Day 29 – 2012 01 27 – 10:21 h. – ISO 100 – f2.2 – 1/400sec
The chickens in the backyard. They have no attention for me, since they just received their daily portion of maize. A rather difficult situation for the 85mm lens, with strong backlight coming trough the bushes. The lens hood helps a little but the purple fringing is still visible in the lower-left of the image. I mostly work with manual exposure and manual focusing, even so with these chicks.

Day 30 – 2012 01 28 – 19:54 h. – ISO 1250 – f2.0 – 1/30sec
I went to visit the Lightfestival 2012 in Ghent yesterday. Just a quick visit, because it was overcrowded and a not so pleasant experience because you just couldn’t get going. What we saw however, was rather impressive, and beautiful. Since there were so many people, I didn’t really care about taking good pictures, but this is one I took with my 85 mm. Handheld, so pushed the ISO’s quite a bit to prevent from camera shake. I have a quite steady hand for low shutter speeds, but this is about how far I can go with 85mm. 1/30th of a second, standing up without anything to lean on. The picture is not extremely sharp, but this is more due to the wide aperture and the high ISO number.

Day 31 – 2012 01 29 – 12:27 h. – ISO 3200 – f5.0 – 1/50sec
Played around some more with my new extension tubes from Kenko. This time I used the 20mm and 12mm together. My son is mad about the Cars-cars, and this was my subject during aperitif-time. Note the extreme shallow depth of field here, due to the very close focusing distance (guess about 30 cm approx. 1ft.) . Photoshopped the image for 5 minutes afterwards to give some more dynamics to it.

Day 32 – 2012 01 30 – 18:47 h. – ISO 160 – f2.2 – 1/50sec
Didn’t really find the time to take a picture today. My wife had a late meeting and I had to take care of cooking. Part of the menu can be seen here. Baked potatoes, yummie!
With a fast lens it is not really a problem to take handheld, no flash shots inside the house. with ISO’s at the low end, I managed to easily get 1/50th of a second. Have a good meal everybody!

Day 33 – 2012 01 31 – 18:17 h. – ISO 1250 – f1.8 – 1/20sec
I have done an entire shoot this afternoon with my 135mm, so I didn’t really have an image with the 85. I had to do some shopping at Bio-Planet Ghent before going to evening classes. This little detail on the parking lot struck me. A huge wheel of one of those gas-guzzling Range Rovers, and then this little tiny lost baby-shoe just next to it. A lot of things come to my mind then, …

Day 34 – 2012 01 01 – 20:11 h. – ISO 1000 – f8 – 1/200sec
I had a friend coming over yesterday evening, together with his lovely wife, and I had no problems convincing them to participate in my ‘Professions Project’. I had asked them before to bring something related to their profession. She did, he didn’t. Don’t count on the men, will you.
I have met Patrick in one of my earlier jobs, we were both DTP professionals, specialized in packaging prepress jobs. He on the Barco workstations, me on an Apple mac, with Artpro software (since then the two companies have merged their graphical systems and are known now under the name of Esko Graphics). I had a small loupe in my drawer, from those days of retouching images, dealing with dot gain compensation, plotting films, creating endless sleeve printing forms etc. … , … Thank you Patrick, thank you Veerle!

Day 35 – 2012 01 02 – 18:30 h. – ISO 640 – f4.5 – 1 sec
I had seen this shot before, even taken it, on one of my walks with our dog. Strong backlight from a sunset, with only the rails lighting up. It is freezing cold these days (-9 degrees Celcius at night) but we had some nice sunny days and that compensates. I had to be really careful not to shake the cam. I wanted the aperture a little closed for greater depth of field, and I didn’t want to push ISO’s too far. Kept the camera still on the bridge railing, with self-timed shutter release, to be sure not to move during the exposure.

So, this ends my fifth week. Are you still following? 🙂