Monday, August 29, 2011

Lambs Canyon

I got to school the other day and the sunrise was phenomenal.  I got this picture, and a few others, but unfortunately I couldn’t get as good a picture of it as I wanted to.

I’ve found that it is best to use a manual lens with my camera set to manual for those kinds of pictures.  On automatic it goes for the average lighting, which usually washes out the sunset.  The only manual lens I carry around with me is the telephoto lens, so I wasn’t able to get the whole sunrise into the frame. 

Which got me to thinking; “Hmm, I have a manual lens on my old 35mm camera sitting on the shelf in the dining room.  I should stick that in the camera case for these kinds of shots.”

So I did.  And Sunday I went up Lambs Canyon, from my house it’s about 11 miles east on I-80, to do some comparison shots with the auto lens and the manual lens.  I resized and added the caption to the pictures, but other than that they are completely unedited.

The old, manual lens is not necessarily better for everyday shots, but I’m still going to pack it around all the time for any special light I want to capture.  There are no comparison shots for the ones in the gallery below, but as you’ll see, there are some that give a great effect because I could play with the light. (Those too were sized and copyrighted, but are otherwise untouched).

4 comments:

A Paperback Writer Photos said...

Oh, I saw that sunrise, too! Amazing!
I love how you capture sunrises and sunsets. Mine are always faded and de-glorified and disappointing.

Max Sartin said...

It's all because my camera has the manual mode so I can adjust the f-stop and shutter speed for the sunlight, not for either the sky above or the land below. On auto mode my camera takes washed out pictures too.

Alexia said...

Well if that's not a very good sunrise, what does a good one look like??

Lovely - I enjoyed the slide show too. Those yellow daisies fair jump off the screen.

Can you not change your lens over to manual settings? I've been playing around with mine a bit, but I'm not confident. I wish I was near a big city so I could go to some photography classes.

Max Sartin said...

The problem with the sunrise was that I couldn't fit the whole thing into the picture.
I can switch over to manual with my regular lens, it's just that I haven't mastered adjusting the f-stop and the shutter speed on it, it's all done electronically and I'm much more used to the physical f-stop adjustment.
Glad you liked the pictures. We've been so wet this summer that the canyons are especially beautiful this year.