Beacons Away Trip
· Monday March 17, 2008
Away trips with the southampton uni walking club are always good fun. The people that come along are colorful, diverse, friendly, and some are just a tad rude— even by Dutch standards, haha. But I also love going away with the club because we get to experience some of the most beautiful places in England by foot.
Of course, the weather does not always cooperate, sometimes with disastrous photographic consequences. Still, it’s worth the risk to me. If you’re not going to take your camera out because you’re afraid it’s going to get a little wet, you may as well leave it home altogether, right?
Weather aside, the trip presented plenty of opportunities for portraits, candids and landscapes. It was also a chance to put two relatively new pieces of kit to use— my EF-S 55-250mm IS telephoto (which I had already gotten to know in Asia) and the new set of polarizers. This telephoto is really not that long by the standards of those who specialize in bird or wildlife photography, but it was enough to give a different perspective on the scene.
EF-S 55-250mm IS
The hill in the distance in the below photo, shadowed, looks much more imposing when viewed at 179mm. It also feels a bit like a wildlife shot, hence the title :)
the Herd
I think a lot of people have been fairly surprised by the resolution figures published by photozone on the new 17-55 and 55-250 IS EF-S lenses. While I don’t own the former yet, I can certainly attest to the sharpness of the telephoto.
Jacqui
A 100% crop of the above photo is included below, just for those of you pixel-peepers out there :)
Photozone more or less says that the lens has quite good optical resolution, but perhaps does not have the best contrast; this seems to agree with my general observations. But in the end, it’s what you do with the equipment that counts!
Circular Polarizer
I’ve read numerous times from various sources that a polarizer is one of the best tools in a photographer’s kit. Well, I’ve gotten on without one for a couple years now… I first bought a 52mm polarizer for a screw-in filter-attachment ring for my Canon A95 in ’05. I found it fun to use, but perhaps too much so, because the two separately-rotating plates broke apart :( Basically I’ve been too lazy/cheap to buy a replacement until this last trip to Taipei’s Camera Street, haha.
Well, the weather on Sunday certainly was lovely and bright (except for the brief period where a snowstorm swept through the middle of our walk!), and my polarizer spent more time on my 17-70mm Sigma than off. It added depth and saturation to the sky, and I think it also enhanced the contrast of the beautiful banks of clouds we encountered that day.
the Cloud
It was also useful in portraits to reduce glare and of course keep the sky more saturated while retaining shadow detail.
Katie and Jinx
But I’m a bit unconvinced about the optical quality of the polarizers I got. You can’t tell in these web-sized shots, but I think you do sacrifice some resolution by adding another piece of glass in front of your lens. Still, I’m a long ways away from wanting to spring for something like a $210 Singh-Ray filter. Hell, those accessories cost almost as much as some of my lenses!
In the end, you make do with what you have… at least until Christmas or a birthday rolls by :)
P.S. It should be noted that I didn’t discover the clock on my camera was still set to Taiwan time (GMT+8) until almost the end of the trip, hence the slightly odd time-stamping in the photo EXIF details!!
— Emery Ku
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