The Quiet Picture

I finally got my long-awaited 24-105mm f4L lens, it will replace the 17-85mm as my all-round lens as I speculated last year. Add an extension tube and it should double as a close-up lens, so I can hike light with just one lens. But speaking of weight, that’s the first thing you notice with the new lens - it’s heavy, and almost twice the size of the old 17-85mm. But you get used to everything, and so I have gotten used to this and don’t even think about the weight anymore.Reading the reviews, one thing they all mention is that the lens vignets on full-frame. Well, I don’t use a full-frame camera, so vignetting is no issue. Neither is barrel distortion which also comes up in the reviews, since I rarely photograph a subject with straight lines. But when it comes down to it, the most important quality of any lens is the sharpness. Is my new 24-105mm f4L sharp? In a word, YES. When I previewed the images in RSE, I had to double check that I wasn’t applying sharpening!

The lens also seems to have low flare when shooting into the sun. Canon had to recall the first batches of the lens because of a manufacturing error which caused flare under certain circumstances, so I would have to say that they definitely fixed the issue. The biggest problem I had with this image was all the pollen stuck on the lens, it’s normally not noticeable but at f16 and into the sun, I had these white dots all over the place. Love the healing brush.

Oh, and I’m not happy with the image either, but I don’t want to clone off the trees on the right. I reckon that there’s a window of about half an hour when you can pull this off. I will take a good image of it, one way or another!

Caltha palustris

• English: Marsh Marigold
• Swedish: Kabbleka (kalvleka)
• Finnish: Rentukka

I think marsh marigold belongs to the category of overlooked flowers. It’s so common that people rarely stop to look at them - we just become blasé to the ubiquituos. But, with a camera in hand, the world looks very different and the deeply yellow coloured marsh marigold are an irresistible subject. A closer look reveals the texture in the petals and the colour really jumps out. Speaking of which, the colour is also the challenge in photographing the marsh marigold. You’d think that the bright yellow is lighter than medium grey, but then you’d be wrong. In fact, you would still end up with an over-exposed flower if you exposed the flower as a medium tone. The red channel will be off the chart with anything less than -0.5 stop exposure compensation, and it gets worse in the sunshine. But compensate too much, and everything else in your picture is just too dark! Shooting with raw has its benefits - the background was nice and green while the flower was slighty over, but a quick highlight adjustment in Rawshooter Essentials easily fixed that. The result is a clean green and yellow colour combination, minus the glare on the leaves - I couldn’t get rid of it even with a polarizer… it only helped when the subject was shaded.

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Image specs: ISO 100, f7.1, 1/400, Canon 300mm f4L w/ 31mm extension tube. Cropped from left and right to 4:5 size, some re-touching to clean the right leaf.

Primula veris

• English: Cowslip
• Swedish: Gullviva
• Finnish: Kevätesikko

Cowslip is one flower I’ve been itching to have in my catalogue since last spring, so I’ve been busy searching for them in the past weeks. It’s not that rare, but the problem is that every single one of them seems to grow on the roadside in front of someone’s house and thus be out of my reach. The favoured location of the cowslip is not so surprising considering that it started out as a garden plant over here, but it has since found a foothold in the wild. I was getting desperate enough to start wondering if I should go and knock on someone’s door to ask if I could photograph the cowslips on their front yard, when I finally found a few of them growing on no man’s land - behind the church, no less, but on the outside of the cemetary wall. That was Thursday.This morning I set out with the gear to shoot my long desired flower. I was in for a shock - they had mowed the lawn and there was only one cowslip left, growing next to the rock fence! Well, nothing else to do than to photograph the remaining flower and contend with the dull splotchy stone wall as a background. It was so close that it didn’t help to shoot with the largest aperture, but I took what I got, at least I would get a new flower in my catalogue. Then it occured to me that I could actually get a profile shot if I put the camera right up against the wall, so I used the beanbag on the ground and rested the camera on it, trying not to scrape it against the rock. It would’ve been impossible to see anything in the viewfinder had it not been for the angle finder. From this angle, I suddenly didn’t have any problems whatsoever with the background, as it was a freshly cut lawn with the nearest trees at least 20 metres away. My awkward setup may have looked odd to the occasional passers-by, but I couldn’t have cared less - I finally had a keeper image of a cowslip!

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Image specs: ISO 200, f7.1, 1/800, Canon 300mm f4L w/ 31mm extension tube