The combination of rain and a garden in riotous bloom made me want to get out and take pictures. I also had a new lens to try out: a Canon 70-200mm f/4L. My lens tests while back showed me that my ancient 100-300mm USM should never be used on a job again, so this is the replacement. I put on a short extension tube, and went out to play in the rain.
Even with the extension tube I could not focus very close, so I played with out-of-focus shapes as the center of interest. And with shooting through foliage to a more distant center of focus. I found that my lightweight travel ballhead was not up to the task of precise placement with the heavy lens, so I brought out the Kirk ballhead and mounted it on the tripod. My shutter speeds were slow, but fortunately there was no wind. I used the mirror lockup function with the self-timer so that I wouldn’t jar the camera during exposures. When it started raining heavily again, I went inside to process the "film" on the laptop.
What’s great is the immediacy of seeing the work just after shooting it. What is frustrating is that it has taken four times as long to process the images as it did to take them. Then there’s a new problem with digital that we never had with film. In addition to compensating for exposure, now we have to compensate for color. The Auto White Balance decided that all that green foliage required a significant magenta correction, and unprocessed all the leaves had a washed-out, cyanish bleach look to them. Zeroing out the tint compensation brought the foliage back to life.
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