Show us some birds...39

Time to setup episode 39 of "Show us some birds..."

Previous part 38 can be seen here.

Nice hand MiPr.   

Chaffinch

A100 Tamron 90mm Macro

Carl

Edited by we82bl8 - 01 November 2010 at 13:57

Nice one MiPr.

A stuffed toucan in a natural Histroy Museum is still a bird:


Dynax7d, Tamron 28-200mm at 135mm, f/5.6, 1/90s, ISO200

G'day All,

My first image upload.

Rufous Fantail series, shots taken Sunday afternoon. They are just cropped and converted, no processing. Sony A900 400/F4.5: 1/15 f32 - 1/30 f22

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Regards,
Craig

G'day Nebbor,

This series were taken on my families farm. We try and encourage birdlife here so that we can take such photo's. We have quite a few friends here in our area who are keen bird photographers and this is the type of photography that is aimed for.

This nest site itself is about 1 meter above water, but level with the top of the bank, and low enough to place the tripod as low as it will go. We used 2 Metz 45 flashes extended out a bit on poles one on either side of the nest about a meter or so from the nest. These old flashes are full manual flashes and altering the amount of light according to ambient light as well, due to it having full afternoon sun. Having the flashes set either side of the nest will light up the nest, bird and background so the background does not go black.

In the afternoon session in about 1.5 hours, I took about 100 shots plus test shots when the parent birds were not feeding the chick to try and constantly estimate exposure as natural light was lowering. We could have done with a third flash to light the background better, but it was not possible due to the nest location above water that is about 2 mters deep.

Camera in full manual mode, lead to flash trigger, Sony A900 400mm F4.5 G lens Lens review. The shutter speed used ranged between 1/60 - 1/15 depending on how bright the subject was with natural light and aperture from F32 - F20. General focus is about half through the nest D.o.F, this basically makes the birds eye sharp and gives a best overall feel to the image.

My father also does photography of birds and he uses a leica 560mm lens (he has been taking these types of photo's for about 35 - 40 years) so I needed to place the tripod a bit closer to try and fill the frame. Tripod is about 2 - 3 meters from nest depending on focal length and angled to get best perspective.

In the background in some of the other shots is some tree bark that is white and this was quite distracting, but could have been cropped ok, but moved the tripod a bit to remove that from view.

Using the older Metz flashes, being full manual they give full power on first shot which tends to overexpose the subject a bit, 2nd & 3rd shots are normal and 4th shot is underexposed, so need to try and keep with in the first 3 shots and wait a couple of seconds for the flashes to be ready and hope that the bird is still there to fire off a couple more.

These birds are not camera shy or people shy and we did not require to use a hide at this site. The birds were quite happy to allow us to photograph them and the chick without them being disturbed at all by the equipment or flashes of light.

However, they were not happy when other birds came into their territory or near their nest and they quickly saw them off. Maybe they didn't want to share the limelight.

Sorry for the long winded explaination.

Regards,
Craig

Here is a portrait of a Black Eared Kite shot with the A700 and the Tamron 200-500.