I got back from a nice trip to Tasmania last week, meaning I’ve now visited all of Australia’s states, and most of its territories (not Jervis Bay!).
The weather was not great, although it was mostly dry and there was sun occasionally, and I even found a bit of snow falling (and gathered) in the Central Highlands where it got down to 3 degC, as well as some on top of Mount Wellington in Hobart.
A surprise was driving through a region called Dorset: funny how names are re-used in other parts of the world by settlers.
Coming back to New Zealand via Sydney, it was very apparent (flying in and out) the number of bushfires in the area from the smoke in the air and the amount of haze and limited visibility.
Last week I returned from a trip to Australia, driving from Sydney up to Sunshine Coast in Queensland, and have just done a first pass of
photo processing. The weather was generally excellent (although it was very windy in Byron Bay and Gold Coast, so walking on the beach was not amazingly pleasant with the sand blowing), and I thoroughly enjoyed the trip and took some photos I’m very pleased with, including several sunrise ones (getting up somewhat early was worth it!).
I’ve just got back from a trip back to the UK for a few weeks, stopping off in Hong Kong on the way out and Singapore on the way back,
which was very enjoyable if also very tiring.
Despite the battery life issue I have with it, the new camera held up well, and I found the Live View functionality very useful for shooting on a tripod and focusing by touching on the screen.
I used this method to tick the box on some (somewhat cliché) location photos in both Hong Kong and Singapore (see below) that I did want to take, and I hope to return to both
places in the future to explore more (although the evidence of political rumblings in Hong Kong was fairly apparent).
Last night I made a more serious attempt at astrophotography of the Milky Way than my previous ones, using my new camera and lens I got a few months ago.
In comparison to my previous astrophotography attempts in years past, I’m pretty happy with the result, but I still need to work out a combination of the best ISO vs noise level to use for single exposures, and whether it’s worth stopping down all the way to f/2.8 or not with the lens.
The Samyang AF 14mm f/2.8 lens I recently bought for this purpose and used I’m not amazingly happy with from a technical/optical perspective - but I did purposefully get it as the cheaper option given the expenditure I’d already spent on new gear back in March, and knew from reviews what its downsides would be ahead of time, so that’s all on me: the vignetting at f/2.8 is very pronounced, and no software currently seems to have the exact profile built-in to correct that, but also it’s sharpest at around f/3.5, and exhibits a fair amount of coma in the corners until f/4.0.
But still, there’s just something about wide-angle photos of the night sky that seems very magical, and even at f/2.8 to my eye at least, it can capture images I’m personally very happy with:
The above photo was taken with a Canon EOS 5D Mk IV, with a Samyang AF 14mm f/2.8 lens, at ISO 2500 with an exposure time of 25 secs at aperture f/2.8.
A few weeks ago I splashed out a rather alarming amount of money on a new DSLR camera (Canon EOS 5D Mk IV) and a new lens (Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L II USM), both upgrades from the previous versions of each. I certainly didn’t need new versions of either, and to some extent it was one of my fairly silly impulse purchases that I end up regretting after clicking the ‘Purchase’ button, but I’m travelling back to Europe for a few weeks in two months, and I wanted a camera with GPS built-in for geo-tagging photos, more megapixels (stitching panoramas of water doesn’t work perfectly), a use-able live-view, in addition to having better low-light performance. It will also likely guilt me into getting back into photography a bit more, which this blog post is also an attempt to do. I did semi-seriously think about jumping to mirrorless with Sony, but I do like Canon gear (they are behind technically currently though) and I have several Canon lenses, so it wasn’t an obvious win for me to make the switch.
I’m relatively happy with the new camera and lens: the new II version of the lens is noticeably shaper, although the vignetting falloff/gradient is also much more pronounced than with the old version, and the distortion’s different - although both of those can be corrected in software. The GPS geo-tagging is useful, but unfortunately I’ve found the battery life of my camera is really bad, as even with GPS totally off (there are two “Enabled” modes as well as fully “Disabled”), within a day of the camera being turned physically “Off” with the battery fully-charged in my camera bag and GPS mode set to “Disabled”, the battery’s consistently drained, and this is happening with multiple Canon batteries (including the one the camera came with), so I’m really not happy about that aspect. I think something must be wrong with my copy electronically, as a colleague has a Mark IV as well without the issue, and clearly most people online don’t seem to have the issue. At some point I’ll send it in to Canon to get it looked at and hopefully fixed, but pulling the battery out of the camera works around the long-term storage problem for the moment, and on trips abroad I’ll likely be charging batteries every night, so it’s not the end of the world.
The exposure sensitivity of the Mark IV also seems quite different to the Mark III: I’m having to stop down one or two stops to match the Mark III’s levels - I guess the light metering is more accurate or something (although I’d argue photos are getting overexposed with it compared to my Mark III with neutral exposure), but that’s not really a problem if I just keep the setting stopped down on the camera to match the results I got with the Mark III (which seem more controlled and less over-exposed).
In a further act of semi-madness, I also ordered a Samyang AF 14mm f/2.8 lens which from reviews looked like it was one of the cheapest wide-angle primes for astrophotography that still had semi-reasonable performance, as I’m very keen to try and get into astrophotography after several previous failed attempts. I’ll be giving that a go when it arrives, and when the night sky clears up and the wind dies down (need a heavier tripod!).
