DOF Calculator App.

Well I might be a bit slow, and you might all be aware of these apps but I found one (many available actually) for my Android phone today.  I expect those of you with iPhone can find one too via whatever mechanism Apple force you down.

The one I found is pretty good, with specific cameras and lenses being selectable.  

You select the camera, then the lens, then the aperture and your subject distance in either metres, feet, inches or cm so useful for macro work too.

Hot the calculate button and it spits out the Near and far limits of focus, giving you the depth of field in the gap.

So for my 5Dmk2, 180 macro at say f11 and 20cm, the available DOF is just 1mm.  Moving the aperture to f22, it doubles to a massive 2mm.    Moving the subject distance to 30cm, it doubles again to 4mm.  So as you can see, when working with things like butterflies, it is not surprising it is not always possible to get things sharp from front to back.

Moving to the 7D and 500 at minimum focus distance, and at f11, the available DOF is only 28mm, so if you are taking images of birds you can see why shooting wide open is not always sensible.

Another feature I like is that you have the option of the longer lenses with converters on as well so you can select 420mm (300 + 1.4TC) or 700 for the 500 +1.4.

Whereas moving to say a landscape, with the 5D and 24mm at f11, with say the horizon at 3km, the near focus limit comes down to 1.72m, so no need for infinity and you can select a much closer distance known as the hyperfocal distance.

Now - my big caveat to working anything photographically with numbers on a technical basis is check and check again with your own experiences, and don't hang your hopes on three decimal places.  Techno nerd geekery is all fine and dandy - but check it out for yourself.  It couldn't be easier with digital.

But as a quick and easily available aid, it does help to remove some guesswork.

It would be good to hear from you if you have any favourite and useful phone apps that you use.  I have previously blogged about sunrise/sunset times and angles, as well as weather and tides.

Exciting day tomorrow for me - might take some images so will share if I do.

Martin

What a strange morning

What is THE strangest animal to come into your garden, Fox? badger?raccoon? Well what about a snapping turtle, Yesterday i dropped my wife off at work and decided to set up in the garden for some hummingbirds, I stood in position for about 30 minutes then i caught something move in the corner of my eye, There was a snapping turtle trying to get through the wire fence between the farm next door and my garden, I popped over the fence and tried to pull it back but this was one fiesty turtle, It reared up hissing and snapping at me, Even a small one will give a nasty bite. A big one will take a finger off, Tip to toe this one was close to 3 feet and it was surprisingly fast, I decided to leave it as it was now away from the fence however 10 minutes later and back stuck in the fence, I pushed it back with a large stick and lifted the fence, I thought that the heavy rains the night before had made it move and was heading for the pond/drainage ditch behind my house , It went into the ditch but carried on, It was heading towards the road so i called animal control and then went to the road to stop it going across, I called my neighbour to get the small dog cage in my house and after a while we managed to get it in and then animal control came and took it away, they said it would be released into a river a mile or 2 away, It was a strange encounter but i did mange to get some reasonable images of it using the D3s and 24-70 at 24mm, I have seen lots of snapping turtles here before in lakes but never out of water-what next?

Dave

A few from the Saturdays mothing

Well my home made moth trap is certainly paying off well now with another good haul from Saturday night.  The weather was again good with a hot still night with a little cloud cover giving good conditions.  With over 21 species including six new 'firsts' for the garden and over 200 specimens in all, I had a busy time first thing in Sunday going through the catch.

A couple of my 'firsts' flew away before I could get an image but these are all new. As usual all taken with the 5Dmk2, Canon 180f 3.5L macro, on the tripod, with Live View, 5X magnification, live histogram and DOF preview used.

 Common Emerald

 Dot Moth

 Miller

Yellow Tail

Meanwhile, the flowers in the wildlife garden have been excellent this year and I will bring you a few pleasant images from that on my next blog.

Martin

4th July

Well its happy Holidays from the USA, We had some firnds and neighbours around for some drinks over the last 2 nights and bought some sparklers to add to the fun, I set my D3s with 24-70 up on my Gitzo tripod and had a play, It was a bit hit and miss, I set the camera in manual to 10 secs and used both front and rear curtain flash to see what effect it had, So either a quick pop of flash and then write your name etc with the sparkler or write you name and pose for the flash, It certainly excited the neighbours as they had no idea what the out come would be like

Just a quicky from me as we are out house hunting

Dave

Nearly got bitten - but I survived the ordeal

One of the problems that I soon discovered after changing jobs twelve month ago was the proximity of so many shopping temptations outside the front door of my office.  When I am in the office I am right in the centre of Birmingham, next to all the shops of the Bullring..  Now while it can be very handy when there are things that you have to get, there are many traps for the faint of heart and weak of brain.

It was during one of these moments that I found myself reading, rather ironically, Dave's blog of Thursday just gone on a Mac Pro at the Apple Store in the Bullring.  A coincidence given the content that Dave was talking about.  The Apple rep was very impressed with Dave's spec which again added to the irony. 

But why was I there in the first place?  When it comes to Apple specs and particularly their prices on any of their products, I have never fallen for it.......so far.

My phone contract is coming to the end and I am looking at renewal options and one such consideration is whether to get a tablet as well.  My thought process was if I got a decent phone that has the capability of acting as a 3G router in its own right, I could get a wireless only tablet to save on getting tied in to two 3G contracts.

And I could stay with using an Android phone for the next contract period as I wasn't too inclined to get an iPhone for all my previous reasons.  However, with my own mobile 3G router capability I started looking at the iPad2.  What? I hear you cry, after the things  I have said before.?  Well yes.  I went to the Apple store and had a look and a play.  I went back the next day (Thursday) and had a long chat to the rep.  I was getting more and more convinced.  All of these things it could do that I NEED.  I went through the justification that it would help my work, even though they are not contributing anything, I could do all these wonderful sexy things with my fingers on this great tab.  I could add a keyboard, I could upload from my camera, even though I could do very little in the way of RAW processing to any decent degree, I could write this blog from it.  I was getting convinced and thought one would be finding its way into the Dyer household very soon.  Just how was going to explain to everyone though?

Then I got home and started to do some more research.  Read a few reviews and comparisons with Netbooks and started think about capabilities and capacities.  My head was starting to get back control of my heart....thank goodness.

How would it be any good for weekends away, for photographic use, for image storage, for processing, for blogging and my browsing requirements.  Well the last two would have been fine but nothing any better than I currently can do with my thirty months old Samsung Netbook NC10 - long superseded and improved.

But could it store decent amounts of images and process them for blogging or other purposes?  Well no quite frankly.

So how does my old Netbook fare by comparison.  Well I can do everything that Breezebrowser cn do, including RAW conversion, I can colour profile my screen, I could use Canon DPP if I wanted to, I have all of the Open Office suite on it.  I can store over 100GB of images on a shoot if I needed to. I have three USB2.0 ports, that I use my Western Digital 250gb pocket drive on and I can plug into a big monitor if I want.  All for less than £300 then and the replacements are now even better as you would expect in all senses.  Better processors, better hard drive, better screen, and better battery life.  Now up to at least 10 hours, although the seven hours use I get is fine.

So it is thicker and heavier than an iPad2, but you get a proper keyboard which makes typing this article, very easy and quick, which I am doing laying on the sofa, and I can add a mouse if I wish.

So at £599 for a wireless only 64GB iPad2, whose spec and capacity just doesnt get even close to this old Netbook, I am pleased to have just saved myself over £600, taking into account the extras you would need, for something that just looks nice.  

One of the myths that the Apple man tried to convnce me of was the old one about Apples not getting viruses. Well having run Kaspersky permanenetly on this netbook and my desktop, neither do I.

So it was a close escape, the iPad nearly bit me, it is enigmatic, beguiling, its charms suck you and makes you think you must have it and I can understand why people fall for its charms.  But at twice the price of a good current Netbook , it doesn't cut it for me.  Maybe I dont want to be controlled by the locked down Apple environment, maybe I dont like the prices, maybe I am not a follower of fashion.  Maybe I have just let my head rule my heart.

But I have to say it was a close run thing and I have escaped its clutches.

Now when is that Samsung Galaxy Tab10.1 being launched in the UK?  :-)

Hope you had a great weekend.

PS if you have a killer use that an iPad2 can do but a Netbook can't, that I just can't do without let me know please ;-)

Martin

Its holiday weekend here in the States as everybody celebrates the 4th July, The weather in NC is excellent with the weekend in the high 90's
Photographically the big news this week is the buying out of Pentax and Hasselblad, I think both offer excellent medium format cameras and i hope that will continue, I have wanted a MF camera for many years and have never got one, The Pentax 645D looks a great camera and excellent value for money at around $10k, My agency got swallowed up by the Getty corp last month and i have been going through all the paper work this week, It seems to be that time when the big boys with the money can take advantage of the economy and get some bargains-just like the housing market, We have had ours on the market for a couple of weeks and luckily have had some good interest-yesterday we had an offer which we refused but there are still a couple of interested party's so who knows how the next few months will pan out, Fingers crossed that by the end of the year we will have a new home with a few acres of land that i can make my own photographic reserve-its what dreams are made of
This week i got through the results of my wildlife photographer of the year submission, I knew that i had not made the finals as that time had past but out of 20 images all went through the first round and 12 made the semi finals, Not as good as i had hoped and not as good as last year where 17 went through to the semis and one made the final round-must try harder
Here are the 12 that made the semis

Obviously various categories, I guess it does show that you do not need to go to the ends of the earth to get good images, The caterpillar (hornworm) was taken in my garden and the cormorant was taken in the UK on a pond next to a pub, I will be interested to see the winners in the comp, I am sure there will be some controversy as usual

Dave

My Canon 300f2.8L lens

I bought this lens nearly four years ago, at what was a lot cheaper than you can get it for now, thankfully.  Notwithstanding that, it still cost me a lot of money, but remains one of my least used lens.

300 is a bit of a funny length for a lot of wildlife imagery.

My 180 macro and the 500 are the primary workhorse and the 5Dmk11 is always fitted with that ready to go, and the 7D has the 500 on it.

But the 300f2.8 stays in the cupboard and see little use or love.  The 300f4L probably gets more use as when used in conjunction with the 1.6 crop 7D, the 1.4 EFTC, it makes for a great little walkabout combo for when you are covering a lot of ground and need to lighten the weight.

But back to the enigma that is the 300f2.8 L.  It is bitingly sharp, all aspects of the IQ are excellent.  AF is lightning fast, but for a lot of what I do it can be too short, unless you have very obliging subjects.

Such as this freshly fledged Blackbird on the top of our neighbours fence in the late evening light.  These juveniles don't know that they have to be scared of us yet so are quite happy to let us get close.  This image is full frame in the depth, with just a little off the right hand side, and taken on the full frame 5Dmk2.

 

With a straight conversion in C1 and just a tiny amount of sharpening, the 300F2.8L performance never fails to impress me.

So should I keep it or sell it?  That remains the eternal question with this fine lens.  Maybe I just shoot the wrong subjects.

Apols for the late post - other pressing urgent matters have been going on this evening.  All will become clear soon and I will share the reason why in forthcoming posts.

Martin

Martin

Dead Dragons and frogs

When did you ever see a dead dragonfly-i dont ever recall seeing one then yesterday i stopped at a coffee shop and there was one covered in ants-its was a real biggy as well, Today i opened my back door and there was another on the patio, Perfect condition but dead as a door nail, A few ants had moved in and i picked it up and blew them off and took it indoors, I set up in the kitchen with thick white background paper and 2 flashguns, I used the D7000 on a tripod with the Sigma 150mm macro lens and 3 extension tubes to give maximum magnification, It was dark where i set up so using the live view was not an option however after a couple of test shots and focus tweeking i got an image i was quite pleased with, I could have liked to have focus stacked some images but i do not have that software so F16 was the order of the day

Last night we had a very big storm with lots of rain, The frogs were very vocal and i said to my wife that they seemed to be enjoying themselves, Well i didn't realize just how much until i checked the pond today to find it full of fresh frog spawn, We have hundreds of tadpoles already that have been in there a couple of months, A couple are very big and back legs are starting to grow, Time to try and get some images

Dave