19 December 2007 One street scene, Three versions
I couldn’t decide which of these three I liked best. The one in the middle is straight out of the camera.
I took this with my 300 lens with a 1.4x teleconverter, for an effective telephoto length of 420 mm. That’s why there’s so much noise in the picture – I had to jack the sensitivity (ISO) to 1600 to get a decent exposure. Even with that that high of an ISO, the shutter speed is only 1/142. Pretty good, considering the old rule of thumb would require a shutter speed of 1/400 or so without VR (vibration reduction), which my 300 mm lens does not have. I’m a spendthrift when it comes to lenses, you see.[Update: Actually, strike that. The reason I don't have a 300 mm lens with VR is that nobody makes one. Nikon does make a f2.8 lens with VR, which lets in twice as much light as an f4 lens, but it's massively heavy and massively expensive, and not really suited to street photography. If Nikon does update their 300 mm f4 to include VR I will be hard pressed not to indulge myself. Then again, VR only helps with hand-shake, not with people in the frame moving, and since I use my 300 to photograph mostly moving people, VR might not help that much....Ahh, one can (and often does) weigh the various variables all day!]
1 comment in “One street scene, Three versions”
December 19th, 2007 at 9:37 pm
The first one is great but I would play with the color mix to grayscale, or increase the whites a little for more contrast.