Tuesday, December 25, 2012

A decent day for Smallies...

Follow that lil' bird..

Been working the whole morning to clean the house.
This is the only opportunity we get to mow the lawn, get rid of weeds at our yard.
I also vacuumed the carpet and mopped the floor as the standard clean-up ops.
While checking my emails on my Google Nexus 7 tablet, I saw a sparrow hopping on the yard.
We cut the grass, so, there's lots of green waste lying around.
I observed the little sparrow as it hopped around and worked on getting a shot of it with my Canon EOS7D and the trusty EF400mm F5.6L.
Its been a while since I shot any birds around the neighbourhood.




Sparrows are common lawn birds that you see everyday. 
But, capturing them in their element is another thing.
I guess I'll have plenty of time to shoot and catalog them next year...

The Olive Backed Sunbird

I went on a walkabout with my camera.
It was rigged to shoot 'smallies' (as birders would refer them) up close.
While scouring the plants at my neighbour's house, I noticed a very familiar 'chirp'.
Its a very small bird, no more than 20cm in length.
The bird has a long and sharp beak and its olive-yellow coloured.
Its also a very loud bird as it tweets non-stop.
I managed to get one in frame and fired away.
My camera's pixel sensitivity was set on auto, so, to compensate motion-blurring, the shutter speed as set at 1/1000sec with an aperture of F8.0.
This is the setting I get by mounting a 1.4x teleconverter on the EF400mm F5.6L lens.
On a cropped sensor body like the EOS7D, the total magnification is 896mm.
The wide-open aperture is reduced by one stop to F8.0 and this means that in order to get a decently exposed frame, the ISO sensitivity was sacrificed.
Even when the shot is sharp, the details are 'grainy'.
Another down-side to this is that the camera is unable to record the full exif data. 
Since a teleconverter is added, focussing has to be done manually. 
Here, I am training to shoot bigger birds..




Decent results...

Well, I must say that I am pleased with the capture I made with the rig.
There is always room for improvement and with the weak ambient light, I made good with the shots that were taken mostly hand-held.

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