The West Ring

…is that it is as complicated as it first seemed! Especially as I have thrown myself in at the deep-end trying to photograph a fast moving subject in our two hounds. Still, I’m making progress and that’s what counts.

Looking at my first attempts I could see that quite often it appeared that their bums were in focus and their faces, well, not. I thought about this and decided that perhaps it was because I’d had too large an aperture, and therefore a small depth of field. My thinking being that in the time I’m taking to take the shot, their speed has moved them ever so slightly out of focus. So I resolved to try a smaller aperture.

This of course brought its own challenges in that it reduced my shutter speed for a given exposure. Again, not helpful when these two are charging around. To my credit it didn’t take too long before I remembered I could change the ISO setting to “increase my film speed”. Another small improvement…

Around this time I also changed how the camera was focusing. I switched it from using all nine points to just the central one to give me precise control of where it was focusing, and again think that gave me small improvements. But there was something bugging me - I couldn’t remember the difference between the focusing modes, and I was sure that one of them should be used for fast moving subjects. So, back to the guide book that I had been lent and I found it: AI Servo. This last time out I used that mode and there’s a noticeable improvement in the sharpness of the pictures. (The pictures will be online in a day or two!)

Though I’ve definitely made some progress in learning what the camera can do, and when to use it, I still need so much more practice to get a much better “strike rate” of in focus pictures. At the moment I am forever guilty of forgetting to check or change something, and it’s usually the ISO. Surpassed myself the other day though, by forgetting to alter the ISO and the shutter speed having moved from in the trees into bright sunlight…

As I said at the start: it’s complicated, this photography lark.