Weather change

The weather was cold and wet on Saturday, and fishing wasn't great either. 

The weather turned around 180 degree on Sunday, but fishing didn't improve like the weather did.

Cokin and Kenko Zeta filter

My friend, Chris lent me Cokin graduated ND filter to try.

I went out Sunday evening to take some shots with the filter, and I liked the job which the filter did. I can now shoot the sky and the land without compromising the exposure between the two.

I was using some blu-tack to hold the filter in place as I didn't have a filter holder. I was still able to take shots with the set up, but it was too fiddly to do especially when you were loosing light around you and mosquitoes were buzzing around my face.

So, I went to a local camera shop today and picked up Cokin P-series filter holder.  They let me try two filter holders, standard one and one for wider angle lens.  The standard one has three slots to hold different filters which is nice, but it appears that with my 24mm lens, a tiny amount of the image gets chopped off at each corner because of the thickness of the filter holder. 

So, in the end, I bought the wide angle filter holder (BPW400).  It only holds one filter, but it doesn't have the vignetting problem on 24mm.  It appears that I can even stack the square filter holder on top of a normal screw-in PL filter without causing light fall. This means that I can use either a combination of PL and ND grad filter or a set of a circular screw-in ND (like ones Kenko makes) and Square ND grad.  I think, having only one filter slot doesn't seem to be bad after all.

Here is a comparison between a shot without a filter and a shot with filters (Cokin 121S and Kenko circular PL) .

Speaking of screw-in filters, I have been using Kenko Zeta filters. I got circular PLs, clear protection filters, and ND8. The clear filters control flare better than my old cheap Kenko and Hoya filtesr do. I don't know what other tows are like compared against filters from B&W, Tiffen, etc, but I am happy with them since they are pretty thin and not causing vignetting on my wide angle lens. Also I got these filters from Japan and the prices over there are good.  Filters are very expensive in Australia, I find.

Mandurah Field Day

The last Sunday was the club's field day in Mandurah.

The weather was great and many fish were caught (I kept a couple for dinner).

It was a good outing.

Canon EF 85mm f/1.8

I bought a second hand EF85mm f/1.8 today.

It is less than 12 months old, and it appears that it has been hardly used.  There is a tiny hair line mark on the front lens, which my friends could not spot when I pointed it out, and more importantly it doesn't appear to be affecting images at all, at least on my test shots. The rear element is perfectly clean which would be more critical, I guess. The price tag was very reasonable ($200) and a lens hood came with it for free.  

Auto focus on this lens is super fast and quiet.  I thought it was broken first as it didn't make much noise (compared to my 50mm f/2.5 macro which sounds like some sort of gears are missing inside when it is focusing).

I went out to pick up the lens, and went fishing straight after that, so I took some test shots on the river in the afternoon. I love the out of focus blur that I can get from this lens when I shot with wide aperture.  I think it is way too narrow for fishing use, but this would be a great lens for my portrait work that I want to do.

@ f/1.8

@ f/1.8

@ f/2.8

@ f/14

@ f/6.3

@ f/2.0

@ f/6.3

@ f/2.8

@ f/5.0

@ f/8.0

What I do when fish aren't biting

Fishing was good until two weekends ago. Then a series of storms came, and the river has turned into a brown soup.

Well, if I look on the bright side, I can spend more time for photographing on the river since fish aren't biting.

この２週間程は、天気がずーと悪くて雨ばかり。川は、ひどい濁りで、魚は、全く釣れません。釣れないばかりか、ヒットすらありません。当たりもかすりもしないとはこの事です。

「もしかしたら」と思って、釣りには行くのですが、同じ結果。魚が居なければどうしようもありません。釣り竿の代わりにカメラを持って川に行く今日この頃です。

By the way, Blogger apparently now has a setting for "Auto Enhance" for uploaded photos.  I didn't know about this until now, but it is apparently a new thing which has been introduced on something called Google +.

It looks like this "auto enhance" thing doesn't do much good for my photos. The images looks fine on Lightroom or Mac preview (even using Firefox and Safari as preview tools), but as soon as they are uploaded on Blogger, the images become noisy and colour gets washed off. Unless this setting is ticked off, the final images will get some ugly smearing and smudge.

Here is a set of photos with "Auto Enhance" on and off, and you can see big differences.

ところで、Googleのブロガーですが、最近Google＋なるものが出来たらしく、おせっかいにも、Auto Enhanceという写真の見栄えを自動にしてくれる機能が付いたようです。

この機能を作ったプログラマーに悪いですが、フォトグラファー・ユーザーには全く良くありません。写真の見栄えが良くなるどころか、勝手にノイズや染みだらけの写真が出来あがってしまいます。とくに空の写真はPhotoshopのペイントツールで上塗りした様な具合です。

これまた、おせっかいにも、この機能はどうやらディフォルトでONになる様に設定されているみたいです。参考までに、設定をONにしたのとOFFにした写真をアップロードしました。

Auto Enhance ON, which  turn the sky to look ugly

Again, "Auto Enhance" is ON.  There is smear and smudge on the sky

Here is one without "Auto Enhance". The sky is noise free and the image retains the original colour and tone

Again, I disabled "Auto Enhance" here.