I was up in London dropping my daughter & friend at Anna Abramovich's 16th birthday party (Roman's daughter - "clang" name drop alert) and got fed up waiting for any celebs to arrive so I could pap them.
I ended up wandering down to Picadilly Circus where the latest illuminated ad screens are just amazing. In my quest for very colourful nighttime photos to balance my very monochrome daytime ones, I thought it would be a good spot for a bit of zoom burst action.
1/10th | f/9.0 | ISO100 | 24mm-105mm on 24-105 unsurprisingly | no pp except cropping.
It's quite a tricky technique. You need the shutter slowish but not so slow that you move the camera. A decent aperture to get some DOF in the scene, focus separately (using AF-On button in my case) set the zoom at one extreme and then start zooming then press the shutter. If you press the shutter then zoom you end up missing half the zoom range.
I did both zooming in and zooming out, and found I was more comfortable with the latter due to the action of hand, wrist & arm being a bit smoother rotating in that direction. I think the above shot is a zoomed out one and I hit the wide extreme of the zoom range with a bit of shutter opening still left, which is why the "background" looks nicely focused rather than a big blur.
You do get quite interesting results though, especially at night where it can turn a relatively static scene into a very dynamic one.
You can reproduce the effect in Photoshop, but in this case the flashing of the neon which results in the cool "staggered" effect in the pic especially on the Zero and Sanyo signs wouldn't be reproduced.
Tobers
I ended up wandering down to Picadilly Circus where the latest illuminated ad screens are just amazing. In my quest for very colourful nighttime photos to balance my very monochrome daytime ones, I thought it would be a good spot for a bit of zoom burst action.
1/10th | f/9.0 | ISO100 | 24mm-105mm on 24-105 unsurprisingly | no pp except cropping.
It's quite a tricky technique. You need the shutter slowish but not so slow that you move the camera. A decent aperture to get some DOF in the scene, focus separately (using AF-On button in my case) set the zoom at one extreme and then start zooming then press the shutter. If you press the shutter then zoom you end up missing half the zoom range.
I did both zooming in and zooming out, and found I was more comfortable with the latter due to the action of hand, wrist & arm being a bit smoother rotating in that direction. I think the above shot is a zoomed out one and I hit the wide extreme of the zoom range with a bit of shutter opening still left, which is why the "background" looks nicely focused rather than a big blur.
You do get quite interesting results though, especially at night where it can turn a relatively static scene into a very dynamic one.
You can reproduce the effect in Photoshop, but in this case the flashing of the neon which results in the cool "staggered" effect in the pic especially on the Zero and Sanyo signs wouldn't be reproduced.
Tobers
) 
