Category Archives: Photos

Toskha the Stupid

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This is Toshka.

This photo was taken on the day we brought her home, 29th May 2011.  She is still with us, despite taking on a dog and losing badly.  She broke her pelvis, but managed to fix it herself with 8 weeks of cage rest – no operation required, thankfully.

She hasn’t yet learnt her place in the house, and regularly fights with our other 2 cats.  We think she’s number 2.  She can’t contemplate being anything other than number 1.

She’s a bit of a biter, and generally spiky.  But she’s rather cute so she gets to stay.

Damn her.

Learning

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Tonight, I learnt 3 things.

  1. If you want to take a photo of a passing satellite, you need more than 2 or 3 minutes notice. I noticed on Twitter that Envisat was due overhead.  I rushed out to the car to get the tripod, got set up (having changed lens; the right lens is never on the camera when you need it), pointed in the general direction, just in time for the prescribed flyover time to pass.  I didn’t even see it with my eyes, never mind the camera…
  2. A 300mm lens really isn’t long enough to take very good pictures of the moon. Yes, you can see what it is, and you can make out the details, but that’s quite a severe crop up there, and it’s really quite soft.  Bah.
  3. My tripod is rubbish. It’s better than handholding, but only just.  It’s so wobbly.

Anyway, having failed to take a photo of my intended target, I thought I’d go after a rather larger target.  Behold, cliché photograph #84773.

Insane ISO

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My photography took a bit of a hit last summer when my well worn and well used Canon EOS 300D finally went to the big Photoshop in the sky.  It seems sea and sand don’t mix well with D-SLRs… who would’ve thought?

Well, all that came to an end last week when my darling wife came into a small amount of money and decided that our walks are much more fun when I’m pre-occupied with taking rather geeky pictures, or something like that.  I’m now the proud owner of a Canon EOS 550D, and I think it’s rather good.  The recent batch of pictures here and on my Flickr photostream are all taken with the new beast, and it appears to be a few steps up from the 300D.

One of the things that caught my eye on the spec sheet was its max ISO rating of 12800. Twelve thousand!?  Surely you’re not going to be able to get any useful pictures with that?

Well, here’s a sample, straight out of the camera (apart from the border… gotta have some kind of house style…)

And here’s a 100% crop:

OK, it’s not gallery quality by any means, but it did mean I could get a shutter speed of 1/1000s at F/9 in rather dingy light, which I suppose could mean the difference between getting a usable shot and not.