A day for a bit of double experimentation. First of course I had the new Olympus 40-150 f/2.8 Pro lens out for a play. It has a 72mm filter size, so I grabbed a 72mm circular polarising filter that I already had from the Canon days and put that on to play around for a bit. I expect that a significant number of my shots with the 40-150 will be ocean-based, and will therefore have need of it. The only issue, and maybe it's just me, is that I find it a LOT harder to see the difference from rotating the polariser on the E-M1's electronic viewfinder compared to the 40D's optical one.

Nonetheless the filter darkened the sky nicely from the washed out blue that appeared at that time of the day. (I got down there later than I should have for what I had in mind.) As for the 40-150 itself, one of the things that I wanted to test out was the depth of field that I could get. This shot was taken from maybe 20 metres away, and the seagull was sitting on one of the huge concrete blocks that make up the eastern side of the sea wall; so maybe 4 metres up. I opened up to f/4.5, and got pretty much exactly the effect that I was looking for; the sky is blurred out as I wanted it, and as you can see the sharpness range of the concrete is very limited and blurred as I wanted it to be in the foreground. Although the front of the bird looks a little overblown, that actually was the correct colour for Snowy's chest here. I don't think that many cameras would pick up feather details with the sun shining straight onto him (?) from that direction.

There were of course a bunch of other shots that I could have used (and may in another gallery at some point) but this is a Photo (singular) A Day gallery, and since this is the one that best represents what I was after today it’s the one that I nominated.

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