Week 9 - Day 60, June 29, 2009, "Rainbow"

"When to shoot, and when not to shoot?", was a question that I was asking tonight. I knew that I need a photo for the blog, but nothing was catching my eye.

The first place I stopped had some ducks swimming on a river, but they were to far away for my lens. I took a few photos, a van drove by, and most of the ducks flew off. I took photos as they were flying. It was an interesting photo, but I was just to far away to make it a great photo.

The next place I stopped, there were deer eating on the other side of a field near the woods. I took some photos, but again the deer were just to far away for my lens. They were also very nervous, and were ready to take off at a moments notice. The deer out here in the country, are not as used to people as those in Ithaca, so it's much more difficult to get very close to them.

After I photographed the deer, I took some photos of sun light coming through the clouds over a barn. The photo looked OK, but not as good as my previous 2 barn photos for this week.

I began to think about all of these photos that I took, and whether I should have even took them. I think the answer is yes, because I learn from my bad photos as much as I learn from my good photos. If I was using film, I probably wouldn't have taken very many of the photos that I mentioned above. But, using digital it doesn't there's very little cost, and I think that it's worth looking at the results.

After dinner I walked outside to see if the clouds had changed enough for some interesting photographs. As I was walking up the road I saw this small rainbow. Ahhh relief, I would have a better photo after all. As I set up my camera, I continued to watch hoping that it wouldn't disappear. I got lucky.

Lessons Learned:

• I can learn from my mistakes. (At least I hope that I can.)
• It's very difficult to focus on a rainbow. I tried the auto-focus because my eyes aren't very good at looking at focal points through the eye piece. It didn't work. I had to manually focus this photo. I used a narrow aperture to give my camera a larger depth of field to make up for my poor focusing abilities. Although the aperture wasn't as narrow as I would like. See next lesson.
• This isn't really a lesson that I learned today, but discovered awhile ago. When I use to narrow of an aperture the dirt that is on my CCD in the camera begins to show up. I've tried to clean it with air, but haven't had any luck. My camera is an older one that does not clean the CCD every time that it is turned on. It's very frustrating. Has anybody had any experience with this problem, and did you resolve it?
  

Photo details: Exposure time 1/15 sec, Aperture f/10.0, ISO 100, Focal Length 70 mm, 35 mm equivalent focal length 113mm, Lens Canon 70-200mm f2.8L USM, tripod.