It was initially my intention to use a sturdier tripod to take a shot of an ex-Country House, now exclusive residential flats. They are 2.66 kilometres from where I was standing when I first took a shot of the building a few evenings back.
But since wind is a prerequisite for exciting windsurfing images, I dropped into the Brogborough Windsurfing Car Park first, and found that although there were a couple of sailors out on the water, they seemed to be making the most of the wind to travel the length of the lake and gybe, whereas I had been hoping for the more invigorating and exciting; jumping.
I stayed awhile in case I was wrong, and had a brief chat with Sam, before considering revisiting the location on the outskirts of Stewartby from which I had earlier taken shots of this distant building, which nestles beneath trees that form the boundary of Ampthill Park.
My interest in this building is akin to HMS Belfast, which used to be a longterm Lens Test subject for Amateur Photographer, well-known to ‘Smudgers’ of a certain age (‘Smudgers’ being a term once used to describe early photographers).
I wanted to check out just how good a distant detail could be when using the Sigma Sports lens with their 2x Converter. Although, I did take some images with greater detail, the wind and much lower light value proved to be the limiting factor! I did manage to get a few shots, but sadly the cloud cover meant there were not the crisp shadows of my earlier shots. But I did my best to limit the camera movement by using a shutter release cable. The long lens and lens hood were almost as efficient as a Windsurfer’s sail, as it seemed to be blowing a gale here!
That you can recognise individual bricks which were over two and a half kilometres away, is remarkable! This distance I have since verified from Google Earth!
This is the detail of the front door!
That you can recognise individual bricks which were over two and a half kilometres away, is remarkable! This distance I have since verified from Google Earth!
Having taken these shots, I returned to Brogborough, and now there were a few more Windsurfers on the Lake. I saved myself some time by only removing the camera and lens from the tripod, so that on arrival, I took out a far more robust tripod, and was soon capturing shots with far more action, where a certain amount of blur only adds to the images.
One set of images, which is of Phil Ashton is a sequence from Frame 71 to 77, really impressed me – had I stopped after a couple of frames I would have missed the very successful continuation of the move, because, at first glance it looked unrecoverable, but his skill became apparent from the outcome! That sequence really made my day, In an earlier posting, I had not known his name, but have since put that right, as it definitely deserved a mention.
This was not one of my lengthier visits, but provided me with some interesting images, and I worked out a far better assembly of tripod and head for the future, so the time was well spent.
I stayed just long enough to know that there were to be no more Jumps for me to capture and I headed back to sort through the images and prepare this entry, having had a worthwhile day's shooting.
No comments:
Post a Comment