Ferrara is indeed a city of bicycles. You’ll see more of them in upcoming posts.
All of today’s images have been taken with the Olypmus 40-150/2.8 PRO.
You may remember, I have the tiny and ultra-light 40-150/4.0-5.6 as well. That’s the one I bought used for no money, the lens with the plastic mount, and I always say it is one of the most under-appreciated lenses I’ve ever had.
Nevertheless, there are reasons why my new long lens is worth having, even though it’s eight times as expensive. Subject isolation at f2.8 is one of them. You don’t see it in the Image of the Day (that was taken at f8) but in the frontal portraits of the two riders below.
The other reason is that the big lens is ultra-fast in focusing. For most of my subjects focusing speed does not matter at all, but once you have such a lens, of course you start experimenting with continous autofocus.
Actually I’m extremely bad at that. I don’t practice it at all and if I suddenly had to make a living of it, I’d starve within days 😄
The speed of the lens definitely helps. Focus tracking in the camera also works. At least I can’t remember it having been any better in the Nikon D300. Obviously it’s me who sucks 🙂
The other problem is a general problem with long lenses and crowds. The longer the distance, the higher the chance that someone crosses into your view, hides the subject and confuses the autofocus mechanism. And then there’s the matter of composition. Forget about that. This game is about making lots of images, selecting a few and pretending you had intended them to be that way 😄