Saturday afternoon on Lake Macquarie

I have some new lenses for my Pentax A3 35mm SLR. One of them, a 35-105 zoom is especially good for street photography. Intending to head out on Safari on Saturday for some street photography, I packed the Pentax in with my Canon 600D.  Because it was such a hot day I decided to head south to Belmont; there would be plenty of people hanging around the lake foreshore, people diving and jumping off the wharf into the lake, picnics  etc etc, all wonderful subject matter for film!

For some reason, I decided to divert to Green Point along the way; that is usually a popular area and has pure unfettered views across to the other side of Lake Macquarie, besides, there may be some boats out and about on the lake!  Well...... I crested the hill and got very excited!  The lake was teeming with sail and boats of all sizes.  I didn't get to shoot any street photography.  I just took in the beautiful breeze running off the lake whilst sitting under some Pine trees in the shade and watched the boats run.

There were craft of all sizes, from small windsurfers, to the slightly larger but very fast 29er's and 16 foot skiffs from the 16 Footers Club at Belmont, up to the large graceful yachts from the Lake Macquarie Yacht Club.

There was a lot of ducking and weaving going on; I have never seen that many boats on that particular stretch of lake before.  Perhaps it was just my perspective at water level?

I started shooting on manual mode, but some of these boats were fairly quick under sail, and I found that if I focused and then had to adjust shutter speed or aperture for correct exposure then the moment had passed.  So, armed with the thought of  'just get the picture' I changed to AV mode and let the camera determine shutter speed.  I used a large aperture of f5.6 because I wanted to get that shallow depth of field on the subject with light bokeh in the foreground and background.  It worked well and I was much faster getting the photos.  

I shot with the Canon but did try a few with the Pentax (that'll be interesting!)  I used my Canon 55-250 zoom with attached UV filter.  For some reason, I have ended up with a slight vignette on the photos, something I didn't expect. After some research I have found that this lens will give slight vignetting on larger aperture settings.  I also found out that if I were to use the Canon RAW conversion software that this vignetting can be corrected automatically during conversion.

I could have stayed well on 'til sunset, but now that we have daylight saving (YES YES !!) that would have been a few hours away.  So, I made my way home, put the SD card into our LCD TV to review the afternoons' takings and sat down with a beer....... aaahhhhh... life's good!

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