I do have to say that the effect pops up a lot more often than people think and in a MUCH wider variety of situations than people believe it can.
I\'ve even had AF go batty even on a natural turf field when shooting sports when nothing was visibly odd to the naked eye.
gdanmitchell wrote:
+1
The condition most certainly occurs in conditions that are not hot. I ran into it earlier this year when making long lens photographs of the Golden Gate Bridge very early on a cold and hazy morning.
The suggestion to use a higher camera position could well help in some instances, especially if the \"heat wave\" effect is coming right off of the ground. However, here too, the effect is more prevalent than many realize. Going back to the Golden Gate Bridge photograph, I was many hundreds of feet up above the bridge in the Marin Headlands, and the bridge itself is far above the water line... yet I had quite a bit of fine distortion caused by this effect. More recently I was making some photographs of the Pacific from high on coastal bluffs and was surprised to find some very distinct signs of the effect.
I\'m convinced that among the reasons people will report that some long lens \"isn\'t sharp\" is that they haven\'t yet come to understand all of the tricky aspects of using such lenses.
Dan
kwalsh wrote:
As mentioned already \"heat\" shimmer isn\'t really a good description as you get the effect on both hot and cold says. All you need is a difference between the ground temperature and air temperature for things to go wavy on you. Happens on sunny winter days all the time.
The only two things I\'ve found to help the situation are:
- Get higher, the less of the air column close to the ground you shoot through the better. If you can find a higher vantage point to shoot from do that.
- Shoot when the air and ground temperatures match. There are a lot of variables to this, though often at some point in the morning the air and ground temperatures will be close to each other. Cloudy days often easier to deal with as there is no solar load on the ground to heat things up.
Ken
Jan 03, 2012 at 02:42 PM
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