Dave Frost Photography

I’m not going to add too many words to this one, I think it speaks for itself – do you?

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In keeping with the animal theme, Daisy, the long suffering Shih Tzu is now feeling every day of her pregnancy. Not only is she fatter than a Mars Bar Munching salad dodger, she’s a bit miserable with it.

Only a few more days to go and there’ll be plenty more to keep her occupied than a Camera in the face.

I’ve seen quite a few shots recently involving playing cards and motion blur so though I’d have a go myself having borrowed a rather nice Manfrotto Tripod from a friend. I didn’t realise how hard this is to do by yourself !! – For those interested, the Flash was bounced off of the ceiling, and the exposure was metered for the ambient light minus around 1 stop.
Multiple test shots gave me a resultant shutter speed of 1/5 @ f6.3 which captured the movement of the cards quite nicely when I was able to get the timing right. Keeping an eye on the timer, and making sure the cards are within the frame was rather tricky, and I only ended up with two usable shots from 20 or so attempts

Sadly, my living room is too small to not have included the wall in the shot. I already had to clone out a bit of sofa behind me. This for me, makes this shot pretty much just below average, but at least it’s good practice. I thought about trying to remove the wall by copying or cloning in more floor, but my PS skills fall way too short to even attempt it.

Added to the list of shots to re-try properly at some point this year.

This month has been a bit of a non-starter photographically speaking. Aside from the fun I had testing the extension tubes it’s been work work work. One of the good things to come out of the extension tube experiments was the rediscovery of the Nifty Fifty which hasn’t had much use at all (I even thought about selling it!),
This was one of a random set I took (most of them were of the dogs) which I quite liked.
The lighting for this one was a veritable mixture, with natural daylight from the right and above, a laptop screen in front of my long suffering model and bounced flash with a diffuser from the 430EX in manual on it’s lowest setting. Aperture was set at f2.5 (@ f1.8 the DOF was a little too shallow), with a shutter speed of 1/25.

If that’s true, then my windows need cleaning or I have no soul. This was another one of those, what shall I do now moments. So I attached the nifty fifty to the 30D, stuck in 24mm of extension tubes and wobbled back and forth in front of the lens with the camera remote in hand. Out of 10 or so shots, this one was the only one nearly in focus.

eye macro photo by dave frost

I guess I’ll be getting bored with the macro shots shortly so will have some “proper” photos up here again before the end of the month !!