Beercan

As I mentioned in a previous post, my little girl is graduating this year. Her commencement ceremony is tonight so I thought I would get today's post in early. 

The joys of telephoto. I took this picture in Steveston, some time ago. I had just bought my 70-210 telephoto and was out testing it. On a bright sunny day I shot this at 210mm, 1/1600sec at f5.6. I wanted to keep the lens wide open to get a shallow depth of field.  This was to isolate the seagull from the background. Here is an interesting little tidbit about shooting with telephoto. Any movement is exaggerated when taking a picture with telephoto making sharpness a concern. If you are handholding the camera, the minimum shutter speed should equal the focal length of the lens. For example, if you are shooting with a 300mm lens, your shutter speed should be at least 1/300sec. 
That is the lesson for the day. 

Ps: The reason for the title is the lens I was testing was an old Minolta lens referred to as a "beercan" because it is all metal and a rather heavy lens. If you shoot with a Minolta (no longer in the camera business) or Sony DSLR, this is a good cheap lens to have.