Randy Walton
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Not sure what’s wrong with me lately but my photography has been suffering . Not sure if it’s the pressures of work or what but I seem to be making rookie mistakes every time I shoot. My mind is just not in it. I debated whether or not to post any of these photos, but decided I’d just post a few, call it a slump and move on. The first was the Tuscaloosa Air show. Two mistakes. First, this was only my second air show to shoot, should have done some research. If i had I would have known that shutter speeds above 320 or so cause props to freeze looking more like a suspended static shot than an “in flight” shot. Couple that with the fact that my 1.4TC was causing some sort of focusing problem and you end up wasting a perfectly good day. It’s so hard to tell out in the bright sunlight what you are actually getting. Then, when you get home, you see the disappointing results. Next was the Monte Montgomery concert at Workplay. Not much i could do about this, just bad lighting conditions for photography. Great show, not so great photos. All I could do was crank up the iso and shoot. Third, and hopefully last, in the slump is the Sunrise Balloon Race at the Tuscaloosa airport. I made the mistake of leaving the ISO set to H1 from the night before and didn’t realize until most of the balloons had launched. Fortunately i was still in auto-iso mode and the ISO was being adjusted down for proper exposure. The ISO still ended up waaaay to high and caused some unnecessary noise in the shots. I varied between shutter and aperture priority and shutter speeds were 125-400 most if the time and aperture at 11-22. This is ok but i never realized the ISO was set the way it was until too late. Ok, slump over, move on… Next up, Andy McKee at Workplay and then I’m going to wade a river with my expensive camera and shoot some Cahaba Lilys.
The Buck Creek Festival celebrates the arrival of spring every year in Helena Alabama. A city park situated on the banks of Buck Creek near Old Town Helena invites you to relax and enjoy the family atmosphere and entertainment. The headliner for Friday night was a group called Mustang Sally. A (mostly) all-girl band from all over the country. These fun-loving and sometimes rowdy gals got the crowd going about 8:30. I seem to find myself in difficult lighting conditions all the time, this was no different. I was shooting with my 18-200vr lens and auto-iso, trying not to let the iso get too high. With shutter speeds as low as 1/40 it’s hard to get sharp photos but I managed to get a few. I noticed after i was finished that the iso hadn’t gone very high at all in most cases. I think if I had it to do over again I’d use a little faster shutter speeds and let the iso fall where it may. The D300 has a sensor that does not produce much noise at all at high iso. Come to think of it, i do have it to do all over again…tonight. We’ll see what happens. Enjoy.
My daughter had a friend home for the weekend recently and since they are both into ghosts and all these ghost hunting shows we thought we’d just drive by Sloss Furnace and just see what it looked like. An episode of Ghost Adventures had been filmed there and they just wanted to get a look at it. There is someone named Zak Bagans who is on the show and my daughter found where he apparently put his signature, and added hers. I’ve lived here all my life and had no idea it was a historical landmark and was open and you could tour the place! I knew they had events there from time to time but i thought it was just standing there rusting. The whole thing is open and you can climb down into the bowels of the place! They say it’s haunted, i don’t know. Lucky we were there in the middle of the day. They say you can go at night and tour it but you have to pay $50/hour for security.
