Trip Report-New Jersey-Bird Gallery

Bear with me there are only 2 galleries after this one before its back to normal, Its taken a couple of days to finally get my PC working properly again after various infections but now fingers crossed we are back up and running, So here are the last of the sea birds, Most are Full Frame with a couple cropped, All taken with the usual Nikon gear, Some of the sandpipers are shot using fill flash from the SB90 and better beamer combo

Black bellied Plover-winter plummage

Common Loon with crab

Gull feeding on barnacles

 

Red Throated Diver-winter plummage

Turnstone

Turnstones and Sandpipers in flight

Purple Sandpiper

Dunlin?

Dave

Better Beamer warning

Just as the better beamer concentrates and magnifies light out from the flash so it does the same when used facing the sun, This i found slightly to my cost the other day after a hot afternoon waiting for kingfishers with the sun in my face, I remember as a kid using a magnifying glass to burn the end of my shoe laces-well i now have the same effect on the front of my SB900 flashgun and you can see its burnt in a line as the sun moves, Luckily for me its only melted a fine line into the flash and hasn't burnt through it, So a word of warning-try to keep your flash out of direct front on sunlight until you are using it i.e turn the camera slightly away and never leave the beamer on in your house by the window-you have been warned

Dave

Its good to talk

Moving to a new area is difficult enough but a new country is a whole new ball game and finding good areas for wildlife can take some time especially local areas, This has been a bit of a dilemma for me the past year, North Carolina is very different to the places i have lived before, The wildlife around the coast is very good and accessible as is the mountains but they are not on my doorstep, Luckily for me i had a mail a couple of weeks ago from a local Photographer Called Juan a Pons, Now i have seen Juan posting on Naturescapes forum and knew he was local to me but i hadn't made contact , Juan offered to meet and do a shoot together on a large local lake that i had visited many times over the last year, The difference at this time of year is that the water level is very low due to 3 months of very hot weather, This means certain parts are not accessible to boats and jet skis and the wildlife and bird life in particular congregate in these quiet areas, We met early Saturday and had a chat in the car whilst we waited for a shower to pass over then made our way around to the birds, The ground was very boggy and 200 feet before we got to the birds we hit the deck and crawled on our stomachs getting very muddy in the process but it was worth it, There were plenty of birds around although not that close to us and we waited until some flew in and fed, Plenty of heron and Egrets but we were after waders and ended the morning with some very nice Killdeer and Semipalmated Plover, It was quite a slow morning photography wise but quality rather than quantity was the order of the day and i was very pleased with my results, We both had skimmers with wimberley gimbal heads with flash attachments/flashguns and better beamers, As soon as the light improved i swapped my D3 for the D300 for the 'extra reach' along with the 600F4 and 1.4x, Where we were positioned is normally lake but now was very lush vibrant coloured grass making for a nice background, So a big thank you to Juan and hope it wont be long before we shoot together again, You can see Juans work as his website here






Dave

Techniques - On board Flash for wildlife

Following on from a thread over at Canon Fodder forums , I thought I would put down a few musings of the whys and wherefores of using flash when shooting wildlife.

Firstly, you need to understand why you want to use it and then secondly will it suit the subject matter, and then finally and in my book most importantly will it cause your subject any distress.

Remember welfare of the subject comes first.

But lets assume you have ticked all those boxes to your satisfaction or at least the second two, but why?

Well there are some times that the ambient light is too strong or nor sufficient.

Too strong? - We have all seen wedding photographers using flash in bright sunlight to put some light into harsh shadows. Same with wildlife. It can work.

But we may have situations with very flat light or insufficient light and we might want to just pop a little bit of fill light in just to balance the image.

Now this Moorhen isn't a particularly brilliant image, but it was shot with the 500 + 1.4, so 700mm @ f 5.6, 1/125 sec and ISO1600, and M Mode. Flash was set to M mode with the flash extender. Now the EOS flash system does a pretty good job of flash metering, and am sure the Nikon system is at least as good.

So this is a ambient balanced exposure. What the flash has done has put a decent amount of detail and colour into the bird in really dark conditions.

You will see one flaw that you need to be aware with this type of shot. There is a very slight shadow cast behind the bird as a result of the flash being raised above the centre line of the lens. It is slight but there so one thing to remember when using it for this type of image.

It works a little better with the Great Spotted Woodpecker, as the shadow cast has nothing to land on. But again very careful observation will show some unnatural catch lighting in the eye with reflection from the back of the retina. It is not too bad, but don't try with Owls - with their massive eyes you really will have a very ghostly apparition.

It has worked pretty well with the Robin below, particularly where you have a bright highlight sky behind. With careful dialling in of the power settings you can let the flash manage the exposure on the subject, and meter to underexpose for the background in the camera settings. So in this case, I underexposed the background by about 1 stop and set the flash exposure to give a zero compensation. Both camera and flash in M mode again.

Again, you can see the eye reflection has it's problems, but the exposure is reasonably well balanced and certainly enables the colours to show well on a dreadful light day.

All shots were taken at ISO1600, and I have not used any noise reduction either in camera or post processing. However, if I wanted to print these I would run some NR on the backgrounds.

I used the Canon 580 EX flashhead with the Kirk Extender, which is essentially the same as shown on the opening picture of Dave's set up with the Better Beamer. They are recommended for lenses above 300mm and are said to be worth about 2 to 3 stops worth of additional distance. They basically comprise of couple of bits of plastic, designed for your particluar flashhead, with a stick on Fresnel lens on the front to concentrate the throw of the light. On the Canon, it is recommended to manually set the zoom setting on the head to 50mm, which is I guess the optimised distance for the light to lens gap.

But we will make that the subject of another blogpost at a later date.

Now my technical skills with the flash can always be improved so if there any pearls of wisdom that I have missed then please let us know.

Martin