Tag: Saltwick Bay

Today was the first real crack at fossiling this visit to Whitby.

There were naturally a few bits of ammonite and belemnite on Sandsend beach, but the ones at  Saltwick were the real deal.

 

As such,this was the first time I had had a chance to test out my 55 mm macro’s performance at photographing fossils.

I had suspected that it would be a good length of the job after I have enjoyed some pretty good results from using a short close-up lens last year and I was not disappointed.

Since I was filling the frame with the fossils , something that the lens I used last year couldn’t always do, the exposure was a bit tricky to master since I had to use a small aperture but also keep the shutter speed high enoughto avoid camera shake, but I figured out pretty quickly what size fossil required what size aperture to get everything in focus and how far away from the subject as she gets away with using any given shutter speed.

This was also the first time that I have got a sharp shot with my extension tube. Normally when I tried to use this, the depth of field is way too shallow for me to be able to focus on anything and the ISO speed I have to use in the limited light means that I have to use some pretty strong noise reduction to make the picture usable , but since the tiny ammonites and shells that I was photographing with it today were relatively flat, I was able to get them in focus with a relatively large aperture which meant that the lighting was good enough to get a sharp shot. It also helps that a lot of them were in the bedrock next to large rocks, so I had something to brace again in order to avoid moving the camera and causing camera shake or losing the focus as a result.

On the subject of depth of field control, I also decided to experiment with new shooting method for a panoramas today. It was basically a combination of merging a panorama andcreating a focus stacked image so thatI can get a wide field of view with perfect front to back sharpness. My method was basically starting by focusing on t

he nearest parts of the image, in this case some rocks, panning a little to the left and right , and then slowly panning the camera upwards , focusing a little further into the scene every time I moved it, so that I would get all the segments of the image in focus. I have tried variations of this method before, but there has always been bands of defocus blur all over the image where I had not managed tokeep the image in focus, but I realised today that if I used a smaller aperture , the sharp areas of each segment would overlap further.

I was correct, when I came to stitch the first image in photoshop everything was in focus aside from a small patch on one of the rocks which looked more like camera shake than defocus blur and was easily cloned out.

On the way back along the coastal path, there were a lot of swifts swooping around the cliffs and the field on the other side of the path. I decided to try and get some shots of them, but was largely unsuccessful since they were only in frame for second or two and weren’t really big enough for the autofocus system to lock onto them. I did get one or two decent shots though.