Zoom! Zoom!

I have a Mazda Miata convertible sports car that I've had now for 15 years and put 105,000 miles on it.  When I bought it, Mazda had an advertising slogan that they used to market the cars -- "Zoom! Zoom!"  While my little car doesn't have a great deal of power, it is fun to zoom zoom around the mountain roads with the top down and the wind blowing through our hair.

But this is a blog about photography, not cars.  There is a fun technique that can be tried with a zoom lens to get the "Zoom Effect".  You get this effect by using your lens to zoom in or out while making the photo.  The resulting photo will have blurring lines emanating from the center of the photo that make the subject appear to be moving toward or away from you.  Here's an illustration from a recent trip to the Christmas Lights at the Detroit Zo.

My Unmoving Subject

The Zoom Effect

The first shot was made without camera or lens movement.  In the second I turned the zoom ring on my lens during the 1/5 second exposure. Zooming will blur what is on the edges of the frame but not blur what is in the center of the photo.  The amount of blur depends on how much you zoom the lens.  In this example, I was using a relatively fast shutter speed of 1/5 of a second because I was hand holding my camera and I wanted to avoid as much blur due to camera shake as possible.  If I had my camera on a tripod I could have used a longer exposure and zoomed even more.

Here are a couple more examples.

1/3 second

 Can you tell what that is?  I was at a zoo after all.

This technique is not limited to lights or outdoors.  Here's an example with a mantle clock.

17 seconds

In this case, I had my camera on a tripod.  I started the exposure, waited 5 seconds, zoomed out for about 5 seconds, and then let the shutter timer run out.  You can see the face of the clock appears inside the face of the clock.

3.1 seconds

One of the coolest subjects to try this on is fireworks. Set up to get an exposure of a couple seconds long, wait for an explosion in the frame and zoom.

2 seconds

Here are some tips to use when trying the zoom effect:

1. You want a long exposure, preferably longer than 1 second.  This is a technique that works well at night or in low light situations.
2. Keep the camera steady by using a tripod.  Trying to hold the camera still while zooming is very challenging.
3. What is in the center of the shot will be blurred less than what is on the sides.  Put your subject in the center.
4. Zoom smoothly.  I like to start zoomed out, start zooming, then press the shutter.   This will help keep the zoom speed consistent throughout the exposure. This will take some practice.
5. Make multiple shots while varying the shutter speeds and amount of zoom.  Try some zooming in and others zooming out. This is not a one shot and done scenario.  Take many shots because you will delete many.

Give this a try.  You have to be willing to delete a large percentage of the shots but keep trying and you will come away with some cool compositions.  Let me know if you try this and how it comes out.

We made it to Michigan and found ourselves in the 16th century

While visiting our son and daughter-in-law, we took a day and went to the Michigan Renaissance Festival.  I had been looking forward to this as a fun side trip on our journey.  We've never been to anything like this and I found it to be a unique opportunity to practice street photography in a very different environment.

Pirates Welcome Us To The Festival

I've discovered that you can find Renaissance Festivals all across the country.  Michigan uses a site specifically set up for the festival. The pageantry of a 16th-century village spreads over 17 acres with building reproductions of Renaissance shops, taverns, jousting fields.  Inside are hundreds of unique individuals costumed for the Renaissance period.  I had so much fun I came home with hundreds of photos from that day.  There was so much going on sharing just a few photos can't really tell the story of our day in the 16th-century.

Dealers in Women's Headgear

I was surprised to find I was one of the few people photographing at the festival.  Many people were there to participate in character and others were happy to just wander around and watch the characters.

The Silversmith

This blog post is mostly photos and less of my writing.  I hope you enjoy the photos.  Remember, if you are viewing this on the web you can always click on one image and scroll through each one using left and right arrows.

Pan the god of the wild, shepherds and flocks and nature

Many of the costumes were elaborate while a few were more early Halloween costumes.  I wasn't always sure what I was seeing, such as the guy I've called Pan.

Others, such as The Dutchman, are well known and can be found on Ren Fair websites.

The Dutchman

The Queen

At one point the Queen passed through the crowds with her court followed by a parade of other characters. She was one of the more elaborately dressed and was followed by another woman that had a rather unique and painful looking outfit.

The Queen of The Pirates

The Fireman

There were several stages spread out around the festival where performers put on shows involving knives and fire.

The big event of the festival was the joust, which is a fight between mounted knights wearing armor and using lances. Jousting was a favorite form of entertainment during the Middle Ages and drew big crowds at the festival.

The Joust 

I got to watch the joust twice.  The lances were designed to break on impact but that didn't prevent one of the knights being knocked from his horse after taking a lance to the chest.  Another knight had to have "her" armor repaired by a local blacksmith.  We were told she broke a rib earlier in the day, but we weren't sure if that was true or just part of the show.  She didn't compete again that day.

A Knight At The Joust

Repairing a Knights Armor

As with any large gathering, there will be those who get into a little trouble.  This fellow was placed in stocks and for a dollar, people could throw tomatoes at him

A criminal gets his punishment

 There was even an early exterminator known as "The Rat Catcher" wandering the streets.

The Rat Catcher

One Scary Woman

Minstrels 

Everywhere we went you could hear Renaissance music.  Some of it was melodious and bright from minstrels.

Other musicians were a bit louder and energetic.

The Band and A Fan

At the end of the day, we listened to a band called Pictus which I think was the best show of the day.  Three musicians played early Celtic music on drums, flute, and bagpipes complete with a fox skin.

The Look

Here's a video of their high energy show.

I had a blast and got more comfortable taking photos of people. Every day I learn something new.  On this day I learned that I didn't need anything more than my camera and one 18-135mm zoom lens. I could have left the camera bag in the car. If we can we will go back next year and maybe look for other Ren Festivals to go to.

It's Important To Plan Ahead

On a recent two week trip, I ran into a problem with the memory cards I use in my camera.  The problem was I made too many photos and ran out of cards!  That shouldn't be a problem.  SD cards are available in Target, Walmart, and most any store that sells electronics.  My problem was I was in the town of Munising Michigan.  Munising is a city of fewer than 3,000 people on the southern shore of Lake Superior on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. This is the best place to go to see Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore.  It's not the best place to find an SD card.

Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore

The best option we found was a Dollar Store that said they had good SD cards.  When we got there we found they were

micro-SD cards for a smartphone.  Low capacity, slow, and expensive.  Then we learned that Munising had something that few other places have -- a Radio Shack store.  Really!  They are not all gone.  We did have a hard time finding this one because it was in the back corner of a local pharmacy. Once we found them I bought the best card they had in the store - a SanDisk 64GB XC I card. Now I'm back in business and heading down the road to the next beautiful photo destination with my new card.

I soon learned why getting the right card for your camera is so important.  My Fuji X-T2 camera makes really large photos really fast.  When I got the camera I did a little research and found the Transcend Ultimate UHS-II SDHC U3 was a good match for my camera.  That's what I have been using since I got the camera.  I now know how important a fast card is.

Shooting Fast on Lake Michigan

The Radio Shack SDXC card has a write speed of 4 MB per second. My Transcend cards have a write speed of 180 MB per second, 45 times faster!  But, what does this mean in the real world?

Most of the time I make five different exposures of the same shot, starting at - 2 EV and going to +2 EV.  When I get home I then either pick the best exposure out of the five or blend some combination of the five together on the PC.  The Fuji camera can make those 5 shots in less than a second and write them to the card in the time it takes me to take a breath.  That is if I have a high-speed card in the camera.  What I found was what appears instantaneous with a high-speed card takes about a minute with the low-speed card.  I would take the five shots then wait a minute while the camera saved those photos to the card.  That's a pretty frustrating experience. 

When shopping for memory cards for your camera I suggest doing a little research first.  Find out what the manufacturer recommends.  Then see if there is any additional information available online. I also found a few good sites with information that helped me decide which cards to buy. 

Camera Memory Speed - Performance Tests for Digital Cameras
https://www.cameramemoryspeed.com/

Fuji X-T2
https://alikgriffin.com/fastest-memory-cards-for-the-fujifilm-x-t2/

Canon DSLRs
https://www.forthebecause.com/canon-5d-mark-iii-memory-write-speeds/

All my troubles could have been avoided if I had planned ahead and brought enough memory cards with me.  I've since solved that problem and am ready for the next big adventure.