with a Pentax K100D and Tamron AF 70-300mm F/4-5.6 Di LD Macro lens

Labels: Animal, Pentax K100D, Photography, Tamron AF 70-300mm F/4-5.6 Di LD Macro

Posted by Mohd Fadzly Abdul Mubin at 10:28 PM | Permalink

Taken with a Nikon D50 and Nikon 70-300mm f/4-5.6G lens

Location: Sepetir Rendang, Gong Badak, Kuala Terengganu, Malaysia.

The Viceroy butterfly (Limenitis archippus) is a brown and orange non-poisonous butterfly that is very similar to the Monarch; it is a Batesian mimic of the poisonous Monarch. It can be distinguished from the Monarch by the black line that crosses its wings. Also, the undersides of its wings are quite similar to the topside (unlike the Monarch, whose underside is much lighter). It has a wingspan of 2.75 to 3 inches (7 to 7.5 cm). The Viceroy is found from Canada to Mexico. The caterpillar is olive green and brown with bristly tufts behind the head; it eats mostly willow and cottonwood. Classification: Family Nymphalidae.

(Source: http://www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/butterflies/species/)

Labels: AF Zoom-Nikkor 70-300mm f/4-5.6G, Animal, Nikon D50, Photography

Posted by Mohd Fadzly Abdul Mubin at 10:13 PM | Permalink

Burung Tiong Gembala Kerbau atau juga dikenali sebagai Gembala Kerbau, nama sains Acridotheses tristis merupakan salah satu daripada haiwan yang boleh di dapati di Malaysia. Mynah in Tanah Perkuburan Ladang, Kuala Terengganu, Malaysia.

Taken with a Pentax K100D and Tamron AF 70-300mm F/4-5.6 Di LD Macro lens

Labels: Animal, Pentax K100D, Photography, Tamron AF 70-300mm F/4-5.6 Di LD Macro

Posted by Mohd Fadzly Abdul Mubin at 10:05 PM | Permalink