So, what can you do with it? Put it on a tripod, Crank up the ISO, learn how to manually focus with live view and take photos of birds that aren't moving too much.
Here's a few examples.
A Common kingfisher's breakfast. He's going to need around 60% of his body weight in tiny fish every day. At f11, It's very hard to blur away the background.
Canon EOS 7D and Canon EF 400mm f/5.6 L USM with 2.0x TC (EFL 1280 f/11), tripod mounted with mirror lock up and remote release. Exposure trio: 1/60s, f/11 and ISO 100.
A Great Cormorant perched on a tree stump in a lake. This photo was taken from one of several public hides around this bird sanctuary on the outskirts of Tokyo.
Canon EOS 7D and Canon EF 400mm f/5.6 L USM with 2.0x TC (EFL 1280 f/11), tripod mounted with mirror lock up and remote release. Exposure trio: 1/160s, f/11 and ISO 400.
A juvenile Little Grebe learning to fish for himself. In summer, the adults are rather more colourful with chestnut cheeks & foreneck and dark chocloate-brown crown, nape & upperparts. Manually focusing while he was swimming around was very challenging. I needed a bit of luck to get something close to sharp around the eyes.
Canon EOS 7D and Canon EF 400mm f/5.6 L USM with 2.0x TC (EFL 1280 f/11), tripod. Exposure trio: 1/200s, f/11 and ISO 200.
A Grey Heron perched in a tree overhanging a river. From where I was it was a long way away and rather hard to spot. A good subject for 1280mm of EFL. F/11 didn't do me any favours with the background. The whole tree is pretty much sharp. Environmental portrait perhaps?
Canon EOS 7D and Canon EF 400mm f/5.6 L USM with 2.0x TC (EFL 1280 f/11), tripod mounted with mirror lock up and remote release. Exposure trio: 1/640s, f/11 and ISO 400.
Hi Stephen,
ReplyDeleteThat photo of the juvenile Little Grebe is probably my favourite from this set, followed closely by the Great Cormorant.
The water droplets on the back of the Little Grebe are also very well focused and look terrific. It's a really nice shot.
How did you go about moving your camera around while it was on a tripod to follow the Little Grebe while it was moving?
Did you use a ball head and have it a little bit loose or did you mainly have to pan left and right following him along and lock in your vertical movement?
Also, I've never used a really long lens before but how hard is it to go from seeing the object you want to capture with your eyes, to then finding it through the view finder? Do you have any tips to make this easier?
I have this same problem when photographing small insects when they are crawling or flying around on plants when I'm using a 100mm lens with extension tubes. Far too often, I finally sight the insect through the view finder, only to find that it is lifting off as I took too long.
Terrific photos. I'm looking forward to seeing more of them.
Regards
Craig.
Hi Craig,
ReplyDeleteThanks for the questions. I personally thought that the photo of the Little Grebe had the worst quality of all these shots. Goes to show what can be achieved with a smaller final output.
As for moving the camera. I use a special technique that I've recently learned. It involves using a ball head and a lens with a rotating lens collar. I attach the lens firmly to the tripod and then loosen the ball and roll it over into it's drop notch and leave it loose there. Then I loosen the tripod collar just enough to allow it to rotate but not have the lens fall out. Now this tripod setup acts like a gimbal.
The ball head allows 360 degrees rotation and elevation. The loose lens collar allows for fine adjustment for a level horizon and I can switch to portrait format quite easily too. With the Canon EF 400mm f/5.6 L USM and a EOS 7D the balance is almost perfect, but when I add the 2.0x TC it becomes rather camera end heavy so that if I let go, gravity will make the lens point straight up. Even still it's very easy to hold and move into position. If you're still confused I'll write up a post about it with a few pictures to help explain it.
With regards to finding subjects in the view finder, I think it's mostly a learned skill. I still miss plenty of shots because I failed to find the subject in time. Here's a couple of things you can try to speed the learning.
Some people track the subject with their left eye and then bring the camera up to their right eye. The images kind of overlap and then they switch to using their right eye and the camera to continue tracking. However this doesn't work for me. I'm strongly a left eye dominant person. If I use my camera with my right eye, it's rather fatiguing but with my left, it's totally relaxing. However when I use my left eye, the shape of digital cameras means that I can't see anything with my right eye.
My usual technique is to track with my camera just under my line of sight and when the inertia of my camera is synchronised with the subject I bring it up to my eye. I usually pick up the bird but sometime, I loose it.
It also helps to pre focus the lens to the expected encounter distance using the focus scale on the lens. That way the lens does less focus hunting and hopefully locks on to the subject faster.
Another option is to use a zoom lens. Zoom out to pick up the subject and then zoom in for the shot.
Some of these techniques might also work for finding macro subjects. Give it a try and let me know how it goes.
steve