DSLR Photography Forum

A photographer is confronted with a complex web of visual juxtapositions that realign themselves with each step the photographer takes. Take one step and something hidden comes into view; take another and an object in the front now presses up against one in the distance. Take one step and the description of deep space is clarified; take another and it is obscured.
- Steven Shore, The Nature of Photographs

Telephoto lenses are the opposite of wide-angle lenses -- it may sound obvious, but the difference goes beyond the magnification. Telephotos isolate, abstract, and remove context, giving the photographer much more freedom to select and simplify their subject. But the importance of careful composition is just as strong as with wide-angle lenses, as subtle changes in position can radically change the relationships within the frame.

For this assignment, let's look at lenses longer than 100mm. New photos are always encouraged, but past favourites are also welcomed.

As in Long

Or a long walk to the end.

Not quite as long.

I was out with my longest lens a couple of days ago, playing with its ability to create abstract designs from larger scenes.

The next big dumb-horror movie, "Weights on a Crane":



Detail from Libeskind's addition to the Royal Ontario Museum:



Playing with perspective compression, but the sharpness isn't quite what I wanted:



I used the short DOF to drop out the background on this one, which I took as a lesson in just what an odd language English can be. The same abbreviation means two different things:



And finally a pattern from the running track at the university. It's a great monitor check: the track should be blue, but it looks purple on my laptop.

It is mid royal blue on mine, but I am still on a CRT.

Mid-royal blue sounds about right.

I was trying to come up with some good subjects for a telephoto lens, so I went back to the zoo. All of these were shot at my longest focal length, a 566mm-equivalent, and are uncropped and unedited. (For some reason I almost exclusively use my widest and longest lenses at their extremes.)

Impala:


Ostrich:


Giraffe:


Gorilla:


Elephant:

Well - this one is a favourite from a while back, which some may remember (shot with my 400 5.6 Canon L just after I got it in September last year). I was up in Darwin and got up around 4:00 in the morning (from memory) to go and photograph birds in the dawn light.

The light is a little hot and I could probably play around with the RAW file a bit more, but I like it as is:

From across a small lake:


From across a nightclub:

These are poor photographs, but the subject matter may interest someone.
I took them this morning while waiting for a delayed flight at Sydney airport. Melbourne airport was closed yesterday due to bad weather, Brisbane airport closed today, and it looks like Sydney airport might be closed tomorrow! I had my original flight through Melbourne cancelled at the last minute and found myself in Sydney for the night instead.


1. My first look at the Airbus A380 Super-jumbo.
This may be the actual aircraft that took the world's first passenger flight of the A380 last year (the maiden flight was made by a Singapore Airlines A380 between Singapore and Sydney, and there are only 4 of these aircraft currently in service for any airline anywhere in the world according to Wikipedia).
I had to do some major tweaks to the tone curve to add contrast to this shot as it was shot through glass and fog. It was shot with a 200mm f/2.8 lens with a 2x and 1.4x teleconverters stacked together giving 560mm. When you also take the 1.3 crop factor of the 1D3 camera into account, it ends up being 730mm in "35mm equivalent" speak.


2. Here's another shot straight out of the camera without any contrast tweaks, showing just how bad the weather was and how low the contrast was. Even with stacked teleconverters (losing 3 stops of light) and this low-contrast scene the 1D3 would autofocus just fine.

Those are impressive shots from such bad conditions. #2 is amazing - I can easily imagine it on the cover of an airline magazine. (For pilots and enthusiasts, not in-flight. )

Very nice lines in your pictures NT..

Matthew...
Your series of the zoo is very sweet, and the picture I like the most from the very fist time I saw it was the elefant... Wonderful detail in the whole picture... and your composition so well cared... Very beautiful picture.

Chris...
Very beautiful picture of these birds. It looks so stylish... as if they were setup in this way for your picture.

I can't stop been impressed by the air bus... and think how far we have gone about aircraft is concerned.

The last picture is impressive Kombi... I liked it a lot!!

Great action shot Adrian.