Harry's Blog

You ever have those days where you come home with your camera and you look at the 80 or so shots on the card and not a single one is worth uploading to Flickr or even showing anyone?

That's how my morning went. We took the kids for a walk to Bushy Park and onwards to Hampton Court palace. The sky was grey, the light terrible and to make matters worse I took the wrong lens with me.

I was using the Sigma 18-200mm DC OS which can be surprisingly sharp at times. But out and about today I took a lot of very dull badly focussed shots. The autofocus in the lens prefers sunny days and today's dull light gave this slow - but very useful - lens nothing to work with.

I wish I'd taken the f2.8 Tamron 17-50mm instead, but I wanted the extra reach in case we saw some deer. We didn't. But really thing to remember is that you're not going to get good photos when there's nothing out there worth taking pictures of.

Certainly there was nothing I pointed my camera at that made me go "wow" before I pulled the trigger. The parakeets in the park were interesting - but 200mm is still pretty short to capture such birds high in trees and with the cold grey sky behind them the shots weren't very thrilling.

I think today's failure comes down to two things. One my lens choice wasn't great - but I think more importantly I haven't quite sussed out the best way of making use of this particular lens, my technique is off. Secondly there was very little to actually catch the eye that would be worth of photography.

Some days are just like that.