Monday, April 27, 2009

Frustrating day for photography


It as one of those days that getting good images would be very challenging. It started fine, I recorded what I thought were some nice sunrise files on my way to work. I was anticipating the arrival of my Canon 500D close-up lens from B&H Photo, UPS got it to me late this afternoon.

From much published info on the Web, I know the AF-S 70-300mm VR works superbly with this Canon close-up lens; I had the 250D when I owned the G6, it's the same optical formula except it's designed for telephoto lenses. Of course, I wanted to try this out for myself.

I went to our LDS meetinghouse, saw some budding plant life that might make for good subject material. Then it hit me - it was windy! Aaaaaaaaaarg. I know wind can make shooting macro subjects very painful, and, the wind did win out - once I loaded the files into the laptop and viewed them, I knew I had failed.

To boot, I thought I could salvage my day with good sunrise shots - there were several with power lines in them! Who put those in my SD card?

Th final straw was the tiny little blotch I saw on all my files from today's outing - it's was in the same spot on each file. Yes, it was a piece of some crap on my sensor, hopefully just dust. You don't see the blasted stuff until after you unload the card; you can see dust in your viewfinder, but that won't hurt anything.

Right click the folder, and you quickly delete all files - I now had nothing to show for today's efforts.

I used my rocket blower to fix the dust problem with the mirror up mode on the D80. The only way to test it was to shoot something - I was happily able to capture the sunset behind my house, salvaging a decent file and being able to create a blog post.

Tomorrow's goal - try to get some nice macro images, shooting close-ups is very challenging.

4 comments:

  1. Very nice image. For all failure you experienced today, it's not apparent to me the blog reader--- you persevered and got one worth posting before the day was out, even if it's not the one you originally had hoped for. Nice work.

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  2. Thanks. I wish there was a way to know if dust was on the sensor BEFORE you took a whole bunch of photos.

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  3. You know Ron, that's what turned me off of the 5D. I was in Hawaii of all places, and to find dust on my sensor in the middle of a vacation and me not even being knowledgeable about a solution let alone prepared to deal with it... disheartening. I think anti-dust mechanisms have improved and I've also learned a few things. Guess it comes with the territory! Perhaps one day they'll have a mechanism to test the sensor for any anomalies as dust so as to be able to warn you -- like the computers in cars or something, huh?

    Anyways, thanks again for your diligence in taking and posting photos. I need to get back to constantly be looking for images.

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  4. The most effective dust buster system is by Olympus; you never hear any of those guys complain about sensor dirt. The beauty of RAW files is you CAN clean them up if you are so unlucky to have this happen, it does to all of us sooner or later.

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