Forth train bridge – Jacques le Roux photography

Looking out of the window at the winter darkness and seeing a few stars I decided on the spur of the moment to take my new Canon 10-22mm EF-S F/3.5-4.5 Ultra wide angle lens for test drive. Once I was outside even though I could see some stars I saw the rain falling pretty hard but I was already ready to leave so continued on my test shoot.

I expected sunrise to be at 0815 but in actual fact it was at 0840. I arrived at South Queensferry just after 0800 and drove towards the foot of the railway bridge. I stopped halfway and saw the harbour sitting between the two bridges and decided it looked like the perfect spot. Let me just make it clear these photos don’t for one second give you a idea how bad the weather was this morning. I ended spending a good 2 hours in rain and wind chill. The car said 2’C but it must have been -10’C in the wind and all for the love of art, lol. I lost feeling in my hands 3 times and in the 2 hours it went in cycles of rain, clear skies, wind and then rain and wind and no feelings in the hands, gloves on, gloves off, blowing hot air, getting on with the photos and then all over again. I’m happy to show it was worth it all in the end.

Now the lens. The EF-S F/3.5-4.5 Ultra wide angle lens was what I decided to get for my Canon 7D. I was tempted to go for the Sigma but in the end decided to stick with Canon glass. I’m impressed with the photos in daylight but I need to play with it more in low light as I’m not sure the image quality is as good as the L lenses I have. I know L glass can’t be used as a comparison but there are just no decent wide angle lens options for the 7D). I’m going to get rid of the Canon 1D MKIII and get another 7D as a backup so I needed to get the right long term lens.

I have one photo in my mind I want to go take with this lens in the dead of night. There is a old building in a field next to trees which is just asking for a night photo to be taken and this lens for purchased for that reason.

TIP: One tip I found and it was a bit of slapping the forehead moment is to get your focus sorted out and then write the lens setting down (I use ColorNote app on my phone). I roughly know where the focus is on the lenses I use but I’m not that good at working it out using the diagrams and have wasted many a minute (long exposures) not having it in perfect focus. I used live view in the past but it’s such a pain when jumping off it to reset the aperture and shutter speed. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could setup a few profiles that you can access instantly by for example pressing the Q or picture style button for 2 seconds you get selection of 5 profiles to choose from to give you your preferred aperture, shutter speed and ISO settings. Profiles can even be named: long exposure, sport, macro, portrait, etc.
Anyway enough waffling, I hope you like my 1st attempt at using a wide angle lens.

The ones I like the most:

Here’s the start of the other photos in order they were taken.

Photographs by Jacques …

Night photosession at the Forth road and train bridges.

We haven’t been out for a while for a night photo session. After days of snow, rain and cloudy weather it was time to get out and get some photos done.

I used my Canon 1D Mark III with my new Canon 24-105 mm F4 L IS lens for this session. I think need to invest in a wide angle lens for photos like these in the future. At 24mm I didn’t get the whole of either bridges in the photos. Time to do some homework to see the best wide angle lens to use. I started at F22 to see how hard I can push it last night and settled on F10 with either 30 seconds, 15 seconds or 10 second exposure.

The wind plays such a big role in night photography. The photos looks great on the camera but once you get it on a large computer screen you can see what the wind has done to your ‘near perfect’ focus. Editing the photos afterwards gives you another level to change things if you aren’t 100% happy with the results.

It was great fun and I think I prefer night photography over day time. So much to do at night to force you to try new things to get the best out of the light and subjects. The best part of all is you can take almost anything that would be boring in daytime and transform it at night, having a famous and brilliant subjects like these on my doorstep is a extra bonus.

Forth bridges:

Probably the photo of the evening for me.