Woof!
At the Apple Store having the battery health in my iPad checked, I spotted this:
How do you improve on this with your megabuck DSLR?
iPhone Pro Max, Apple Pro RAW, Focos used to blur the background.
1,000mm? Hand held? No prob.
Cattail fields are a favorite perching palace for male redwinged blackbirds. (The blah-looking females keep a far lower profile).
The birds are fairly shy and while it’s a joy to listen to their trilling sounds, getting close enough for a good picture is something of a challenge.
The long end of 300mm on my 28-300mm AF-S VR Nikkor is really not enough for the job, but it’s not like I’m going to lug around 8.4lbs and $12,000 of 600 f/4 AF-S Nikkor bottle, so I make do with what I have:
How best to do that? Simply crop like crazy, taking benefit of the massive pixel count of the Nikon D800, and handhold with VR for a perfectly sharp result, using center spot AF:
A vibrant time in America.
You can read about Googie architecture here. This futurist style from the middle of the past century is never less than fun but, as is the American way, many exemplars of the genre have been torn down.
Here’s a superb example which has been ‘repurposed’ by an interior design firm in Boise, Idaho, having started life as a gas station:
Googie at its best.
iPhone 12 Pro Max, processed in Photoshop and Lightroom to remove the telegraph poles and ugly wires.
At the Getty Center.
iPhone 12 Pro Max.
Superb.
The Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena has a wide ranging collection of art, not least the modern sculpture garden in the back. But you come here mainly for one thing and it’s the world class collection of late 19th Century French art, with emphasis on Van Gogh (French in all but birth) and, of course, Degas.
The bronze statue, grass skirt and all, is by Degas.
iPhone 12 Pro Max.