As things turned out the poultry show consisted of two ducks and some eggs! However there were lots of sheep. Being in hill country close to the Yorkshire Dales that's to be expected. It soon became obvious that aside from the baking, jars of preserves and other craft classes this show is a sheep show.
There was little in the way of 'entertainment', just a bouncy castle and a merry-go-round for the kids, plus a children's disco - held in the mart's auction ring! The trade stands were all agriculturally based and the food and drink suppliers were the mart café (so busy when I went to get a brew that I didn't bother), an ice cream van and a burger trailer. A show with no pretensions and certainly not out to 'fleece' the visitors. Even the vintage vehicles were different to the ones which seem to do the rounds of the bigger shows.
After a quick walk round the sheep section with a fast lens I realised that old faithful would do well enough. One advantage of using a slow (cheap) lens on a full frame (expensive) body is that high ISO values are not to be feared. Despite the internet wisdom that you are better off with top end lenses on entry level bodies, this iconoclast works the other way. While my superzoom has technical limitations it has practical advantages.
Fast lenses of longer than standard focal lengths are useless for taking close up detail shots (unless they are macro lenses in which case they have variable apertures as focusing distance changes). I'd tried to get a close up of a sheep's eye with the 85mm, but it's closest focusing distance was too long. No problem for the superzoom. And the result is sharp enough when printed at 15in by 10in.
Being an open sided mart in the old fashioned style the available light was pretty good given that the day was mostly sunny. It continues to be difficult to resist grabbing an occasional picture of characters. My concentration, however, was on action and gesture.
There are times when the technical features of a camera really can make a difference. One reason I swapped my 'pro' bodies for the 'prosumer' ones I use now is the flippy screen. Interestingly this feature now appears on Nikon's latest small pro body. If the touch screen facility and the supposedly faster focusing find there way into the next iteration of the model I have now I might make the change. If the price becomes affordable. But I manage well enough with what I have even though moving the focus point is laborious. For low angle pictures with a wide angle lens (which has a lot of depth of field making critical focus less of a concern) this got me some half decent pictures, while saving my creaky knees from painful bending or kneeling.
With the judging over there wasn't much left to see so I came away around two and took the scenic route home. Although I stopped off to take some photos along the way the sun decided to disappear. It was landscape anyway so I would only have wasted my time. More from the show here.
Back home and time was running out until the midnight deadline for entries into the British Life Photography Awards. I've never entered a photo competition before for a couple of reasons. One is that I don't take the kind of pretty pictures which camera clubs award prizes to, and the big serious arty competitions require far too much money and/or paperwork for this lazy and cheap soul. The BPLA competition is a bit different. Entry was on-line and simple, the fee reasonable, but best of all the subject matter, British Life, is right up my street. Having bought the books published from winning and commended pictures from the first two competitions I was going to enter last year. Maybe it was me who jinxed the competition because it was cancelled! When I heard it was on again for 2017 I determined to give it a shot. Not that I hold out much hope for my entries.
Trying to edit a bunch of pictures for any purpose, even the gallery of yesterday's show, involves making an initial selection of decent pictures. Then I start whittling them down. When I think they are going to be judged critically my standards rise and the reject pile gets higher, and higher, until I have none left in the selection pile. In the end I stuck in one I think might have a hope and then worked on the basis of the more I entered the more chance I had of at least one being chosen. The lottery approach!
It's probably unhealthy, but I've got as obsessed with sheep recently as I got with poultry. The other evening it was warm and sunny. Ideal for some snapping. Where to go? The marsh has sheep on it. So I went there. Tricky blighters out in the wild though. But get close enough and they will pose looking straight at you.
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