Amber
Good studio session yesterday with Guildford Photographic Society. Myself and another colleague hired two models and had two complete studio setups. We had 11 members who came along and had a great day getting to grips with the whole studio scene. I managed to sneak a few shots in especially as I had never worked with Amber before. the ladies a true professional.
Short Eared Owl in flight
Today I ventured again over to Papercourt Meadows to try and capture a short eared owl in flight. Having arrived at 2:30pm it was completely dead until around 4:45 and then we got the first show. The place has become so well know with birders and photographers there must have been 30 or more standing around.
It is incredibly frustrating as it seems that no matter where you stand the owl’s seem to be in another part of the meadow however on this occasion two of them decided to fly in my direction. At that point I was somewhat taken back and struggled to actually get the bird within the view finder. This was made all the more difficult as I was using a 500mm fixed focal lens with a 1.4 extender on a Canon 1D mk 1V so the focal length was 910mm making the field of view really small.
I did manage to capture this one that is reasonable and I like the way the setting sun was shining on the owl’s face.
Had a superb studio session today with a great family.
All in all the kids were very obliging and the whole thing was wrapped up in 45 mins. Now that’s a result!
As always it pays to have backups of everything as when I went into the studio prior to the family arriving I found that one of my flash heads decided to expire.
Slight panic as that particular head had my big soft-box’s which meant that I wasn’t able to use a soft box. In the end I swapped out to another head and used a shoot through brolly.
I used my 1D Mk 1V with a 24-105L F4 Canon lens. Set the main light at f8 with the background lights at F11
I have recently discovered an area close to where I live where there appears to be approximately 6 short eared owls living.
From local birding contacts they appeared to have arrived some time in early November.
Yesterday afternoon I decided to head out and see if I could get any shots. Unfortunately the lighting was not great and although I saw a number of the owls they were quite a long distance away.
I think these two images are the best of the bunch.
Eagle Owl in Flight
I am not sure if you are like me but I become very attached to the images I take and have a real problem in deleting the images that are really no good. This year my New Year’s resolution is to religiously delete the ones that don’t make it. The problem is sometimes you look back at what you thought was rubbish and then you find one that somehow was a “keeper”. An example of this was recently I was desperately searching for an image to put into a club competition when I came across this image from about 2 years ago on a shoot I did on a Canon Pro day at the Barn Owl Centre in Gloucestershire. Strangely enough it got me a top score of 10. Now I am not so sure about my New Years resolution
As normal the weather over Christmas has not been very good which has been disappointing as I had 10 days off and wanted to get out with my camera and take some shots.
I decided yesterday to head over to the wetlands and wildlife centre at Barnes even though the light was awful and the skies were very grey.
I took my 500mm telephoto and thought I would at least practice trying to get some birds in flight. I was quite pleased with the result of this Herring Gull that I managed to bag. I had to dodge and burn a bit but think the result justifies the effort. Hope you think so too?
I decided to get up early today to take advantage of a beautiful misty morning with a great sunrise. Even though I had to drag myself out of bed it was a truly memorable sunrise.
The stags were in fine form with lots of roaring however as most people will have seen with the recent publicity the stags were in a somewhat aggressive mood however unlike last week I didn’t see any photographers “get it”
The one problem in Bushy park is the difficulty of getting a clean background and the sheer amount of photographers there. Today was unreal I reckon there was between 50 and 100!!
By luck I came accross a heron who was fishing. I saw him catch one fish but was too slow on the trigger but managed to grab it on his second time. Problem was that the light was very low as the sun hadn’t risen at this point so not quite as sharp as I would have liked!
I had been thinking about buying an iPad for some time however I did not think that I could justify the expense, however after a lot of deliberation I decided that if I could use it in my wedding photography then I would buy one. So whilst in New York recently I was lured into the Apple store on 5th Avenue.
On arriving home I then discovered that I also needed a camera kit to enable me to download the images from my camera card. So off I went again to the Apple store in Coventry Garden. Imagine my shock when the assistant informed me that the camera kit only supported SD cards and NOT compact flash cards which are what my camera’s use.
Now I had a IPad that I couldn’t use for the purpose that I wanted it.
So I googled and found an independent company in Hong Kong that sold a compact flash card interface for the iPad 2, (http://store.micgadget.com/card-readers/280-ipad-2-cf-card-camera-connection-kit.html) for the princely sum of $29.90!
Once I received the gadget I plugged it in shoved in a CF card and was surprised to see it just work! Don’t you just love Apple.
Ok so now I had images on the iPad but how would I edit them?
I searched around knowing that there was nothing like Photoshop or Lightroom but came across a program called Photogene. I decided that I could afford the sum of £2.49 but also thought that at that price it wouldn’t be any good. How wrong can you be!!! I was really surprised by what you can do with the software. It has curves adjustment, great sharpening and a whole host of adjustments and presets that make image editing fun and simple.
Anyway the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Here is an image that I took recently in the garden of a honey bee collecting nectar. I imported it and edited and sharpened it exclusively in Photgene. So what do you think?
For the photo nerds out there I took this on my Canon 1D mk 1V with a 24-105 F4L zoom lens and a 15mm extension tube. I had the camera set to high speed shooting and auto focus.
Sunday saw the trial run of the London/Surrey road race. My wife and I decided to take the dogs for a walk to to see the riders come through. The course runs about a mile from where we live.
Having never seen this type of thing before it was a really amazing sight, Over a hundred riders sped past at high speed along with an unbelievable amount of back up cars, police and ambulances.
To take the shots I crouched down low right at the kerbside. As the pack came through I was nearly blown over by the amount of wind that the pack created.
Now looking forward to July next year when its for real.
Just returned from a fabulous three days photographing sea birds on Skomer Island with a friend Dennis Read.
Atlantic Puffin in the evening light
At this time of the year the Island is full of Puffins and Manx Shearwaters that have returned to the island to breed.
No one actually knows where the shearwaters go after they have left the Island and to some extent the same is true with the puffins.
The Puffins and Shearwaters either use Rabbit burrows or dig their own where they lay their eggs and hatch their young. During July the adult puffins are out fishing for sand eels which they bring back to their chicks.
The chick is called a Puffling and unlike the parents they don’t have the brightly coloured bill and has soft downy plumage. They regularly come out of the burrow where they flap their wings in preparation for when they fledge.
Puffling outside it's burrow.
Incoming Puffin
As they approach the island Lessar Black Backed Gulls swoop at the incoming puffins to try and make them panic and drop the sand eels. The gulls are also joined by Jackdaws as well as herring gulls which means for the puffin they have to dive and swoop around to outwit the gulls etc.
Approaching the island they will circle a number of time in “dummy runs” until they think they have a clear landing as near to their burrow as possible. At the last minute they will swoop down before performing a “stall” and then diving into the burrow.
Normally the puffins are friendly with each other but sometimes they pick a fight with one of their neighbors. It appears to be fairly aggressive but they don’t seem to harm each other.
Puffins in full battle
There is no doubt about it but if you like seabirds then Skomer Island is the place to go.