Yesterday, we spent a warm and sunny Sunday morning playing at the Willows Beach and feeding seals at the Oak Bay marina. Our daughter has just recovered from a nasty virus that struck half of the children in her daycare group, and my wife and I were just coming down with the same virus – the vicious pattern familiar to many parents of young kids. The weather was beautiful, though, and we really enjoyed the unrushed time together.
At the marina, there are always 3-5 harbor seals waiting for tourists to feed them frozen fish, which can be bought at the souvenir shop for $2.50 per small plastic bag. According to the source that cannot be revealed (Snowden, eat your heart out!), this is, by far, the most popular item at the gift shop. The seals are wild, but they are well-trained in various ways of extorting the treats from people. For example, they appear to know the schedule of the tour buses, they can splash their fins on the surface to attract the crowd’s attention, and they always gather around the dock when a small child appears (as it was in our case).
While the little one was having fun throwing fish to the seals (the closest one got most of it) and my wife was keeping her from joining them in the water, I tried to bait the seals to grab the fish from the side of the dock, while pre-focusing my camera on the fish. I used a Canon EF 35mm f/1.4L USM lens
, but it held up beautifully, along with the more rugged 
and a 
).
on a Macbook Pro using a 
. Since I only wanted to select 3 or 4 best images, theoretically, there was more than enough time to select and post them in the remaining 6 minutes of the halftime. However, I found that changing my habitual workflow of culling, or selecting the best images, was not easy. My usual “shotgun” approach is to go through all images in the gallery mode and give one star rating to those that appear to be interesting and technically acceptable (sharp and reasonably exposed). The problem is that what I deem interesting results in about 10% of all images, which means that I would need to look through them again (and sometimes a third time) to further down-select to a set of not merely “interesting” but hopefully unique and generally the best. Clearly, this two- or three-stage process is not time efficient when only 3 images are needed to begin with. The only logical conclusion is the one needs to relax the quality of the selection process, i.e. accept the fact that the selected 3 images (which, by the way, must be determined in a single pass) might not be the best of the entire set. Basically, the timing of delivery of the images must take priority over the quality of the delivered photos. This is difficult to come to terms with, because from the artistic standpoint, we are emotionally attached to the photos we’ve just taken and intuitively want to show off the best of them. Here, the professional side of being a photographer must come into play. What helps me rationalize the process is that I know that the “best” images are still there, waiting in the Lightroom catalogue, which I will have other opportunities to review, hopefully, without the time pressure.
, baking is supposed to be good for kids, as it teaches them methodical approach (measuring ingredients, etc.), patience (waiting for the thing to actually bake) and moderation (not eating the whole batch of muffins at once). As you can see from the pictures, success is a relative thing. Still, it was good fun.
for that day, but I already knew that it was very unforgiving. One really needs to practice following the subject and anticipating the action, and even then, some missed shots are expected. It’s all worth it, though, as the shallow depth of field of this lens is unmistakeable and very appealing.
in this role. At first I was skeptical – I thought that if I would be limited to a single focal length, all photos from that shoot would look largely the same. However, I now think that shallow DOF provided by f 1.4 compensates for the absence of zoom, and the images actually look more interesting than those taken at f4. I am beginning to agree with a friend of mine, who said that if an image does not have a shallow DOF it does not look “special” (his background is in portrait photography; this does not apply apply to landscape, for example).
