19 August 2016
My Friend Neil and I were out the other day roving around between some Trout waters that were not looking all that promising. Neil asked me to stop, and asked if he could borrow my camera. I had been boasting about just how fantastic these bridging cameras are nowadays. On optical zoom only, shot from the passenger seat, this is what he got: On no zoom: 1200mm equivalent, optical zoom only! And in the photo editor back home, effectively using digital zoom: And a bit more, just to show where you can go with this thing: These were taken
So often we fish a piece of water that is not quite as clean as we would like it. Added to this, it seems that our cameras pick up the brown in the water well beyond levels that we experience out on the stream. The result is a set of photos to which your friends may visibly recoil, even if just a little, or perhaps the pictures will draw the odd remark. At the risk of misrepresenting the truth, here is a little tip to clean those pictures up, just a little. Here is your original picture:
Forget the camera for now. Let’s just look at composing a picture in the countryside. Here we are experiencing the river running as a relatively thin thread through beautiful countryside. The angler is far off, and barely visible. He is diminutive in the large landscape, and that landscape is wide open, and it’s vastness is evident: In the picture above we lose the sense of high mountains. We cannot fully appreciate how high they are, and the degree to which they dominated the river valley that lovely morning. To achieve this, try orienting the picture the other way. In other
For as many years as I have fished, I have carried a camera when I fish. At first, and being more than 30 years ago now, it was one of those entry level film cameras that was so rickety in its construction, that it threatened to let light in at any moment. It took awful pictures. Or perhaps more correctly, I took awful pictures, but it worked. I still have those awful pictures, and they are great, if you know what I mean.