Animal experience

Ooops. That’s what you get for posting at 5 in the morning. Please go to my personal site blog for this post

Cassandra Madge Photography – the Blog

Pardon the dust…

I’m moving already!

Please find me at my brand new site!

Cassandra Madge Photography

Just a little peek…

I got a new toy yesterday, from my patient and very tech-savvy DH. It’s a very dense piece of lens, also known as the 85mm f1.2L. Wow.

We researched it for a whole day, I know it has it’s little joys and dramas. We thought mine was broken because of the funny way the focus ring works, but I think it’s working just fine, thankyou very much. Despite my still swollen and purple toe, I took it for an excursion around the backyard, and boy did it change how I view the world.

I did have to keep working on backing up. I’m more used to a 50mm point of view, and I found myself constantly reversing into bushes etc, trying to fit what I wanted into the frame. And man, I’ve never shot with anything faster than f1.8 before, and I honestly did NOT expect the difference. On an overcast day, I was shooting at 1/1000 of a second. Wow. Great to freeze any stray motion around the place. The other thing that kept on tricking me was the minimum focusing distance. At 0.95m, you really do have to keep your distance from your subject, or you just won’t get any focus. The focus is slow, and can be a bit clunky, but when you get into the groove, the depth of field and blur are nothing short of magic.

Here are a couple of shots of my beautiful fur-baby, Jessie. She’s very camera shy, and wasn’t in the posing mood, but I think they worked out just fine myself. Again, here the distance from subject came into play, only because if I didn’t hold her down, she kept on getting up and walking off. And my arms are NOT nearly a metre long.

Next on the agenda is to get my monitor calibrated, as all my colours are off and I have to check them on a different computer to make sure I’m getting it right. Not a very good way to work. Looking at getting the Datacolor Spyder, as it seems to be very easy to use, which is good around here.

Turning 13, Grunge Photo Shoot

Here is my newly turned 13 year old. We went for some photos Saturday afternoon to a fabulous location near home – great for this type of work.

Mental note for future use…. try to read the words on the walls, and move accordingly. It will save you a bit of hassle post-processing and covering up the nasty words later on.