Tag Archives: How I took that shot

How I Took That Shot – Finbarr O’Shea

The image above, by Finbarr O’Shea LIPF’ took first place in Grade A in our recent ‘Black and White’ competition. This is how he made the shot:

I took my picture at Coumeenoole on the Dingle Peninsula, Co. Kerry, a location I
visit a few times a year. I think it’s best to photograph this beach
when the tide is on its way out at sunset. I converted the file from
colour to b&w with Nik silver efex which is a free download.

My camera settings for the picture were: ISO100,  F16,  1 Sec,  with a 6 Stop
ND Filter. 16/35 lens at 20mm Focal length, on a full frame camera.

 – Finbarr O’Shea

How I Took that Shot – Noelle Lowney

Noelle Lowney came first in Grade B in our recent ‘Beautiful Blur’ competition with the shot above. This is how she made the image:

The shot was taken at the Cahermore Pier in West Cork whilst visiting the Beara Peninsula. It is a little pier located  5 miles outside Castletownbere on the main road to Allihies. It was a windy, blustery day and the tide was fully in. The camera was mounted on a tripod and using a ND Filter I took a number of shots using different shutter speeds to try and capture the motion of the waves as they thrashed the pier hard. It was a challenge to get the image not to mention trying to keep the tripod still and holding onto the camera for dear life

The image was taken with a Canon EOS 7D Mark II. Camera settings – F/16, Exposure 24 secs ISO 100. Focal Length 24mm.

Well done Noelle!

Click here to see a gallery of images from the competition. Enjoy!

See also:
How I took that Shot – Trevor O’Connell
How I took that Shot – Jim Curtin
Competition Gallery
Competition Results and 2016 League Table

If you are interested in photography and would like to know more about East Cork Camera Group, click the ‘Contact Us’ link above.

How I Took that Shot – Trevor O’Connell

Trevor O'Connell - Beautiful Blur

ECCG member, Trevor O’Connell came first in Grade A in our recent ‘Beautiful Blur’ competition with the beautiful image above. This is how he did it:

This was an opportunistic shot,

I took the boys out for a walk in Rostellan woods one day and I brought my camera with my 150-600 mm lens along in the hope I might get a shot of a red squirrel (there are quite a few jumping around the treetops there).

BeautifulBlurSettingsAs we were navigating through a particularly narrow and muddy part of the woods we found ourselves enveloped by this long purple heather (I think), so I dropped back from the boys and set my focal length to 200mm and f/5.6 focused on Matthew and took the shot knowing that most of the flowers would be out of focus due to the long focal length and large aperture.

In post, (using Adobe Lightroom) I sucked some saturation out of the greens (I hate saturated greens) and brightened up and sharpened the centre.

It could probably do with being cropped in tighter to draw more attention to the boys as there is a lot of wasted space around the edge which is quite distracting.

Camera: Canon Eos 6d
Lens: Sigma 150-600c
Focal Length: 200
ISO: 100
Shutter Speed: 1/50sec

Well done Trevor!

Click here to see a gallery of images from the competition. Enjoy!

See also:
How I took that Shot – Noelle Lowney
How I took that Shot – Jim Curtin
Competition Gallery
Competition Results and 2016 League Table

If you are interested in photography and would like to know more about East Cork Camera Group, click the ‘Contact Us’ link above.

 

 

 

How I Took that Shot – Gráinne Davies

In our recent ‘Colour Burst’ competition, Gráinne Davies came first in Grade A. This is how she made the shot:

The theme of the competition was ‘Colour burst’ so the thinking cap went on as to try to capture something a little different. I have some props at home for some abstract and macro work so I took out my trusty coloured slinky to try to see if I could get any shots to fit the theme. I purchased the slinky on Amazon for a few euro and it’s given me a few good images.

I set up a black background (small black sheet) on a coffee table in a sun room with natural light and set up the slinky in various ways. Key thing here was I wanted to use a slow shutter speed so to capture a blur.

To get this shot I had the camera on the tripod and tilted it downwards so it looked directly down onto the slinky on the black cloth set up in a circle so that it held open and the point of focus was the centre of the slinky. I then used a technique called ‘zoom burst’ where I used the zoom on my lens to create the colour blur. The lens I used was a 24-105mm range so I set up the shot zoomed in on the slinky and then using a slow shutter speed over 1.5 seconds I then manually moved the lens to zoom out slowly and steady until reaching 24mm and the image was captured over the 1.5 seconds. This technique takes a bit of practice to master properly. The slow shutter speed created the colour blur similar to streaking car lights at night.

I shot the image in RAW and converted to JPEG but did very little post processing work as I had done it all in the preparation of my shot so it needed little work afterwards.

Canon 50D 24-105mm lens, f5, 1.5 sec, ISO 100

Well done Gráinne!

See also:
How I took that Shot – Zane Llewellyn
How I took that Shot – Karina Leeson
Competition Gallery
Competition Results and 2016 League Table

If you are interested in photography and would like to know more about East Cork Camera Group, click the ‘Contact Us’ link above.