Weekend photo fun

What better way to inaugurate a new post category than with a brand new photo gallery? I seem to be getting more into photography these days, most likely due to the unsavory characters I'm hanging out with at work. (I'm actually trying out several new hobbies - try and guess which ones will stick!) Both Dan and Bill are heavy into the photo thing, and I'm really starting to get into it myself. Dan was kind enough to provide a copy of Photoshop CS, so I actually have the tools to create some pretty fun images. That said, I still need to create a workflow that can handle the volume of images I seem to crank out. Okay, and I need to get better about throwing away pictures I'll likely never want to process.

So this weekend I decided to play with big glass and rented a 300mm prime f2.8 lens from Gassers Photography in San Francisco. This is a $4000 lens that weighs at least 6 pounds and comes with its own carrying case that was larger than my photo backpack (Nikon D70 body, two reasonably large lenses, SB-800 flash, etc. etc.). It was a pain to lug about, especially since it was too heavy to hand-hold. So there I am with a photo backpack, a laptop backpack, a lens case and a tripod, ready for a weekend of photography. Next time, I'm taking up the piccolo.

Oh, did I mention the big glass was completely manual? No autofocus, no TTL metering, nothing. Talk about back to basics. However, it drove home several of the lessons I'd been reading about over the past month or so, and thanks to the wonders of digital photography I had instant feedback. The results were uneven; given the tiny depth of field at f2.8, many of my photos exhibited back-focus, where the in-focus parts of the image are somewhere behind the intended subject. Still, I managed to come up with a few keepers.

Saturday was a lovely trip to Carmel - Mel and I wandered around the town for a bit before heading down to the beach. There I made the acquaintance of several furry friends, two of whom you see at right. (Plenty more photos of them - see previous comments about workflow and filtering.) I spent a good ten minutes on my stomach shooting these little guys - they were quite photogenic! Expect more photos of them soon.

Sunday I headed up to Sonoma with another co-worker, Garth. He has raced motorcycles in the past and mentioned that the AFM would be hosting races at Sears Point Infineon Raceway. He'd raced at the track before and knew some great places to stand. I took some 300 photos on Sunday - the ones I consider the best (though they're not quite in the state I would like) can be found here. Let me know what you think, I'm really looking to improve both my technique and my compositional skills.

Oh, one other thing. I signed up for some additional education. December 13 should be a very exciting day!