This is another picture of HB from today. Sometimes pictures are taken because of magical light, but today’s picture was simply because she was wearing her Marie the kitten top. She is more than a little fond of the Disney cartoon, The Aristocats, and the little kitten Marie singing the line “rikki tikki tikki” is just the very essence of a good-life for her. My Sister in Law, Linda happened to witness HB singing along with this and characteristically remembered this and sourced “from god-knows-which-supplier-of-legacy-cartoon tops” this magnificent and sweet top. My readers perhaps won’t be as impressed as I am, but HB’s other big favourite is The Rescuers, with it’s sweet mousy heroes! You guessed it, she is also the very proud owner of a Miss Bianca mouse top; truly awesome!
Photographically, these were using my 500D with the new 24mm f2.8 pancake. These were taken wide-open with a 1/60th second shutter speed. They are not pin sharp, but they are good enough as fun snaps!
Strictly speaking for a moving child, I should have had a faster shutter speed, but it was hard to juggle checking aperture, ISO and resulting shutter speed. You see, I have given up on using Canon’s auto ISO on the basis that it is simply not reliable enough. In this case I chose 800 on a judgement call, but 1600 would have been a better choice. I know that there is a view that a good photographer should do everything fully manually, but I am not convinced by this. Interacting with people is challenging, and if your camera can be trusted to take the aperture that you have chosen, (a sensible thing to leave in the photographer’s control), and to ensure that it chooses an appropriate ISO setting to match the shutter speed rule-of-thumb plus a little more to be safe, then that will save you time and let you focus on your subject. The trouble is, as I said a few days ago, the Canon algorithm is simply unreliable. If you search online on the subject, you will find that I am far from alone in this view. The algorithm seems to try to hard to keep as low an ISO setting as possible, presumably to minimise noise in the image, but I would rather have a sharp, grainy/noisy image than a soft/blurred clean one. Modern noise reduction in processing can do a huge amount with noise anyway, so I feel Canon badly misjudge this. My suggestion would be that Canon simply put two auto ISO settings in the menu. One would be the existing one, used for landscapes, stills etc. The second would be labelled (auto ISO people/moving) or similar, and this would simply favour the higher shutter speed to give the desired aperture, and would still motion within reason! Feel free Canon, just send me a free 5D Mk3 for my idea!
Please forgive the mini-rant (rantette?) As soon as Mr Canon visits me with a reasonably sized notebook, they will cease.
