• Mood: accomplished

What I've been up to (T189 Digital Photography)

The OU course continues to take up all my spare time. I have just finished absorbing the materials for Week 3 and Week 4 starts tomorrow! This would be fine but I haven't done as much commenting on my fellow students photos as I would like. This is partly due to the server giving up the ghost in one of the centres where I teach. I rely on being able to do bits on the course during the working day during tea and lunch breaks and last week I couldn't.

I did have fun with this week's photographic assignment though. (Pictures behind the cut and more to follow.) Fortunately the weather was favourable on Saturday so I headed off for old haunts, namely the valley where the Youth Hostel is situated. We were wardens here for about 6 years, so this used to be almost my backyard.

I discovered the hostel was teeming with cyclists, so I experimented with different settings to capture the movement.

Week 3 -- night scene I've never tried anything like this before. I would have felt too conspicuous with a tripod, but fortunately there was a convenient post to rest the camera on. I chose shutter priority to ensure a long exposure to maximise blur. f3.5 at 1/4 sec.

Week 3 -- fast car I managed to slip out to the main road during my tea break. Taken with the point and shoot which has quite a delay on the shutter. I took a few shots, but thought this was the best, even though the car was halfway out of the frame. Exposure f4 at 1/100 sec

Week 3 -- cyclist I discovered that too long an exposure caused the cyclist to disappear completely! This was taken at 1/40 sec at f2.7. I rested the camera on my car to ensure there was no camera shake.