Jubilee Celebration

May 17, 2019 by Howard Dale Posted in Flowers, Nature Leave a comment

It’s Spring, time for planting and my wife has been acquiring new roses. This is particularly so because she has located some good local sources for David Austin roses. He was the great guru of roses. Recently deceased his company continues the tradition.

This one is called “Jubilee Celebration” and according to the David Austin website:

We were honored to name this rose in commemoration of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II’s Golden Jubilee. The large, domed flowers are a lovely rich pink with tints of soft gold on the underside of the petals, each bloom being elegantly held well above the foliage. Despite the size of the flowers, they are produced with exceptional freedom and continuity. The growth is vigorous, building up into a fine shrub. Very healthy and reliable. It has attractive, glossy foliage. The scent of the young flower is almost pure lemon zest, later becoming a delicious, fruity rose fragrance with hints of fresh lemon and raspberry. Excellent throughout the US including the challenging hot and humid climate of the south east.

It’s just emerging from its bud.

Taken with a Sony A77II and newly acquired Minolta Maxxum AF Macro 50mm f2.8.

Film Camera 2019/3 – Minolta XD – Results

May 14, 2019 by Howard Dale Posted in Film, Flowers, Landscapes, Statues, Things Leave a comment

First let me say that I wasn’t too happy with the film I used: Fujicolor Superia X-TRA400. I’ve used it before and it seems to me that it has a greenish cast, which I don’t find appealing. So why did I use it? The last few film cameras I used with black and white film and I had an urge to use color. The only color film that was readily available was this one.

Otherwise I was pleased with the results. Everything came out well focused and well exposed. In fact I’m struggling to find anything to say. Everything came out so well that it was almost as if the camera wasn’t there.

As mentioned in the earlier post the only problem I encountered was with framing. A few shots weren’t they way I’d wanted them to be. This could, however, be because my memory (and my eyes for that matter) are faulty.

Now I didn’t really try the camera out in difficult light. I was walking around taking pictures on a bright sunny day. In fact it was so bright that I regretted that I was only able to get ISO 400 film. I did’t use much of the camera’s functionality either, preferring to just put it in aperture priority and shoot away

For more pictures taken with this camera/lens see:

Happy Mother’s Day!

May 12, 2019 by Howard Dale Posted in Flowers Leave a comment

Happy Mothers Day to all mothers, but particularly to my wife and daughters Jessica and Jasmine.

Taken with a Sony A77II and Tamron A18 AF 18-250mm f3.5-6.3.

A Birthday Present

May 7, 2019 by Howard Dale Posted in Flowers, Nature, Sigma 400mm f5.6, Statues, Things, Wildlife & Animals Leave a comment

In an earlier post (See: Croton Landing – Killdeer) I expressed an interest (with some reservations) about trying bird photography:

I’m quite interested in wildlife photography, but I’ve always shied away from it. There are a couple of reasons for this. First I lack the patience. Second I don’t really have the right “gear”. While I would normally make the point the “gear” shouldn’t matter that much in this case I think it does. It seems to me that without a very long and fast telephone lens taking pictures of distant animals is very difficult. And acquiring such a lens seems to be very expensive. This picture was taken at the entirely inadequate 70mm equivalent maximum zoom of the Sony RX-100. It was then heavily cropped.

Still it did stimulate my interest. Maybe I’ll see if I can find an old Minolta AF lens at a reasonable price. Then I’ll only have to come to terms with the “lack of patience” issue. It might be a good challenge.

In pursuit of this goal my wife bought me this lens for my birthday. It’s a Sigma 400mm f5.6.

I realized that it wouldn’t be a good lens in low/dull light and when it arrived we were going through a period of gloomy, rainy days so I decided to wait for a sunny day to try it out. Unfortunately, there were no birds around so I did a few test shots around our garden.

It’s quite a solid lens, but at the same time not all that heavy (all of the pictures in this post were hand held). As many of the reviews I’d read pointed out it’s really an f8 lens as anything wider than that suffers from lack of sharpness. All of the pictures here were taken at f8 or smaller. It also has really bad chromatic aberration, which thankfully can be corrected fairly easily in Lightroom.

It has a built in lens shade and a sliding cover over the manual focus ring (so you don’t damage the lens by trying to manually focus the lens when the camera is in autofocus mode I imagine). It also has it’s own tripod mount. Mine also came with a polarizing filter.

I’d read that there might be compatibility problems with modern Sony cameras, but I didn’t have any problems with my Sony A77II. I’d also read that had been problems related to stripping the gears on the autofocus motor so, as advised in the articles I’d read I set the AF drive speed to slow. So far so good.

All things considered I was quite pleased (particularly since it was my first attempt with this lens). The results were better than I’d thought they would be. Now to find some birds.