Gotcha!

Posted by baobab (Cambridge, United States) on 22 February 2008 in Architecture.

what could it be but a lobster??

Rags guessed correctly when looking at the previous shot.

boston massachusetts february 2008

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Comments (7)

Ina from Krugersdorp, South Africa

Now this is different! Never seen this before. Very unique capture, I like it! Thanks for sharing. Have a great Friday and weekend!

22 Feb 2008 6:52am

e. from New York, NY, United States

Haha great capture of a humorous variation on the typical rooster.

22 Feb 2008 7:54am

Illuci from Hurdegaryp, Netherlands

Agree with Ina. I bet it's a fish shop. What could it be else? My son (10) would see a battle ship in it from a computer game with a dangerous fighting instrument on it to catch the bad guys :).

22 Feb 2008 10:15am

@Illuci: Lobster claws can be dangerous fighting instruments! I am always amused to see tanks of lobsters with their claws elastic-banded shut to prevent them from fighting one another.

danthro from Suburbia, United States

funny. looks like the sun came out a little since the previous shot. nice composition, definitely focuses the eye directly on the lobster.

22 Feb 2008 8:32pm

@danthro: The clouds were scudding around in front of the sun that afternoon. I can't remember the exact setting (and unfortunately aminus3 doesn't show it in the EFIX data), but I used exposure comp for this shot. The sky was a lot lighter than the building so I upped the exposure (i.e. with the camera set to aperture priority instructed it to slow the shutter speed) to avoid underexposing the building.

danthro from Suburbia, United States

I don't understand that exposure, shutter speed, aperture stuff -- not exactly subject matter a point and shoot is conducive to learning about -- but whatever you did I think it worked.

22 Feb 2008 11:16pm

@danthro: It sounds complicated but really isn't in practice.

As a rough rule of thumb
aperture --> depth of field
ISO --> sensitivity / graininess
shutter --> speed

Most of the time I shoot in aperture priority mode with ISO set as low as it will go (200 on the D70). This lets me control the depth of field and I leave it up to the camera's smart software to figure out the optimal shutter speed.

The camera's shutter-speed software works well when the scene has a fairly even distribution of tones, but when the subject is significantly darker or lighter than the background this may result in under/over-exposure. SLRs have an exposure compensation option where you can set the camera to adjust the exposure by letting in either more or less light to appropriately expose the primary subject.

For this particular photo I wanted the building and lobster to be correctly exposed and was unconcerned about blowing out the highlights in the clouds. The default exposure resulted in a silhouette effect so I set the camera to allow in more light than it would have done with a completely automatic exposure.

SLRs can do a lot of fancy stuff that point and shoots cannot, but there are a number of advantages to the P&S. Apart from the obvious smaller size / less complicated = good simple to use technology, I think that one of the great things is that with a P&S you focus on creating the picture rather than the process of setting up the camera to take the picture. Your composition skills are far stronger than those of many [good] photographers with fancy cameras. And this person takes stunning photos, often with his mobile phone!