Pushing the limits

Pushing the limits

I’ve written before about the edges, the borderlands that are full of risks, and where – very often – creative stuff happens. This time, I’m talking about pushing on the technical side, and particularly about trying to get wonderful results in areas that cameras and lenses are not well fitted for.

Let’s talk about birds and my garden. I have a 500mm Minolta mirror lens, but it doesn’t make for easy shots of the birds in the garden – for various reasons. The minimum focus is around twenty feet, so I need to use extension tubes. The limited maximum aperture means the ISO has to be way up – and, quite crucially, the AF operates only through an LA-EA4 converter.

This gives my 2018 camera the AF capability of a 2008 camera – nine AF points grouped around the middle of the viewfinder, and a fairly sluggish response from the motor in the converter. There’s a lot of lens to move around. There’s very little chance of keeping up with a robin pecking at the fat balls on the bird feeder… I don’t think there is a cheap way to shoot wildlife, to be honest – but if someone who has found a way, please share it!



Let’s take another example: my Godox flash unit works nicely in the camera’s hot shoe, and came complete with an adaptor and a softbox: you might get the impression that this and a kit zoom lens will give you studio-quality full length pictures. But it doesn’t quite work. At a distance of ten feet and full power on the flash, 100 ISO gives a working aperture of f/4. Even if the lens is sharp at that aperture, the depth of field will be limited… Spend a similar amount of money on the same brand’s studio units and you can be working at a nice, easy f/11, though it won’t fit in a hot shoe.

Don’t make the mistake of moving everything closer and using the lens wideangle: distortion is more than likely, and the lighting may be very uneven across the subject. (Anyone who’s read a few of my blogs, attended one of my workshops in pre-Covid days, or remembers O Level physics will know that this is the result of the Inverse Square Law.)

Now, I’m not suggesting that it’s impossible to shoot wildlife with a small-aperture, slow-focussing lens, or brilliant figure shots with a speedlight, but I will assert that you will need either massive luck, or plenty of practice. It’s like the stories about Paganini deliberately breaking three strings on his violin in a performance to show what he could do with one string: this should not encourage you to cut three strings on you granddaughter’s violin just before the school concert.