Machine Gun Etiquette

Black Headed Gull, originally uploaded by andyskelton-a Blog a day http://andrewskelton.net.

The classic third album, released in 1979, by the Damned and also a good description for the judicious use of high frame rate capture with my camera. The 1D4 can record 10 frames a second for up to 12 second without drawing breath, at which point the buffer in the camera becomes full. The camera will also be moving data from the buffer to the memory cards and so the photographer is still able to snap away, just not at the full 10 frames a second, until the buffer clears sufficiently.

Having had some time after work with some good light to photograph with, I set up the camera gear and in a very short space of time had rattled off nearly 700 photos. 700 photos. In old money, I would have used up nearly 20 rolls of film. And there’s the beauty of digital photography; if I’d been using film I certainly wouldn’t have taken that many pictures in one sitting, let alone in less than 30 minutes. I would have experimented less with exposure and shutter speed. I wouldn’t have been able to boost the ISO are readily (yes, I know you can do this but it’s more difficult to cross process then). Plus if I don’t like the final outcome, I simply delete them.

Machine gun etiquette? Well, at 10 frames a second, the camera sounds like a machine gun going off and there are times and places where you can use this. I don’t suspect a hide full of bird watchers or more over a nervous bird nearby would like the sound of a Tommy gun going off but in the right place it can be useful. To most people the camera will just sounds like “Noise, Noise, Noise“!

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