Zoom with your Zoom

The last blog I wrote talked about not using a zoom lens and how much I love shooting with prime lenses.  Well this week I was on a business trip to Pittsburgh, PA and each evening after work I headed to a local park for my daily run and then a little shooting.  The park was great for running with a nice 5 mile loop and some hills to add a little work.  For the photography side though it was typical mid west in the middle of the summer... green, green and more green.  Just not very interesting.

So, with my cool little Olympus Pen in hand I traded out the 14mm prime for the 17-40mm zoom lens and played with the zoom.  All of these shots were taken at about 7:30 PM as the sun was getting low in the sky, kept the ISO low at 100 and stopped down the lens a bit (usually about f/8 or so) so get a slower shutter speed.  On most shots I was aiming for a shutter speed of about 1/2 to 1 second and then zoomed while the shutter was open.

I probably took over a hundred exposures and from that got maybe 10 or 12 that I thought worked pretty well.  The best results also seemed to come from zooming out to in.

This was a great project for when there just wasn't anything too interesting to shoot.  This is when I would usually grab my macro lens and shoot big pictures of small stuff but a micro four thirds macro doesn't yet exists and I don't own a four thirds one.  But the zoom game was a lot of fun and another way to be creative with the camera.

Enjoy!
Tom Laux
August 28, 2009