21st October 2009

Playing with patterns

posted in Gymnastics, OmegaMom, Photography |

The dotter having been declared broken-toe-free via x-rays on Monday, she returned to gymnastics on Tuesday.  She wanted me there, so I took along my new toy to play with.  What I learned:  the auto-focus can often fixate on something you don’t want in crowded conditions–causing your intended target to be fuzzy, while a bystander is clear and sharp.  Hmm.  This also happens with videos.

Obviously I need to play more.

But what I mostly did was play with patterns that captured my eyes.

We have worn paint on the bleachers that I was sitting on.  There’s a message in there, somewhere, I know it!:

worn paint on bleacher

The HVAC system, looking very science-fiction-y:

HVAC

Beams and boxes of various colors and shapes:

Beams and boxes

A mish-mash of equipment surrounding and behind one set of rings:

Mish-mash with rings

All in all, it was fun.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 21st, 2009 at 9:54 pm and is filed under Gymnastics, OmegaMom, Photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

There are currently 4 responses to “Playing with patterns”

  1. 1 On October 22nd, 2009, del said:

    I’ve noticed that the autofocus on my Canon also tends to target the wrong things sometimes: a blade of grass or a twig ten feet in front of the bird I was really trying to photograph, etc. I’m not sure if this is a “Canon” thing or if all digital cameras do this (I’ve only ever owned Canons). My model has a setting where when the autofocus locks in it’ll zoom into that point on the display and you can tell if it’s focused on the wrong thing. If it has you just try again. Frustrating. It also has an option where you can make the autofocus [] bracket thingy smaller, thus cutting out more stuff in the frame that might confuse it. That option is only available in the manual modes, though. And then there’s always manual focus, but that’s hard to use on my camera.

    One day I took a cat toy outside and put it behind some branches and stuff and then practiced focusing on it from different angles and distances with the camera. That helped a lot.

  2. 2 On October 22nd, 2009, GrannyJ said:

    I’ve had the same problem, esp. with birds in the bushes, which always turn out to have had twigs in front of them. Bah. I’ve also discovered that the camera can’t focus directly on infinity, such as those great clouds over yonder or the moon or such. My only way of coping is to get a distant mountain or tree in that little framing thingy, said object being effectively at infinity. My eyes are not really good enough to count on for manual operation unfortunately.

    BTW, those pattern pix are great fun…

  3. 3 On October 23rd, 2009, lizard said:

    the message: Paul Is Dead.

    Either that, or it says Redrum

  4. 4 On October 27th, 2009, Kate said:

    Photoshop and I are BFFs. I can think of all sorts of creative improvements to do with that paint on bleachers shot! :-)

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