Kabul from above.

 About a week ago I was on a tasking doing some filming about pilots in Afghanistan, as part of this there was the opportunity for a flight in a MI-17 out to the ranges on the outskirts of Kabul. The flight went out over the city and once again I had my Nikon D700 with, this it was locked and loaded with a Nikons new 28-300mm F3.5-5.6 lens.

The flight over the city gave me the chance to to see the vastness of the Afghan capital and the range of the lens enabled me to shot great wide shots and close up shots too. Plus the f3.5-5.6 range of the lens did not effect my shots in any way duw to how bright the condition are out here during the day.

In was nice to see the beautiful side to Afghanistan.in both a man made and natural capacity.

A day at 1.8

I was recently tasked as part of the camera team to cover the graduation of the Afghan Uniformed Police (AUP) at the Regional Training Centre (South West), which was a filming task throughout the day. But as usual I had my Nikon D700 with me with a old 50mm F1.8, so I decided to make it 1.8 day.

Shooting everything at 1.8 proved interesting for my exposure, as during the day out here it is very bright. Even on iso 100 I still had an exposure of 1/8000th at f1.8. So I shot in NEF to help me, knowing that you can bring back a certain amount of the highlights back in Adobe Raw Convertor.

It was nice using an old manual lens on a modern camera and having to use manual focus again was a welcome change, especially knowing that if the shot isn't sharp its not the cameras fault.

 I was recently out shooting some moon rising images. When I was finished I turned to go and noticed a large ammount of traffic moving past. So I tried some panning shots with the D3s when I notice a multitude of coloured lights in the background of the shots which had blurred into abstract patterns. I then focused on the just lights themselves with the use of a long shutter speed and moving the camera during the exporsure to create obscure and interesting patterns.


Here are the results.

In post production, I used vibrance and saturation to help bring out the colours of the lights. Then for a couple I used hue to adjust some of the images to a different colour.