Surely you joust!

So, I may or may not have mentioned before, but I took The Wife to Scarborough Faire for our first date. It was her first visit to a renaissance festival. We've made it a point to visit a ren fest every year since, but after moving to New Braunfels, Waxahachie's too far for convenience, so we more often attend the Texas Renaissance Festival these days, simply because of easier logistics.

This year, we went on opening weekend. I've blogged a little bit about the general experience (the kids loved it, as they always do, and burned through all our money in record time) over at the Lisa On Location Photography blog. In this particular post, I want to go into some extended detail about a set of photos I took.

To recap, last Christmas The Wife gifted me with a Canon FD 500mm f/8 reflex mirror lens. Which, over the ensuing six months, I converted to Canon EF mount and inflicted a little bit of nerve damage on myself in the process. I painstakingly documented my conversion, but then apparently deleted all the files. sigh. The long and short of it is I have an extremely long focal range lens that cost $10,000 less than Canon's EF 500mm f/4 IS lens, or $800 less than Sigma's 50-500mm alternative. The FD 500mm is also about 10 pounds lighter than either of those, but has the disadvantage of being a pretty slow f/8 lens that can't be stopped down. And it's also strictly manual focus. It's a tough lens to use, to put it bluntly. My first real efforts with it I chronicled here, and ended up throwing away far more shots than I kept. But attending the Texas Ren Fest, the idea struck me that the joust might prove to be a suitable subject to practice my lens-fu on with this challenging mirror.

All the photos you see here were shot with the 500mm reflex. That German princess in blue in the upper right corner? Yeah. The jumping squirrel immediately above? Absolutely. You can tell by the blurred circular bokeh of the background behind them--that's an inherent trait of the mirror lens design. Some people hate it, and it can become very distracting with busy backgrounds (the squirrel is a good case in point). But such effects can be controlled with careful shot composition and background awareness. Which I'm still working on. But I was quite pleased at how quickly I was able to manually focus on this darting squirrel across the arena--it came running in from the left, leapt up onto the retaining wall to steal some dropped food, then darted back the way he'd come.

The biggest problem I faced was overcast skies. Heavily overcast skies. Since the mirror lens is slow, ie it doesn't let that much light in, it does best under bright conditions. That means sunny skies or thin, hazy clouds. Nothing doing this day. And because it's such a long lens, I needed to use a shutter speed of at least 1/500 of a second to control camera shake and stop the action I was shooting. Under ideal circumstances, I'd rather use a 1/800 shutter speed, but there just wasn't enough light. As it was, the cloudy conditions forced me to use ISO 1600 rather than ISO 400 or 800 I'd rather use (higher ISO--that is, the image sensor sensitivity--film sensitivity in the old days--introduces more random noise and loss of detail to an image).

The German knight, all in blue, turned out quite nicely as you can see above. I am particularly pleased with the color and detail sharpness in the second image, with his great helm on. My best shot of the afternoon--in my opinion, at least--was the jousting clash between the English knight and the French knight, below. I tracked the English knight as he rode toward me, using his shield as a focal point. That's why his shield is in focus and his great helm is slightly soft, and the French knight is very soft. A 500mm lens has a very narrow depth-of-field, even at f/8. The blurring of the lance shards is a result of motion blur. If I'd shot this at 1/800 of a second shutter speed, everything would've frozen motionless. Alas, the overcast conditions made even 1/500 that I shot at marginal.

But look at this! While looking at the image at 100 percent resolution, I noticed a bit of discoloration in the eye vent of the English knight's helm. I applied some lightening and contrast tricks in Photoshop, and was surprised to discover my lens had resolved the knight's eye inside the helm! I don't know about you, but I found that quite impressive.

Then, we have the fighting on foot sequence. Obviously, the knights didn't move as far in distance terms as they did on horseback, but the back-and-forth, side-to-side unpredictability of the fights led to a lot of slightly out-of-focus shots. None, save for the very last image here with the English knight saluting the crowd, are perfectly focused, but I include them to show how close I managed to get with such a narrow depth-of-field, with an elbow here or a bit of chain mail there perfectly sharp and the rest of the subject rapidly blurring into softness. Case in point is the third one down, the Spanish knight's "blood geyser." The back of the English knight is very sharp, but that's not where the focus should be. Even so, I'm including it simply because it's pretty darn cool (if disgusting) and as such appropriate for Halloween!

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