Day 224/365: Tamron 24-70mm

Today was Valentine's day. We like to make a bit of a fuss about Valentine's around here because we think that positive rituals are an important part of family life and it is always nice to celebrate love.

 

It's also good to have an excuse to get some bunting out. Have you noticed that we have bunting for just about every sort of occasion? I would like some more actually. You can never have enough bunting in my opinion. 

 

 We usually like to fill the day with cards, some sweet treats and a small token gift. My husband surprised me this year by going all out and getting me a new lens. He went straight to the top of my photography wish list and got me the Tamron 24-70mm. Not a traditionally romantic gift, but my goodness how I love this lens! Apart from the joy of it being a zoom lens. I am amazed by the sharpness I can achieve with ridiculously low shutter speeds. I have read so many times that you need a shutter speed of at least 1/125 to eliminate camera shake and to capture the kind of movement that you get with kids.

 

Through playing around with sharpness in Lightroom I have gotten into the habit of zooming right in to examine a photo. Doing this on my LCD screen on the camera yesterday, I could see that high ISO pictures were very blurry when I compared them to low ISO images. So as an experiment I took some pictures with ISOs below 400. This left me with shutter speeds of around 1/20. Ridiculously low! But the Tamron 24-70mm has vibration compensation which did a great job of eliminating the camera shake. So long as the kids weren't moving much, I got pretty sharp images. I cannot wait to see what I can get in good light which will afford me low ISOs and high shutter speeds. 

 

 

I often struggle to find opportunities to take pictures with leading lines. I was pleased to get this one but I wish that I took a step back to get the whole guitar into the frame. I'll get it next time. 

 

 

This is not a strong image technically, but I have been frustrated for ages about being unable to achieve this "framed" picture with the 50mm. This is actually Rexy's bed. She is just so cheeky. 

 

 

So much of my learning is starting to come together. I knew that I wanted this starburst effect and how to achieve it. (Raising the aperture to f/17 or above). I had to go with the high ISO this time but I still had a very low shutter speed. You can see the motion blur on her hand. I cannot believe this lens.

 

This picture makes me so happy I am going to use it as my entry in this weeks 52 project. The prompt word is happy.