Friday, March 05, 2010

Anyone familiar with me, this blog or my photostream on flickr knows that I try to go at least once a week for a walk in nature. Usually I visit the Amsterdamse Waterleidingduinen and usually I carry my camera.

I’m skilled enough to get decent fallow deer shots almost weekly and the occasional good bird shot. I’ve been doing that slightly over a year now and I was so overconfident that I thought I was pretty good at it.

Now this Wednesday I visited the Island of “Tiengemeten”. It’s a small island about 30km south of Rotterdam that is being returned to nature. Lovely oasis of piece and quiet that is so rare in this country. A dyke has been breached to create a wetland area and the island is populated by several hunderd very noisy Barnacle Geese.

But, let’s start with this shot, the common shellduck

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Looks good this small, best of about half a dozen. Click trough to the big version and you see there’s a few problems with it.

Next shot:

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Click on that and it will be sharper. Too far away but sharper.

Let’s look at settings. The first;

Exposure: 0.001 sec (1/800)
Aperture: f/8.0
Focal Length: 300 mm
Focal Length: 302.0 mm
ISO Speed: 400

And the second pic:

Exposure: 0.001 sec (1/1250)
Aperture: f/8.0
Focal Length: 260 mm
Focal Length: 261.4 mm
ISO Speed: 400

Substantial difference in shutter speed.

Number three:

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Exposure: 0.001 sec (1/2000)
Aperture: f/8.0
Focal Length: 260 mm
Focal Length: 261.4 mm
ISO Speed: 400

I got a few more but all in all perhaps 2 dozen keepers out of more than 200 pics. Not a good result. So I started looking for help.

http://www.birdphotographers.net/forums/showthread.php?t=58615
http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1039&message=34700638

Now it turns out my errors had a few causes.

1. Pretty lousy fieldcraft on my side. I’ve been spoiled by a landscape with loads of cover and animals and birds used to humans. On this island I encountered about a dozen other walkers the whole day. In my weekend walks I meet that many in 20 minutes.

2. Poor understanding of my camera. “automagic AF" just doesn’t hack it. I found this: http://johnfriend.blogspot.com/2009/10/nikon-d300-auto-focus-for-sports-i.html which explains a sports shooter’s setup for his D300. Most of that will be useable here.

3. No knowledge of my surroundings. Every encounter was a surprise, most flight paths were unexpected.

4. No knowledge of my models. I met at least 4 new species.

So, I now know more or less where it went wrong. I used my D300’s AF system ineffectively. I was overly optimistic on my shutter speeds and I was unrealistic in my expectations. A 370 euro zoom is no substitute for a 3000 euro zoom and a casual shot when walking is no substitute for spending 4 hours in a hide. Next step, go to a place with loads of seagulls and practice.

One final shot:

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