Back to Sandy

Posted on by

I’ve been down to Sandy, or more specifically the RSPB HQ, about 6 or 8 times in the last year or so and probably had my most successful shooting this morning. I decided to my modify my usual mode of operation [walk and hope for the best] by camping out in the hide for a couple of hours, basically because I had a hangover and didn’t fancy a 3 mile hike largely unspoilt by photography. I’m reasonably pleased with the results although a decent shot of a woodpecker still eludes me. The one in collection of shots here decided to put in an appearance when the light faded particularly badly. Shooting handheld at 400mm isn’t terribly forgiving: anything at less than 1/200 second is guaranteed to be a write-off.

I’ve modified my set-up for the wildlife: centre autofocus, plus a reverting to jpeg: I’m never really going to push the pixels around that much with a wildlife shot, so there’s no point in shooting RAW.

Every time I come back from a session like today, I think I should flick over to shutter priority [I always shoot in aperture priority when I’m not doing something manual because of the flash] and set the ISO to auto but I’ve never experimented with it to see how smart it is at choosing the lowest possible setting for a given exposure…

New Equipment…

Posted on by

I’ve been a bit idle on the website front for the last couple of months, partly because I have a new job that is taking up some more of my time. In the intervening period I’ve had a splurge on equipment, starting with a new body – the 7D – at the start of February. It’s a fabulous piece of kit, and a noticeably bigger step up than my last upgrade between the 400D and 40D. The autofocus is much more sophisticated and, based on my limited experience with a D300, firmly in Nikon territory in terms of quality. The 8 frames a second has proven pretty useful for sport and wildlife.

I was over at the HQ of the RSPB today with a mate, and managed to get a couple of passable shots of a woodpecker, something I’ve been hankering after for months. If you have ever tried to take a picture of one you will know they are incredibly nervous, and very very tough to get a passable shot of. A great opportunity [in a hide] today was marred slightly by not-great light: as this was taken at 1/100 second at 400mm, it’s surprising this shot isn’t softer than it turned out:

Great Spotted Woodpecker

1/100 sec, ISO 100, 400mm at F5.6

The other new piece of kit was a surprise birthday present from my wife: the new 100mm F2.8 L Macro. I borrowed a macro lens for a couple of months at the end of last summer and really enjoyed it. The image stabilisation, in combination with the flimsiest efforts to steady the camera, make handheld results at minimum focal distance pretty reliable.
It’s a wonderful lens and, barring a lottery win bringing exotica like a tilt-shift into play, the last lens I’ll buy.
1/100 sec, ISO 100, 100mm at F8

1/100 sec, ISO 100, 100mm at F8

1/100 sec, ISO 100, 100mm at F8

1/100 sec, ISO 100, 100mm at F8

These were shot on full manual. The reflection from the flash is a little harsh, so the output on the second shot is reduced by 2/3.