Your Daily Bridge. August 13, 2012
Posted by littlebangtheory in Art and Nature.Tags: an extender for my tool, Bridge of Flowers, Canon 2X III Tele-Extender, Canon f5.6L 400mm lens, dahlias, Gizmo, gladioli, peek-a-boo, shameless tag trolling ;), Shelburne Falls MA, tele-extenders
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I just can’t stay off of that damned thing!
But this particular visit to the Bridge of Flowers in nearby Shelburne Falls was a furthering of my investigations of the combination of my 400mm Gizmo and a Canon 2X tele-extender.
The combo is cumbersome, shaky and slow – the auto-focus on my 5D Mark II doesn’t work in this configuration, and the 2X closes the maximum aperture by two stops, leaving me with a max ap of f/11, which makes hand holding difficult for this shaky old relic. I addressed that problem with a monopod collapsed short and canted against my thigh in a kneeling position. It made for wet knees on a dewey morning…
Hey, one does what one must to get that shot! 😉
So, the results:
People can be photographed from enough of a distance to not be self-conscious – here gardener Carol works to keep things beautiful:
Thanks, Carol! 😉
The tele-extender doubles the magnification of my 400mm Gizmo without increasing the minimum focusing distance. Glads from just over twelve feet:
Crisp focus is difficult with 800mm hand-held, and nearly impossible for these hands with a twirling subject:
…but she was too darling to not include in this post. God bless the children! 🙂
I did better with stationary subjects like dahlias:
The effect is nearly macro-like, with a peek-a-boo look which brings a viewer into the scene, or so it seems to me…
…and the depth of focus includes the entirety of a blossom while utterly excluding the background:
This is exactly what I was hoping for from this visit: find the strengths, isolate the weaknesses and develop strategies to contend with them.
I’m pleased.
Giving You The Bird. April 8, 2012
Posted by littlebangtheory in Art and Nature.Tags: bald eagles, Canon f5.6L 400mm lens, deerfield river, eagles, Gizmo
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Our National symbol, that is.
Here in Western Massachusetts we have a resurgent population of eagles, which were extremely rare in my youth. Conservation and re-introduction efforts since the ban on DDT have been one of the great success stories of the modern environmental movement, and I’m thrilled every time I witness the results.
Along my local stretch of the Deerfield river we have frequent eagle sightings; they’re nesting near-by, though I’m not sure where.
Yesterday I got home in the evening and unloaded my camera gear and groceries, then saw the laundry basket in the back seat and remembered that I had a load drying at the laundromat in the next town down river. I hopped back in the car and went for it, and along the way spotted three eagles roosting in a tree across the river – damn! I always have my camera with me, but… not tonight. Bummer!
I carried on and retrieved my laundry, then headed home, and don’tcha know, there they still were, three eagles in one tree. And me without my camera.
So I got home, ditched the laundry, grabbed my camera and headed back down river.
I know: my chances of success at this point were slim. But if I didn’t try, my chance of success was zero.
So I went, and some little while later as I pulled around the bend into view, I saw…
…two eagles.
Oh well. Mother Nature isn’t obliged to mark time while I get my act together.
So here are a few shots Gizmo snagged over the next twenty minutes. I resolved as soon as I turned the key off to stay ’till somebody took wing, and many cramps later I got my wish:
Yeah, I shoulda been closer, but there was the small matter of a river between us. And I shoulda had an 800mm lens, but that’s several more thousands of dollars I don’t have either.
So I got what I got, and I hope you like it.