Black spots (just for fun)

[hssutton]

What caused all the black spots on this photo. I've stripped out the exif so that the answer is not to easy.

The Arrows had just left their base, the rest of the flight where just a few seconds behind.

Harry

[OldBoy]

As you are close to a tree my guess is flies.

[cosmicma]

shot through a window perhaps ?
rain on the front element ?

[rbarry]

The planes look sharp and while the tree isn't, there must be a fairly healthy dof, so can I swop Oldboy's flies for a small swarm of wasps or bees and award an aperture of f6.3 with a shutter speed of around 1/500sec. If you were tracking the planes with a panning shot I would expect more movement in the trees, so I'm assuming an ISO of say 400 or 800 to get the fast shutter speed.

Sticking my neck out there a bit so go gentley with the axe when you chop my head off!

[rbarry]

..........but, I've just re-read your post and realised that the planes are probably travelling quite slowly waiting for the others to catch up, so I'll knock the ISO back down again to what would be a more likely 200 for the time of day and drop the shutter speed down to 1/320sec.

[hssutton]

Oldboy is spot on with flies (midges)

Now the details, I was actually shooting butterflies with my 7D +100mm f/2.8 IS macro lens and twinlight macro flash. 1/250 @ f/20. Camera and flash both set to manual. I heard the sound of the aircraft, looked up saw the aircraft and just fired off a frame. Time of day recorded 17/08/2011 – 11:03:51.

I can't be 100% certain as to what caused the spots, as I certainly did not see any 'swarms' anything.

Harry

[Cathus]

I'd say flies or the like.

I often notice in my sports photography that a fly or bee will end up in the same sharp plane of focus as one of my American Footballers, you usually only notice when processing the shots.

[rbarry]

I wouldn't have guessed you were using a prime 100mm macro lens, and made the false assumption from the subject material that a wide angle mid zoom range lens was attached to the camera body.

I have no experience of the macro lens you used, but would like to! At f20 I would expect the foreground tree to have been in sharper focus because of the greater dof. Even though your proximity to the tree was slightly further away than I imagined, the dof at f20 using a wider angle lens, say 25mm to 50mm compared to the reality of this shot at 100mm would have produced a sharper image. But I also got the ambient light availabilty wrong as you managed a relatively high shutter speed for a small aperture and low ISO setting in what looks like a cloudy day. Then again I didn't appreciate you were set up for a macro shoot and were using a flash gun. Big midges though!

Time to sharpen that axe, executioner...