So I was pacing around looking for something to shoot, and decided to shoot Ivan, who was looking suspiciously at me (as usual) from his perch atop the cat tree.
But what lens to use? The 24mm f/2.8 AI is nice and on the camera, but too wide. The 50mm f/1.8G is brilliant, but in heavy rotation of late. !!Aha!!! the Holga 60mm f/8!
Of course, such a lens pretty much requires a flash indoors, so I popped up the pop-up for some cheesy on-camera stuff.
And, of course, indoors, with only one 100w lamp at about 20ft., APmode Shutter Speeds were clocking in at 6 seconds: far too long for handholding. So I tried some creative blurry stuff, and then decided to change over to the 36-72mm f/3.5 E-Series.
This scared Ivan terribly, and he fled under the sofa.
So I laid down on the floor and shot a few of him cowering, still with the flash on, and still in APmode, and then I remembered the old zoomy flashy trick, where you take a longish exposure, trip the shutter, zoomy in or out, and pop the flash at some point…
It didn’t work with Ivan, so I spun around, and poked the lens at the front door, with the trees beyond.
The shutter speeds in AP mode went a bit too quickly for decent zooming (it’s fairly impossible to rack a zoom from one end to the other in 1/1000th of a second, even a paltry 2x mid-range zoom like the 36-72).
So I flipped over to Manual, and tried various settings till I got something I liked, and here we have the result.
It’s resolutely not what I was looking for, but I really ended up liking this quite a bit, what with the obviously zoomed trees (though not a full 36-72, obviously), with the reasonably sharp frame over top, and the shadows that make it look almost like one of those divided picture frame things…
I think I might play with this a bit more in the coming days or months: good times.
D7000. Nikon 36-72mm f/3.5 E-Series. ISO100, 1/10th, f/22. Pop-Up Flash in TTL mode. Very minimal processing—about 5 seconds of slider play in the Levels only, plus a bit of straightening and very slight cropping—but only after I hemmed and hawed over this one or that one or the other one no wait that other one there maybe…
