Rodney Campbell's Blog

Well Autumn is here in force (at least down here in Australia) and it is a great time to get out and take some shots of the interesting colours and textures in the turning and falling leaves…

The following were all taken with my Nikon D90 and Nikon 50mm f/1.8 lens.

I hadn’t taken this lens out for much of a spin since I bought it a few months ago. However I figured it would pay dividends to force myself to use such a restrictive single focal length (on my camera this 50mm is essentially a short telephoto 75mm equivalent) which would force me to actually move my feet and compose shots (rather than simply use the zoom). For a significant part of the last day of the music camp from last weekend (also dictated by shooting a lot indoors so the fast glass @ f/1.8 helped) and also for an entire day now I’ve stuck with this single prime lens.

Some of the portraits I was able to take (@ f/3.2 & f/4 for instance) were fantastic and razor sharp. I’ve been very pleased with the results from this bargain lens (it only costs AUD$165).

What follows however were some of my shots of the Autumn leaves:

1/125 sec at f/2.8, ISO 200, 75mm equiv

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1/400 sec at f/2.8, ISO 200, 75mm equiv

The following is my youngest daughter and a friend running through the fallen leaves at our local school – must be fun to be a child :). I could have used a smaller aperture (like f/8) to try and get both girls in focus (and it was hard enough to focus as it was 🙂 ) but I needed a decent shutter speed to stop the girls running and I desperately wanted to blur both the foreground and especially background. I’d love to retry this shot at another time with my neighbours new toy (the beautiful Nikon AF-S VR 105mm f2.8 macro).

1/400 sec at f/3.2, ISO 200, 75mm equiv

I took the following in late afternoon (5PM – which is just before sunset at this time of year) and tried to get a silhouette of the row of trees with the ribbons of golden sunset clouds in the sky behind. I’m not quite sure whether I like the shot or not – I guess I’ll leave it to the viewer to judge:

1/60 sec at f/9, ISO 320, 75mm equiv

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