Telephoto Shots with a Canon 10D
(Posted June 9, 2003, © Herbert E. Lindberg)
The strengths of the Canon 10D single-lens-reflex digital camera are most apparent in telephoto action shots. Andy posted a few he took of birds in flight so I'm replying with a few images from shots I took of waterski boats zooming past our dock during a visit by Craig, Jodie, and Tyler on May 25. The image below is cropped from a shot with a 64-mm focal length (102 mm equivalent on a 35-mm film camera) and an equivalent ISO speed of 400. I've also reduced the size from the original by half to save space. When I cropped I made sure to include some of the houses across the lake, to show that they're severely blurred because I was tracking the boat.
Part of the same picture cropped to full size shows reasonable resolution, even though this boat was zooming past at about 30 mph.
As in Andy's bird pictures, this picture was part of a series in multi-shot mode as I panned and held the shutter button down. Below is the next picture in the series, also cropped at full size. You can see that the angle to the boat has changed, and the woman on the side bench has lifted up to see who her husband was waving to.
A sail boat also passed as I stood on the dock. It was more than half way across the lake when I snapped the picture below, also with a 400 ISO setting but zoomed to 110 mm (176 mm equivalant) because of the greater distance to the boat than in the ski boat pictures above. The image has been cropped, and reduced in size by a factor of 2.6 for use here.
The image below is cropped at full size, so you can see that although the picture was composed to emphasize the complete boat and sails, there is still some detail in the individual people on board. In all these pictures the people were way too far away for me to recognize from where I stood on the dock. I could barely make out that there were three people on the sail boat.
You can see Andy's bird shots at http://www.barbwired.com/andy/Flying-Birds/flying-birds.htm
