Bokehrama in the woods (Markela)

I was being sensible, getting on with university coursework and in the corner of my screen pops up a Skype window, yep its Andy.

He is Currently Completing a PhD in physics, part of which requires he run 16 hour + simulations…  with the computer locked up for that long, he had some time to kill. Naturally I did the only sensible thing I could and instantly dropped the coursework, packed some camera gear and pandered to Markela to come along and model for us 🙂

After a short drive we arrived, parked up and headed into the woods. It was eerily quiet and the distant and strange sounding animal noises spooked Markela a little (I think she has spent a little too long watching TV/Films where bad things always happen in the middle of the woods!).

ARGHH THATS IT I’M SELLING ALL THIS NIKON SH*** AND GOING CANON!

We found a nice spot where Andy fired off a few shots and where we tried some slightly “out of the ordinary” lighting set-ups to experiment. The second location we found  (I always let Andy go first, its harder :P) it was my turn to shoot. Having invested so much over the last 4 years in equipment which I’ve always taken great care of, I was extremely pissed to find when I mounted the Nikkor 70-200mm f2.8 on camera, I couldn’t see anything threw the viewfinder. It turns out an element inside the lens had fallen out!  So, as light was diminishing, mainly due to heavy rain clouds heading in, I put the 70-200 away and got the 85mm prime out. Mounted that and went to shoot, whats this, fEE error ? My aperture is locked at max (usually the cause of this error message), and yet,  the camera would not let me shoot. After a short session of swearing at the camera body, lens and Nikon in general the engineer within worked out that if I didn’t fully mount the lens, it would think it was a manual lens and ignore the requirement of the aperture ring. Of course this left me with no metering, no autofocus and having to ensure the lens doesn’t fall off the front. To make my life even more complicated, I thought it may be fun to use the Brenizer method (Invented by: http://www.ryanbrenizer.com/) also nick named a Bokehrama. See post about getting in lots of practice for situations like this: Practicing the Brenizer Technique

It was cold and even started raining and still Markela was awesome and super patient with us, what a trooper 😀

Considering the circumstances I’m pretty happy with the final image.