There's a Mouse in the Garage!

So we noticed that a container for bird feeder peanuts on a shelf in our garage always had husks around it, then we noticed on closer inspection what looked like Niger seed on the shelf too.  I thought my wife topped up the Niger feeder, she thought I had.  When we spoke about it, turns out neither of us had topped up the Niger seed and on closer inspection it turns out they were mouse droppings.

Ok, time for a trap, not the springy shut type but a laser trap.  After setting peanuts in the same spot on the shelf for several nights (which were all gone by morning) it was time to set the trap and get a look at my nocturnal visitor.

I rigged my Phototrigger to shine a laser beam over the peanuts, and prefocussed my Canon 7D with a Canon 100mm f2.8 macro lens onto the same place.  I also had a studio flash (operated by radio control) pointing at the same spot (with a snoot and honeycomb, lighting the scene from behind the camera).

Click the image to enlarge

Then it was just a matter of waiting and hoping.  As things cooled down the beam would wander and the 7D would start to rattle off pictures, so I had to frequently check and reset things, hoping this wouldn't put off the little fella from making an appearance.

But then, he (I've no idea if its a he or not) put in appearance, apparently the lure of the peanuts was too strong and he ignored all the new stuff that had appeared, and the blinding flashes of light!

Click the image to enlarge

I think he's kinda cute.

Peter.

PS: No animals were hurt during this photoshoot!

For info the PhotoTrigger website is here http://www.phototrigger.co.uk/

Jumping Dog [Explored]

As a dog owner and photographer, I'm never without a willing (for a reward) subject to take pictures of.  George my 2 year old Sprocker Spaniel has given great service right from when he was a pup (one of his puppy pics has been sold by Getty many times).  He's done Studio work, Outdoor work, been composited, off camera flashed and loads more besides.

His latest modelling session involved an idea I had to get him to jump straight up at the camera for a quirky shot.  It worked out quite well and I posted a couple of images onto Flickr.  For me these were work in progress, it was the first time I tried it, and as it was a dull day, high ISO was needed resulting in more noise than I wanted.

However, the citizens of Flickr did not agree and both images got "Explored" and one of the images picked up over a thousand hits in just one day, which is very good for me.

You can see that image here.

I thought I would put together a short video of how it was done, there's a couple of tricks I discovered along the way. Hope you enjoy it, George certainly did.

I would love to see other peoples attempts.

The New Canon 7D MkII

A good friend of mine has been fortunate enough to come into some money that he can direct to new photography equipment.  His current camera is a Canon 5D mkII and as he's primarily a wildlife photographer he also has a canon 300mm f2.8 lens with teleconverters.  Whats interesting (and difficult) is deciding on where to spend his cash.  He's leaned towards a 5D Mk III, and some longer glass and then veered towards a 1DX.  Naturally this dilemma has been well explored down the pub.

But it did set me thinking about what features are important to me (since that's what I'd base my purchase on) and what I'd like to see in the next Canon 7D revision as the 7D seems to be the best fit for me at the moment.

• I'm ok with the APS C sensor so I wouldn't want to see the 7D move to full frame.
  
• More Megapixels would be great, personally I'm not convinced by Canon's trend to smaller better pixels, give me around 30mb and I'd be happy.
  
• I would like to see lower noise levels at higher ISO, and higher total ISO..
  
• GPS built in would be great, now I've started using a separate GPS tagger, I've come to love the feature.
  
• A flip out screen, this would be a real boon for field macro work and other non straight shots, I love this feature on my G11 point and shoot.
  
• A couple more frames per second would be good, but the current model is not too shabby.

And that's about it really, of course one can ponder things like in camera images stabilisation, but that's unlikely.  Overall its not a big list, which goes to show what a good camera the 7D is, and how closely it meets my needs.

Fingers crossed for the 7D MkII.

What do you think? are there any features you'd like to see? Are 1DX pixels better?

The making of the Dangling Spider

Freshly spurred on by a recent afternoon spent taking pictures of Spiders with other members of our local camera club I wanted to try and take things up a notch.  I had in mind a macro picture of a Spider dangling from a single gossamer thread against an all black backdrop, looking like it had descended at night and was only lit by the moon.

Hmm, ok where to start! I managed to find a Spider that would do the job, one of those fat ones in the garden with a white cross on its back, they seem to make a web almost on demand and with a small stick you an carefully catch the web and lift it, and the Spider into the air.

But how to light it (remember its at night) , how to focus on it (its macro so shallow DOF) and how to freeze it so it is sharp when it will be moving, as may its appendages be.

I came up with a solution, and made a video showing how it was done, its only a couple of minutes long and I hope you like it (literally "like" it :-) ).

One of the resulting images

You can view more images here just search on "spider"

The Photo Trigger was supplied by High Speed Photography UK and the "spare pair of hands" are from Amazon, amazing value at less than £5 each, I use them loads.

Cheers Peter.

Reflecting on the trip - learning points

Our trip to Scotland was great fun, and while it seems churlish to moan about the weather (blue skies every day temperature just below 30C), as photographers it did cause us a few issues.  Whereas I had hoped for leaden skies, summits shrouded in mist and cloud, etc etc we had the odd puffy blue cloud instead.  Unfortunately, this meant that during the day we had very flat high contrast scenery with little detail, making for lacklustre shots.  Evenings produced some lovely vistas though.

The trip also provided an opportunity to observe how four very different photographers interpreted the same situations.  This was not just in technique and equipment chosen, but also in enthusiasm for a subject.  I have to confess to being uninspired enough a couple of times that I didn't bother getting out of the car to take a shot as in my opinion, all I would end up with would be an uninteresting image, rendered so by the very strong midday sun.  To note though, my pals that did make the effort made the best of a bad job and got some nice shots.

One of the highlights of the trip was the opportunity to get close up and personal with a nesting pair of wild Ospreys.  This session provided a lot of food for thought in regard of wildlife photography and equipment.

Iphone photo of Osprey nest top of tree left and
Osprey in tree on the right, the little dot towards the top,
not the dot further up thats a Crow.

The picture on the left was taken from my Iphone to "scene set" and also provide the GPS location for where we were.

So you can see things are pretty small (but not as small as at the nearby RSPB reserve which is really far away!

The birds are sitting in trees on a small island and luckily its easy to get down to the waters edge and set up a tripod and chair.

Cameras trained on the Ospreys

So that's exactly what we did as you can see in the following photo.  We were joined by a couple of other chaps.  Notice how two of us are sitting close, that's me and a buddy that is well into wildlife photography.

It gave us a good opportunity to do a little comparison of the kit we were using and the outcomes.

I was using a Canon 7D, a Sigma 120 - 400mm lens and a no brand 2x converter.  My buddy was using a Canon 5D mk 2, Canon 300mm f2.8l lens and a Canon 2x converter.

If we crudely priced these up then I would guess the 300mm lens alone would far outweigh the cost of my entire setup!  but hey lets not dwell on that!.

So we had the same subject, doing the same things, in the same light from the same spot, the only difference, was kit and photographer.  So how did we fare?  Well in terms of zoom I had the advantage, as I started with 400mm at the long end, with 2x converter giving me 800mm and then a sensor crop factor of 1.6 which meant a massive 1280mm! whereas my buddy had just 600mm.  I also I had the advantage of a far higher frame rate of up to 8 frames per second versus 3.9 of the 5D mkII. 

Of course its not all good, at full zoom, the Sigma 120 - 400 has an aperture of f5.6, add the converter and I lose two "stops" so it becomes f11.  That's pretty dark, and as we were photographing birds I wanted a high shutter speed so had no choice to up the ISO, with all the sensor noise that brings.  Needless to say, my pal didn't need as much ISO though he'd too dropped two stops to f5.6.

The other main difference in this setting is mega-pixels.  7D =18mp and 5D = 21.1mp, so he can throw away 3mp of data in a crop and he'll be at my total image size, if I crop in 3mp I'm down to 15mp and much further and the image could get ragged.

So anyway lets look at the images:

Canon 7D, Sigma 120- 400

This is mine, if you view it full size you'll see its really not sharp.

Exif data:1/1250 @f11 and ISO 400, 800mm











5D mk II, Canon 300 f2,8L

This is the 5D version, really nice and sharp.

Exif data: 1/1600 @ f8, ISO 400, 600mm











So there we have it.  The compromises that manufacturers have to make to bring components down to affordable levels do have an impact when situations become more extreme, like the high zoom levels here.  In more normal situations I'd expect the differences to be less stark.  We were blessed with very good light, if it had been overcast I would have really been in trouble.

Time to start saving!!!!

Ironic Heron

I live on the edge of a nature reserve (Paxton Pits), and one nice byproduct of this, aside from the ability to be in the reserve within two mins walking, is that some of the residents make it out and visit our feeders, or fly over  our house (Geese, swans, gulls, Buzzards, Red Kites etc).  The reserve had a good Heronry when we moved here 20 years ago, which to me seems to have been usurped by Cormorants in recent years.

Still, while walking my dog around the reserve there I found a couple of spots where there is a regularly a Heron hunting, unless of course I have my camera with me, which is pretty pointless with the dog as he scares everything within half a mile.  So I’ve been nipping out when I can, several times a week to try and get a pic of a Grey Heron, either hunting or more likely flying away.

So imagine my surprise when my wife  calls me into the garden saying she thinks a Heron has landed on our neighbours roof (yeah right).  Anyway, I pulled myself away from the football and wandered out with my Canon G11.  Amazingly there actually was a Grey Heron, sitting bold as brass on our neighbour’s roof! 

I took a couple of shots then ran in and dug out my 7D and Sigma 120 400mm lens and ran out again.  The bird decided at that point that it had to go, and flew off over my head and away.  I managed to get a few shots off with the 7D but it was all a bit rushed. 

Feeling really lucky to have seen and photographed it, but I bet it’s not hunting when I look for it tomorrow!

7D Pics here

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Mystery Solved,

Many thanks to Jeff Morgan of PhotoPlus magazine for spotting that my camera was in Exposure Simulation mode, which was why the screen was black and then went back to normal with the Flash raised.

I think it goes like this, I had an f-stop of 11 and a shutter speed of 100 (this was to stay well below the shutter sync speed, and give a reasonable depth of field), so naturally the image would be very dark, which wasnt a problem as I was using Flash.  However as I had Exposure Simulation on, the camera was showing me what my final image woiuld look like (without flash), i.e. black.

However Exposure Simulation  seems to be switched off when you raise the internal flash.  In fact if you look at the two images in my last Blog post on the topic, you can see that the "Exp SIM" (bottom right corner of the camera screen) is greyed out on the image with the flash up.  So the camera shows the scene without any attempt at simulating the exposure so its clearly visible.

Exposure simulation can be set on or off through the menu system, so no need to mess around with the internal flash at all.

Thanks Jeff.

Peter.


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Live View Macro tip

One of the great things for me about photography is the way you can experiment and get unexpected results.  I've recently been doing a bit more macro stuff see The Wasp here and have been playing around with extension tubes and extenders.

A boon to Macro shooting on my Canon 7D, is LiveView as it allows you to move the point of focus to exactly where you want it, and with some of the shallow DOF's Macro work has, this is essential and easier done in LiveView than peering through the viewfinder.

This is fine if you are working with continuous light (maybe LEDs), but using external Flash, the Liveview screen is black, even with the modelling lights on.  (see below).

However, I found accidentally that if you pop up the on camera flash whilst in LiveView, for some reason (not sure why, happy to hear from someone more knowledgeable why this works) the camera recalibrates and the subject is clearly visible.



















This means that you have access to the LiveView ability to zoom in tight and get focussed where you want to be, lock everything down, lower the flash, carefully put the external flash trigger into the hotshoe and start snapping.

Oh and if you'd like to see what I was snapping its Here.

Cheers, Peter.


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Taking remote Photography up a notch!!

Following on from my last post and taking the learning that failure delivers, I decided to change the setup around.  Firstly, I managed to get hold of a suitable log to act as a focal point for the feeding birds.  Using a router I made a "tray" in one end and then positioned it with the final shot in mind, so that the background would be as uncluttered as possible.



Upturned log with a "tray" routed into the top.

Of course just sticking the log out would not guarantee any feathered visitors so I filled the tray with live mealworms which did the trick in a matter of minutes!

The idea of the tray rather than just a pile of food was to keep the food below the surface of the log so it looked clean on the photos (that didn't really work as to get to the good stuff they flicked the other food onto top!) and to stop the mealworms from escaping.

My plan then involved placing the Laser at one side of the log, shining across the "tray" to a light sensor on the other side.  I then planned to focus the camera where the beam crossed the tray so if the beam was broken the camera would trigger and take the shot.

However, trying to mount the laser robustly so that its narrow beam bridged the gap and hit a 4mm target proved impossible.  I need to rethink that one, the sensors are tricky over a couple of inches so this gap was nigh on impossible.  So it was back to the microphone!

So technically the setup was the same as before but now I had a better target, better background and knew that I needed to frame the shot better so that I'd get more usable shots.  I put the camera into Shutter Priority at 1600 to ensure that it would freeze motion, set ISO to 800 so that the camera had enough "headroom" to adjust Aperture to give consistent light levels (to compensate for differing light levels as clouds go past the sun etc).  Then sat back and let it run.

This was my favourite shot, you can see the microphone under the birds tail and the scattered food on the top of the log.

I had good shots of a Robin and a Blackbird too.

In the final analysis, yes its an improvement, but theres still a lot more to be done.  The issues I have at the moment is that as sound is used to trigger, there are a lot of images with nothing going on.  Thats because the microphone picks up birdsong, dogs barking, aeroplanes etc etc and snaps away!   It would also be difficult to argue that the setup wasn't obtrusive and thats not good.

A friend wanted to try the setup at his birdbath but the sound of the water bubbling would constantly trigger the camera, and I didn't fancy getting water in the mic either so we need another solution. 

Watch This Space!!

A New Toy

This week saw the arrival of my latest gadget a device called a Phototrigger from http://www.phototrigger.com.  I’ve wanted one of these devices for a while now, ever since I tried water droplet pictures (see Union Jack pic below), which although was reasonably successful, always felt a bit hit and miss.

There are a few devices out there but I settled on this particular one as it had the features I wanted (guess what, I want more now!) and was at the price point where it enabled a dabble in the technology without the need for a second mortgage.

In summary, the unit can trigger the camera or a Flash or both, when a specific physical situation occurs.  This could be a sound or vibration, a change in light levels or something interrupting its laser beam (cool, it has a laser!).  It will also function as an intervalometer for time lapse work should you wish to try this (I have an idea for this one!).

As always with new kit there is a learning curve that you have to climb before you can start getting creative.  Therefore my first attempts have been to get to learn the way things work with simple subjects.  In the first instance, garden birds.  Since they flee very quickly when they spot a human (or the dog), if I can master the technology I should get a few nice shots.  

I decided to use the microphone as a trigger and you can see the setup in the picture below. 

Did it work ? well, sort of. 

Nothing whatsoever wrong with the equipment, it triggered fine when birds (or my dog) were in the right area.  The issues I had were all in the setup of the camera.  Have a look at the picture below, no laughing now!!

As you can see, it triggered fine, BUT the framing is way off.   When I set zoom and focus point (I set focus manually so lens didn’t have to waste time finding focus, I may need to adjust this strategy).  Obviously I underestimated the size of the birds that would feed.  Also, though you can’t see it here but the original was quite dark.  This is because I set the camera up on full manual as I wanted to dial in a constant fast shutter speed to freeze motion, I think shutter priority would have been better as the camera can change Aperture to maintain light levels.

Still, making progress up that learning curve, I can only improve!

Cheers, Peter.

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Flowers, not that easy

For a challenge I decided to try taking pictures of a flower sprayed with water.  I purchased a bunch of flowers, with some exotic types in it for us to work with and armed with a couple of LED lights, off we went. 

It soon became clear that to do them justice was not going to be as simple as I thought.  I deleted all of mine! the best one is here so you can imagine what the others were like!

I used a Canon 100mm f2.8 Macro lens, but somehow was not getting the results I wanted.

 

I'll have to read up on technique and have another go at it.

In other news I put my first "tip" video on to Youtube the other day. 

I'd been helping a friend with a shot of some flying Gannets he'd taken on the Farnes Islands.  It was a great shot but there was a gap in the shot where there were no birds and it looked odd.  We tried slecting birds and pasting them in but that didn't look right.  Somehow we found that you can use the Patch tool in Photoshop CS5, in reverse and in this case got perfectly blended birds to fill the empty space.  It was particularly pleasing as it took seconds and blended the different shades of sky perfectly.

You can see what I mean on the video here on a shot of Manx Shearwaters flying in Wales.

So if you have any tips on taking flower pictures, or comments on the video clip, please let me know.

Cheers, Peter.

Flickr stream

At Last Sharp Pictures!!

I've often felt that the pictures I've taken on my Canon 7D are not always as sharp as they could be.  Its been noticeable in a number of situations and I've put it down to operator error or wrong settings. 

Its been particlulary annoying when going out with others to do wildlife pictures.  Ok perhaps I can't expect to compete with a Canon 5DS Mk II and a 300mm f2.8 L lens, with my 7D and Sigma 120 - 400mm lens but I'm sure I should be able to get sharp(er) shots more of the time.  The Sigma lens is well regarded and I do get the odd sharp shot but not as often as I should.  In some images I can see that the Auto Focus (AF) point is spot on an animals eye for example but the eye is "soft".

One of the things that was bugging me was that certain shots with the subject close to the ground, showed sharp focus in the foreground going soft on the main subject.  After a bit of judicious Googling, I stumbled on a page from Northlight Images which exactly described my problem and how to fix it.

I'll not replicate here the work on the Northlight website, suffice to say that when I tested my camera/lens combination, the sharp point was indeed in front of the AF point.  Using the 7D's "Micro Adjustment" feature I was able to correct this in the "test" scenario.  I've had a quick go "in the field" and things did seem much much better though low light levels and high ISO's meant things were a little soft all the way through.

Hopefully I'll get out in good light in the next couple of days and see a great improvement.

Watch this space!