April 2008

A tripod to avoid - and a lesson learnt

This month I planned a trip to the Gargano in Italy to photograph orchids - particularly the Ophrys species. The Gargano is an area in the Southeast of Italy and has a justified reputaion for being excellent for orchids in April.

When photographing orchids I usually use my excellent but heavy Benbo mkI tripod, which can be seen below working at ground level. However, I have often used a Benbo/Uniloc Trekker when travelling abroad to save weight in the suitcase and when hiking around. As I knew my old Trekker would not be man enough to support my Canon 1DmkIII and a 180mm macro, I took my 40D and 100mm macro lens to reduce the load and carrying weight.

.

My trusty old original Trekker had broken a leg some time ago when I pushed down too hard on it (me being lazy by not slackening the bent bolt lever enough) I decided to replace it with the latest mk III at the eleventh hour - well the day before I was due to leave to be precise.

When I found my first orchids to photograph, I got out the Trekker mkIII and was immediately horrified to see the new tiny ball head that was supplied as standard. In the picture from the Patterson brochure, you can clearly see the tripod and supplied head being used with a digital SLR - but I found that the head was totally incapable of supporting the camera without sagging. Still, no matter, I had brought along my trusty Markins ball head and a 3/8" adapter and fitted that instead.

Next problem - the new tripod now has an adjustable plastic head mount which allows the camera to be rotated through 90 degrees - and to wobble like a jellyfish !

The "Bent bolt" lever caused the next problem - it simply wouldn't tighten enough to stop the legs splaying under the camera's weight. After numerous frustrating attempts to tighten it as the legs continued to splay all over the place, it seized completely ! Just for the record, the leg adjustment screws are far too tight, and required a very firm hand to tighten the legs adequately. I was therefore forced to abandon this tripod after thirty minutes of frustration and use my camera bag as a support for the rest of my 14 day trip !

On my return to the UK, I have returned the tripod to the supplier where I bought it requesting my money back as the item is not fit for purpose - for the reasons stipulated above. I will let you know what happens as events unfold.

So - in summary, my advice is :

1) Don't touch this tripod with a bargepole until the manufacturers do something about the hugely reduced quality of the Trekker mk III.

2) NEVER GO ABROAD WITH UNTESTED EQUIPMENT !!!

Despite my equipment problems, the Gargano certainly delivered - and I saw 43 species of orchid, plus some interesting hybrids and albinos. Ten of the species were new for me. I will be adding pictures to the galleries as I sort them out.

Roof top - Monte St Angelo

Ophrys Garganica

March 2008

New Tutorial - Photoshop CS3 update

I have prepared a new tutorial for those of you who have upgraded to Photoshop CS3 and are grappling with the new RAW converter. I take you through my RAW workflow and how to use the increased number of sliders properly. As the RAW converter is identical to that in Adobe Lightroom, the RAW conversion bit is is also relevant to Lightroom fans
To access the Tutorial click here:- Photoshop CS3 RAW workflow tutorial.

The big picture

I normally sell prints at A3 or A4 size as these are the largest sizes that I can handle in-house. If I was to sell images printed on canvas or to wallpaper, I would have to source this resource externally and would unfortunately have to pass on this charge to customers. As an alternative, I am able to provide a single-use licence for customers to use a high-res image (supplied on disc) for printing themselves. Mrs Clark did just that, and she very kindly allowed me to publish this picture of a bedroom that she has decorated to great effect with a Skomer puffin image to brighten up a plain wall. She now has a totally unique feature and is apparently delighted with it - the image quality is apparently great.

The cost of this service is a measly 50 quid - so please contact me if you would like to do something similar.

Mrs Clark used a company called "The better wallpaper company" and they are to be found here: betterwallpaper.

Many other companies will print to canvas if required.

A new camera - at last !

For those of you who regularly read these pages, you may remember that I ordered a Canon 1D mk III when the model was first announced back in March last year - so it is a year old already - how time flies. You may also remember I quickly cancelled my order when the news of severe AI servo performance problems were discovered with this model.
Canon have recently identified the issue as a submirror problem and the camera is supposedly now fixed. However, just as you thought it was safe to go back in the water, there are rumours on websites such as Rob Galbraith's , that suggest that Canon has now recently discovered the "root cause" of the problem and there may be another fix to come. Also some sports photographers have reported more AF problems when the scene is predominantly blue and when the light is particularly flat ! Hopefully this time, a future firmware update is going to sufficient to provide the solution.

I have been using the 40D in preference to my 1D mk II for some time now as the camera is so much nicer to use, it has an extra couple of megapixels to crop from, has a 1.6x crop factor which is great for bird photography - which is what I tend to do most in winter, but most importantly, the image quality is a bit better.
However, I did miss not having more autofocus points - the 40D's nine is just not enough to be able to always put a point over the subject's eye. As good as the AF is on the 40D it does still not track subjects as well as a 1 series camera, and I miss not being able to use extenders on some lenses as the 40D will only focus to f5.6 vs f8 for the 1 series models.

I really miss using a 1 series professional body, and have been um-ming and ah-ing as to whether to get a 1DIII as many users now seem to feel the AF now works well. Some great Finnish bird photographers such as Markus Veresvuo and Jari Peltomaki are now getting great results from their "fixed" cameras.

When Jacobs offered the camera for £2299 recently I couldn't resist. I was prepared to pay £3050 at launch, so I have saved myself £751 - like getting my 40D for free. I ordered the camera after 1:00pm on a Wednesday and I had it in my hands on Friday morning - great service Jacobs! Enough waffle - is it any good ?

Test 1 - Can it focus on a static subject ?
I set up CD case in the studio and used one-shot mode with the 100mm macro. result - perfect. I repeated the test using AI servo and then Liveview/plus manual focus at 10x - No difference was observed between them at all when viewed at 100% on the screen. Phew - a great start - I haven't bought a complete dog !

I played around with the camera that night in the living room, and the AF in low light was obviously locking on much better than my 1DII - in fact it was quite astonishing.

Test 2 - Big test - how is the AF in AI servo in bright light?
Next day, I got my trusty assistant to run towards the camera Rob Galbraith style. The weather was very bright (conditions found to cause problems) and I used the 500 f4 wide open. I had 1/2000 sec shutterspeed and shot a burst of 65 large jpegs before the buffer filled - wow! When viewed on the screen at 100% I got a hit rate of 73%. The remainder were soft, but not badly OOF.

This was using centre focus point only and default custom function III settings.
Despite not getting 100% in focus, I had so many usable images that I didn't feel that I needed to worry too much about the odd soft one. I admit that I have not done this test with my 1D II but I'm sure it wouldn't have been as good as this. I would have preferred 100% but that is probably expecting a bit too much ! Never-the less, it is strange that once the focus has locked so well, it still loses it again on the next frame and then seems to re-gain it again for the next frame. I should add that this is all happening at a shooting rate of 10 frames per second - pretty phenomenal.

Next day I calibrated all my lenses to the camera with the lens micro adjustment feature. Interestingly, my very sharpest lenses (the 500 f4 for example) needed no adjustment, but some of what I considered less sharp lenses - like the 100-400 f5.6 needed around +6 adjustment. I will be interested to see how good these now look in real world use.

Test 3 - Image quality in the field
Use in the field. I shot some shots of green woodpeckers and a blackbird in good light. I used one shot but mainly AI servo - which worked superbly as the birds moved around. I need to try some action next, but so far so good. The images straight out of the camera (after raw conversion using CS3) were the best that I have seen on my monitor. Fabulously detailed, very low noise (far less than my 40D) barely needed a whiff of sharpening, very nice accurate and saturated colours. Here is an example:

1. Blackbird - 500mm 54 1/600 sec at f5.6 ISO 400



100% crop:

So all-in all, I'm very pleased, and I feel that so far the camera is as good as I had dared hope. All the features that I now take for granted on my 40D are present - such as the big screen (now much sharper than my 40D's thanks to the updated firmware - maybe not as good as the latest Nikons, but in another league to the 1DII ) the much better menu and button system, liveview etc. The camera is much lighter in weight than I was expecting too.

Niggles ? My main niggle is that I think that I prefer the old (1DII) way of selecting AF points manually - and why have the number of manually-selectable points been reduced from 45 to 19 ? Seems like a backward step. Having said that - I always had a point that I could put over the bird's eye today, unlike the 40D which has a miserable 9 points - that cameras biggest weakness.
The full 45 points only become available in auto selection of AF point mode (ring of fire) but the mysterious hidden 26 "assist" points are also available when expansion of AF points around the manually-selected point is selected in custom functions.

So far I think the 1DIII is awesome, I still need to try it on birds in flight, but the runner tests look promising. Unlike Andy Rouse, I certainly have no intention of jumping ship to Nikon just yet!

The story continues

I have been reading upon everybody's recommended custom function III settings for the camera to try to optimise the AF for action in AI servo- particularly birds in flight (BIF). Trouble is, everyone seems to have a different recommendation, and most of the web articles refer to a time before the submirror fix and latest firmware (1.3.1) came out. Nothing for it but to try myself.

I took the camera to Arundel Wildfowl Trust to gain some experience with the camera, and also shot at anything that moved in the sky - jackdaws, wild ducks attracted to the decoy of all the other birds, and this pigeon.....

Shooting BIF is not an exact science - I find it incredibly difficult, and it is hard to gauge what the camera is doing on various settings, as my own performance is usually the limiting factor. The pigeon came past like a bullet, and I just sniped at it and got lucky. The camera locked on fine on this occasion - but I can't say that it always does by any means - even if I get it right myself .

I should add that I only used the 100-400 f5.6 IS zoom at Arundel. It is not a bad lens, but the 500mm f4 is so much better, that I am spoiled. Nevertheless, since I carried out the micro-adjustments on the 100-400, it is performing much better than I usually expect. Also the AF is a bit sluggish on it usually, but the extra horsepower in the 1DIII seems to drive it much better than previous cameras. The 400mm f5.6 is a much better lens for BIF as the autofocus is very quick on it. It lacks image-stabilisation (IS), but as shutter speeds in excess of 1/1000 sec are required, IS is not really necessary. The zoom is really useful to frame BIF as they fly towards you, I wish that Canon would update the 100-400 to compete with Nikon's 200-400VR - an exceptional lens by all accounts that Canon has no answer to.

Hopefully I will be able to post some custom function III recommendations as I become more familiar with the beast !

So, in summary, although it is early days, I can honestly say that I think that Canon have indeed "fixed " the camera and it appears at last to be the phenomenal tool that it originally promised to be. If there are more firmware upgrades to come to improve the AF further - I will say yes please - thanks very much, but for the time being, I'm sure that this camera (mine at least) autofocuses better than any other Canon camera to date. - What a pleasure to be able to type that !

If you would like to see some other early examples from the 1DIII - take a look at the following two galleries:

Green woodpecker (A few shots were taken with the EOS 10D in 2004 - you won't have much trouble working out which !)

Mandarin ducks taken at Arundel - note the lovely saturated colours. All taken with the micro-adjusted 100-400 f5.6 IS handheld.

February 2008

Golden Eagles in Finland

Typical monochromatic scene in Finland - actually taken in colour !

Those of you who follow these pages may remember that I went to Finland at this time of year in 2007 in the hope of photographing golden eagles in the snow. You may also recall that despite spending three long days in a hide, I had no success. Well I am pleased to report that this year, I returned and fortunately had much better luck.

The first day I was in the hide 2 hours before dawn and had to wait until 1 pm until the first eagle appeared on the bait - a road kill hare buried beneath the snow. The eagles seem to smell or sense the lump in the snow and are immediately attracted to it. All I can say is wow - what a fantastic bird ! It is such a privilege to see such a large, impressive and totally wild bird at such close quarters.

The eagles are very wary, and I was advised to not move my lens and wait 5-10 minutes before starting to take pictures to enable them to start feeding and settle. This was agonizing for me, but I held on until the bird looked relaxed - and got my first shots in the bag - hooray.

Next day was better still. Three different eagles visited over the course of the day, and each stayed at least 15 minutes. One eagle flew into a nearby dead tree, had a preen and then flew briefly back to the hare, enabling some flight shots to be attempted in the poor light conditions.

.

Talking of light conditions, the entire trip this year was dogged with grey, overcast skies. You may be forgiven for thinking that this is normal for Finland in winter - but this is not usually the case. At this time of year, in the Vaala region where I was located, it is normal to have -20c and plenty of bright blue skies. Having said that, both my recent winter trips have been very mild (-2c) had similar gloomy conditions. (Global warming ?) Most days this year had thick cloud and a drizzle of snow much of the time. This makes for some moody and interesting shots, but is tough for getting a high enough shutter speed for flight shots or fast moving small birds - such as crested tits.

Fishing for owls

Great-grey owls (GGO's) are a Finland speciality, but are largely nocturnal and keep in the depths of the forest. However, in harsh conditions they are forced to hunt voles in open fields in daylight and can apparently be very approachable for photographers.

My guide, Eero Kemila, had heard of a sighting of GGO "tracks" at a site about 3.5 hours drive away, and asked if I wanted to have a crack.As this was right at the top of my species wish list, I eagerly accepted despite the low probability of actually being successful. We were accompanied by Juha who was going to try the "fishing technique" for owls for us.

The technique is to find your owl or a site where you think there is one, and then using a dummy vole, cast out using a fishing rod and then walk across the open fields in the hope that the owl will see the vole (as they can from astonishing distances and come swooping in). Once you have got the interest of an owl, you can substitute the mock vole for real ones that you just happen to have with you in the boot of your car !

Thanks to Eero, we did find some "tracks" - these are actually the marks left by the owl as it dives into the snow after the vole. In the shot below you can clearly see the outline of the owl's body, wings and feet ! The head is coming towards the camera.

Owl print in snow

Despite a lot of fishing and a lot of driving around in the off-road vehicle, we did not see a GGO. Instead we had to make do with seeing some of Eero's phenomenal shots which he has accumulated over the years. Oh well, maybe next year !

Many thanks to Eero and Rhya for the fantastic guiding and hospitality !

Left to right - Eero, Rhya, Grant (my photography buddy) and Juha. (Apologies for any names spelt wrongly !)

Please click here for more pictures of the golden eagles.

January 2008

A happy and prosperous new year to you all !!

Jan 24th

I have been trying to get a shot of a kestrel that often perches on posts on the track to my local nature reserve. It is quite obliging when shooting from the car, but always seems to get on something unsightly - or in this case out of site ! ....

However, perseverance always pays off, and as I noticed that there was going to be a nice sunset this evening , I jumped into the car and zoomed over to the track. After a bit of searching - there it was on a post, and for once, I had an unobstructed view, with gloriously warm evening light on the bird. I only got a brief few seconds before it flew off hunting, but I was very pleased to have got this nice image of a common but nevertheless stunning bird.....

For a larger version of this image, please see my image(s) of the month page

January 22nd

It was a surprisingly bright day in January, and my photography pal - Andy Vidler kindly acted as chauffeur for the day. We started by practicing our BIF shots (bird in flight) on some mediterranean and herring gulls. Andy was very pleased with the auto focus on his Nikon D300, but I was struggling a bit with the Canon 40D. I changed to the 1D mk II and my hit rate went up quite a bit. Funny really, as the 40D actually beat the 1DII in some recent AI servo auto focus tests that I did on a moving car being driven towards me.

Five purple sandpipers had returned to the same rocks that they were on last year at Hythe in Kent. The birds are amazingly accommodating, and will allow a very close approach if you just take it easy at first until they get to accept you. The Canon 40D produced some stunning shots of the sandpipers - surpassing the IDII image quality I think. I do wish that Canon would not be so stingy with the number of auto focus points on the 40D - nine is just not enough, I struggle to get an AF point to be just where I always want it - over the eye of the bird. This is not an issue with the 45 points on the 1DII and the 51 points on the Nikon D300.

Gear talk

Here are some very interesting links for you equipment junkies........

Rob Galbraith has finally finished his 8500 word article on the Canon 1D mk III auto focus test .It makes a fascinating read, and concludes that the 1Dmk III with the sub mirror fix and latest firmware update v1.1.3 is much improved in his AI servo auto focus tests over the original bodies that he has tested. The good news is that the camera produces very high-quality files, noise performance is excellent, and the AI servo works much better in low-light than it's predecessor the EOS 1D mk II N. The bad news, is that it does not perform as well as the 1DmkII N in bright sunlit conditions. So - great camera - but don't take it on holiday with you ! I should add that there are many respected photographers who now feel (or have always felt) that their particular camera performs superbly well- despite all the furore. Most strange.
Here is another balanced in-depth review of the camera and it's auto focus performance by a pro sports photographer - Laurence Ripsher.

Here is a link to a thread- in a Fred Miranda forum where a contributor observed another issue in Rob Galbriath's 1DIII test photos " virtually every time the MkIII has an out-of-focus image, it almost always exhibits some sort of secondary 'ghost' image, suggestive of some sort of movement (which at 1/8000th, I'd think is unlikely on RG's part.) Read more here: Fred Miranda

It is most disappointing that Canon do not seem to be able to improve this camera in all respects to everyone's satisfaction over it's predecessor. I really expected to be a 1DIII owner myself, but I am still too cautious to invest in one. Perhaps Canon will gradually improve the AF performance through firmware improvements, but it is possible that there is an inherent design fault with the mk III that can't be sorted in it's current guise. Maybe there will be a 1DmkIIIN or mkIV model soon which re-establishes the Canon 1D series as the AF king - who knows. As it stands, the 1Dmk III has acquired a tarnished reputation, and I would be concerned about resale values.

In the meantime, Nikon appear to have raised their game, and the D3 and D300 models appear to be very good cameras. The noise performance on Nikon has always lagged behind Canon, but the Nikon D3 (full frame) now appears to have bettered Canon 5D (full frame) in this respect. Here is the ISO comparison by Ken Rockwell. It is nice that Nikon are back in the game - the extra competition can only be good for us consumers.

Ken Rockwell also did comparative tests of the new 12Mp Nikon D300 against the Canon 5D 12Mp. The Canon is now an old design and will probably soon be superceded, but it is still holds up very well.in terms of image quality and low noise.Like the Nikon D3, it has 12 Mpixels on a full frame sensor, so the pixels are large and spread-out which helps give the low noise and high image quality (IQ). The D300 appears to better the 5D in noise performance above 800 iso - but the sharpness of the image suffers. Nikon are apparently using on-chip noise reduction even with RAW images (naughty) and this is why it appears to win over the 5D at first. Ken Rockwell called this "cheating " in his article !

I am still very pleased with my Canon 40D and I think it appears to hold up well against the Nikon D300 at a much lower street price. It has 2 less Megapixels (not a lot), a lower resolution rear viewing screen, (nice, but won't help you take better pictures) but does have similar IQ and noise performance (if you apply a little noise reduction on-computer rather than in-camera). It remains to be seen whether the auto focus of the D300 is superior. On paper it should be - it has colour recognition as well as contrast - which sounds awesome, and the 51 AF points trounce the 40D's 9 points (It's weakest feature I feel).

Finally, Canon have launched their 21 megapixel full frame 1Ds mkIII flagship camera. Here is an interesting test of the camera by Juza nature photography. The 21megapixels is great for making very large prints or for cropping very hard, but as nearly double the number of pixels have been crammed onto the same sized sensor as a 5D, the pixels are smaller and closer together, so noise performance and IQ should not be as good as the 5D - despite the huge resolution advantage of course. The 1DsIII is apparently about the same in terms of noise as the 5D - so that is a big achievement.

Make up your own mind as to whether you think that it is worth investing all the extra money (£5899 1DsIII vs £1299 5D from Park cameras at time of writing) after you see Juza's examples. For the wildlife photographer who uses telephoto lenses a lot, I personally still prefer a crop-sensor camera.

Here is another very interesting article by Alan Stankevitz who very clearly demonstrates the crop camera advantages over the full frame cameras. I strongly recommend you read it - you could save yourself a lot of money. He puts up a very convincing argument for buying a 40D instead of a 1Dmk III . If I only did studio work, close-up and landscape, I would go full frame for sure, but as 80% of my work is telephoto - I like the 40D's 1.6x crop.

A new computer.

"Upgrading" the 1DII camera to a 40D with 10.1 Mp 14bit image files, has caused me several problems. Firstly, the more megapixels you have, the more space it uses on your computer hard disk.So you soon run out of space, and need to upgrade your storage and backup.

Secondly, I found that processing raw images from my 40D took twice as long as my 8.2 Mp 1Dmk II images - despite being only 2 extra megapixels. Perhaps it's the 14 bits that take the extra time - I don't know, but it is a pain waiting 50 seconds each for images to process !

Finally, as Adobe Photoshop CS2 does not support the new cameras (such as the 40D) an investment into CS3 or lightroom is necessitated too.

I was therefore forced to upgrade my trusty old Pentium 4/ 2.8Mhz/1Gb DDR ram computer for a new hyperspeed Draconis computer from Cube Computers. This has an awesome spec for less than £1000 and I would recommend one to anybody:

My only reservations about it are that it comes with Vista loaded as standard - which has compatibility problems and is memory-hungry with minimal benefit over XP. I therefore plumped for the XP Professional "upgrade" - which transpired to be the 64 bit version. Apparently this is necessary to achieve maximum warp drive, but transpired to have all the same compatibility problems as Vista. So out went my Agfa scanner (no driver updates available) also my wireless card ( finding a 64 bit card was not easy - and the one I got was faulty, and it's replacement suffered a bad connection problem - aargh!!!). The final compatibility problem was the fact that the Windows XP transfer wizard, which should transfer all files and settings across effortlessly for you, does not appear to work and this had to be done manually. What a pain.

However, hopefully that is all behind me now, and I now have a much improved computer and subsequently much quicker image workflow - for the time being !