If I had one book on photography....

If I had could only have one book in my collection of photography books I would have to go with Understanding Exposure by Bryan Peterson. Your camera does a pretty good job with focus on its own. Composition can be learned but its hard to teach it. Exposure however is something that can be taught and a good creative exposure can make the difference between a snapshot and something you would hang on the wall.

Star Trails - Second Attempt

I tried some star trails this summer with not really the greatest results.  Its hard to gauge what your exposure should be and takes more luck than skill to get a good result. I went out last night on Highway 40 west of Cochrane to try again and the results, while varied, were more satisfying. My first attempt was a 30 minute exposure which was far too long for the aperture I had chosen. This attempt was a 7.5 minute exposure at f/2.8 and ISO 200.

I tried some shorter exposure times (1600 ISO and f/1.8) and still had about a 24 second exposure. Its astounding how much the stars move even in that short of time. (The larger size really show the motion)

Scavenger Hunt results are in!

  Finally after months of waiting we got to see the results of this year's Scavenger Hunt. The theme was North of the Tracks and took place downtown between the tracks (duh!) and third avenue here in Calgary. Each team had to come up with a witty name starting with a letter we drew randomly. I (who was somehow team captain) drew the letter W so we decided to go with WUT? from our last names Wong, Untershultz, and Taylor. We managed to get most of the images but had a tough time with some of them. There were a few that when we found out what they were made us groan because we had seen the subject that the clue referenced but didn't make the connection. Nevertheless we did pretty well getting second overall and I ended up with the best overall image in the competition. (Did I just toot my own horn? Toot-toot! Yes I did!)

The rest of my shots can be found here. Kevin and Jim had some terrific shots. If only we had been able to find all the subjects...

 Here are Jim's shots
http://www.flickr.com/photos/41772474@N03/
Here are Kevin's shots: http://picasaweb.google.ca/FloatingImitations/200908fccscavengerhunt?authkey=Gv1sRgCJSfn4qJ_6OEMA#