My Photographic Journal 4
Peach Country - The January 2016 5 star shot
I got my five star money shot to-day - the first one for 2016 , 1 out 1101 pictures taken over the month of January. There are some 4 star shots I am still working on. However, this is the first image that as soon as I downloaded it, I knew would be a five star exhibition piece. Photographic serendipity happens like that and that is why I remain enthused by this project. I never know what I am going to get until I download.
I have got the shutter button down with the Canon whilst still shooting on f8 setting. There was almost no forced saving or turning off functionality disruption to-day. The secret is I turn the camera off after each series of shots and start up again once I have lined up the next image location.
The test for me to-day was on lining the kayak up far enough away from the image to slow the movement of the kayak down, to visualize the shot, frame and then zoom in and out as I move. I haven't got this under control. Where to line up to get the best shot is still at the moment based on serendipity - although I am hoping to be able to replace serendipity with approximation to describe this process shortly.
Control of the zoom is cumbersome and difficult in this situation. I panic in my haste to try to smoothly control the speed of the zoom to set the frame parameters and I don't have a second chance. Once I have entered the shooting zone, the water surface remains relatively still if I have lined the kayak up reasonably well around the semi- visualized image. However, the camera doesn't have a fast enough zoom on the lens to make quick adjustments when the kayaking is drifting near and through the image around 1 or 1.5kms
The result is uncertainty with the outcome of the shot, hence serendipity. This I think will remain a constant tension. Maybe I need to learn to live with this constraint with both cameras. Comparison between the Sony RX100 Mk3 camera that doesn’t have as long a zoom lens and the Canonis the next frontier I want to understand.
To-day has however forced me to think about what content I am likely to get as a result of this constraint, to re-think how I can expand the potential image content repertoire.
