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.