A single foot

My friend CHM gave me a monopod a few years ago. I've used it a few times; it's a nice compromise between hand-held photography and lugging a full tripod around. Like I said in yesterday's post, it doesn't eliminate camera shake, but does give you a little more stability in low-light situations.

Still a bit grainy, and blurry in the background. Can you see Callie on the path?

I decided to try it out with the new camera for the first time on Monday afternoon's walk. The sky was mostly overcast, so I didn't have to deal with the contrast of bright sunny spots and dark shadowy spots as I did for the photo in yesterday's post. Still, it was quite dark in the woods. I set the ISO to 400 on the camera but wasn't able to stop the aperture down as much as I wanted. I thought I should keep the shutter speed under one second, so for the above picture I ended up with f/6.3 and 1/8 second. That wider aperture explains some of the background blur.

I took the shot below in a different spot, so it's hard to compare, but I don't think there's much difference. The ISO is still at 400, but I got to f/9 (smaller aperture) with a shutter speed of 1/4 second (twice as long as the previous exposure). That longer exposure time likely resulted in just enough blur (from camera shake) to cancel out the better depth of field. Argh!

A different spot in the woods. Callie's not in this one.

In both cases, I'm not really satisfied with the result. I'm sure the tripod would make more of a difference. Still, it's fun to experiment with the monopod because it's much easier to carry on a walk. And the more I shoot, the more I'll learn.