Irene Singers Recording 2011

I am part of a small community choir based at the Irene Homes.  Last year we put out a Christmas CD and enjoyed it so much that we decided to record another.  This year the theme is Africa.  We recorded the soloists in ManleyStudios on Saturday 28 May 2011.

Thanks to Sean for donating his studio and time to the choir.

For most of this shoot I used my 50mm f1.8.  It is a fantastic little lens with great image quality and DOF, especially at the price.  The lighting conditions inside the studio itself were very tricky, mainly due to the intense back lighting.

The complete gallery can be found here.

Barend preparing for Toto's Africa verse 1

Junior giving it all in Toto's Africa verse 2

Hugo getting into his part for Weeping

Junior looking pensive

Alet warming up

Barend and Annika enjoying the sun

Photo Glossary - 02 - Shutter Speed

Shutter speed refers to the amount of time that light is allowed to fall on your camera’s sensor when taking a photo.  It, in conjunction with the aperture and ISO setting, determines the exposure of the photo.  Given a consistent aperture and ISO setting a fast shutter speed will let in less light and a slow shutter speed more light.

In addition a fast shutter speed will freeze motion, capturing a particular moment, while a slow shutter speed will result in a blur, capturing the motion.  Slow shutter speeds can lead to blurred photos due to camera shake when hand held.

 In automatic mode shutter speed is controlled by the camera.

Photo Glossary - 01 - Exposure

I run a photographic club in my office and part of that is a contribution to the internal weekly bulletin.  At the moment I am using it to put together a photo glossary, which I will mirror here.
This is the first entry, originally posted in February 2011.
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Exposure
Exposure is the amount of light that falls on your camera’s sensor.  It affects how bright or dark your image is.  In a well exposed photo you can make out all the colour and brightness details across the entire picture.  In an over-exposed photo lighter areas will be ‘blown out’ to white and in an under-exposed photo darker areas will be “crushed” to black.

Your camera has 3 methods of controlling the exposure of a photo: shutter speed, aperture and ISO setting.

Swartkops Air Show 2011

Hi everyone, welcome to my very first post.

I'm going to start off with a collection of photos from the Swatkops Air Show on Saturday 21 May 2011.  It was the first air show that I have shot and it was tremendous fun.  I should probably have researched plane photography a little more thoroughly before I went but over all I'm pretty pleased with the results.  Next time (probably at the Wonderboom Air Show in October) I'll try to get a little more prop blur.

For this shoot I used my 350D and 100-400L, hand held and pointed at the sky.  I used aperture priority mode, set to f/8 where my lens is sharpest, shutter speeds were between 1/640 and 1/1250 for the most part.  I was quite impressed with how well the camera tracked the planes and kept them in focus, even when I didn't hold them in the center of the frame.

I kept the post production relatively simple for the most part, just tweaking exposure, contrast and colour, but the two scatter photos have been quite heavily modified to give an old fashioned look, which I think is quite effective.

The complete album can be found here.

Gabriel Wings Soloist

 SAA Harvards

Silver Falcons - Scatter 1

 Silver Falcons - Scatter 2

 Vampire in the Sunset

I hope that you enjoy my blog, please drop me a comment and let me know what you think.

Bevan