Chincoteague NWR > June 2021
info@GrayFoxImages.com
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Chincoteague NWR > June 2021 |
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Michael W Masters
info@GrayFoxImages.com |
| Grandma Kayaks | New Camera in Town | Nature Images | Oyster Bay HDRs | Bottom of Page | |||||||||||||||||||||
Grandma Does Kayaks!In recent years the younger half of our family contingent has taken up kayaking. At our bay front rental house, it's an easy pastime, with a dock just outside and Oyster Bay beckoning morning and afternoon. Even the youngest has forsaken the beach in order to be with Mom and Dad as they tour the Bay, Morris Island and Assateague's near shore. (He now wants his own kayak -- with paddle!) Ospreys on nests, tricolor and little blue herons, fiddler crabs, and plenty of shorebirds await. Well, this year bird lover Grandma decided she wanted in on the action. So, before dawn, under a cloudless orange sky, Grandma made her way down the ladder and, as she describes it, took her place with grace and dignity (!) in the front chair of daughter's two-seater. Off they went supposedly to investigate the site of a batch of fiddler crabs as their first stop. The view through a telephoto lens seemed to confirm the stop, if not the purpose. It wasn't until they returned that we learned that they had run aground! Closer inspection of the telephoto image revealed daughter out of the kayak, mired up to the axel in muck, dislodging the recalcitrant craft. But, despite the mishap, a good time was had by all, and the event provided plenty of laughs as daughter climbed up the ladder to the dock covered in mud and grime. And, oh by the way, Grandma did just fine. She made it into and out of her assigned seat unassisted and without creating a hole in the water. . . !
Bird Photography at the RefugeIn other news, bird photography was very spotty as it has been for several years. Egret Alley has long since fallen into disrepute, with downed trees, sandbars and various distractions cluttering up the pool in front of the culvert to Tom's Cove. And, the location has long since been taken over by fishermen. These late spring days there are only two productive morning locations -- and none in the afternoon. (We have yet to understand how refuge management has let the refuge slide into such a barren situation.) The first is a little notch out of Little Tom's Cove (itself a bigger notch out of Tom's Cove) that I long since began calling Tiny Tom's Cove. Morning sun is full on the cove, and birds gather there for their after breakfast grooming and a nap. But, the water is very shallow in this inlet, and when the tide is out the shoreline becomes a huge mudflat. Birds hang out at water's edge, meaning that an approach is inherently a grimy mess. Worse, when you get there the foreground is still an ugly expanse of mud. This is the birds' natural habitat, to be sure, and they don't seem to mind. But, it's not very photogenic. Unfortunately, this trip the tide was out -- WAY out. All week. Sigh! The second spot, not always occupied, is a pair of inlets across from Black Duck Pool, on the west side of the beach access road. These pools also receive full frontal sun in the morning. Unfortunately, there's a barb wire fence in front of the pools, put there to keep a herd of wild Assateague ponies isolated from other herds on the island -- and simultaneously to frustrate wildlife photographers. If fishing birds are far enough out the fence is no longer in line-of-sight -- but then the subjects are farther away and smaller as well. Nevertheless, there was enough activity to keep this photographer occupied. Refuge visits were supplemented with morning Oyster Bay HDRs, Canada Geese swimming in a canal alongside the access road into our subdivision, a visit to Chincoteague Museum and a bit of window display photography in Chincoteague's Main Street village center. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Grandma Kayaks | New Camera in Town | Nature Images | Oyster Bay HDRs | Bottom of Page | |||||||||||||||||||||
New Camera in TownOne thing that made bird photography different this time was the availability of Canon's new R5 mirrorless camera. On balance, and despite the sale of 1D-series cameras to finance the purchase, the R5 has proved to be the best tool yet for my uses. In the past, digital interchangable lens cameras in two flavors, a high frame rate, low megapixel body for sports and action and a low frame rate, high megapixel body for general purpose. The R5 represents the first unicorn camera -- high megapixels and high frame rate combined in one product -- 45 MP and 20 fps (with electronic shutter). This trip more or less coincided with one year of use, and it was the first extended bird/nature outing. One week of heavy use was enough to not only discover what the camera was capable of but also to refine and update various settings. The biggest boon to bird photography was the new eye detect autofocus feature. The word is often overused, but eye detect AF truly qualifies as game changing. And, forty-five megapixels enables very deep crops while still maintaining printably sharp images. Twenty frames per second enhances the chances of getting the wings of a flying bird in a pleasing configuration. The fact that almost the entire frame is available for autofocus is highly useful for composition. Another plus, albeit one not exercised on this outing, is the availability of focus peaking as an aid in using the tilt feature of Tilt-Shift lenses. Compared to previous iterative methods, this feature makes getting the tilt and focus right a much simpler process. Some iteration is still needed, but it is minimal and the focus peaking visual feedback greatly reduces the need to repeatedly magnify various parts of the image to insure sharp focus. The ability to customize buttons and dials is very good, especially when combined with custom shooting modes C1, C2 and C3 and up to five MyMenu tabs of six settings each. The week produced some changes to these customizations, discussed below. On the negative side, the buttons themselves are uniformly small and so little prominent that finding them is difficult in the best of circumstances. We worry about using the camera while wearing heavy winter gloves. Also, the placement of the multicontroller on the accessory battery grip is, to put it mildly, borderlinew unsatisfactory. RE batteries, they were fine despite concern with Canon's relatively low advertised CIPA rating. Lessons LearnedAll was not lollipops and rainbows, however. Consistent with the experiences of other MILC users, the camera sometimes struggled to achieve focus on low contrast scenes with the 600mm f4 paired with a 2X teleconverter. The 400DO f4 exhibited similar behavior. This has occasionally shown up with backyard passerines, usually when moving between subjects at significantly different distances. Perhaps this is related to the problem with all current mirrorless technology, wherein if a telephoto image is very far out of focus MILCs basically give up and do not even begin to attempt focus. DSLRs are much better in this regard. The electronic viewfinder is another mixed blessing. While the information available in the EVF is much more comprehensive and helpful than that in an OVF, nevertheless there are negatives. First, the viewfinder takes time to activate while the eye is detected and the display is turned on. Second, for action photography and subject tracking there is a small lag and a distinct slide show effect that is disconcerting at first. It is hoped that this problem will be greatly aleviated once Canon introduces a backside illuminated stacked sensor analagous to Sony's A9 and A1 cameras. Stacked sensors also minimize rolling shutter, although given our subjects during this trip we did not encounter any instances. There were, moreover, a few lessons learned. First, electronic shutter at 20fps, with no auditory feedback, can result in dozens of inadvertent identical images. While this setting may be ideal for dynamic action, it is an editing disaster for stills. Also, use of compressed RAW in conjunction with 12-bit electronic shutter images left me with a nagging doubt that images were equal to full 14-bit uncompressed files, contrary to the suggestions of some. The biggest problem observed, or at least perceived, was unexplained color shifts. This had nothing to do with raising shadows, the area where most reported testing seems to have concentrated. Further controlled testing is required. Finally, even with an in-viewfinder histogram, it is easy to overexpose whites in full sun, in part because picking up a small spike jammed up against the right histogram stop is not easy in bright light. Back to the FutureThe difficulty in dealing with mixed scenes including not only medium tone but also, at times, dark and white subjects, as well as varying backgrounds, led to some setting changes for bird photography. My anticipated approach was to use manual exposure with Auto-ISO and exposure compensation, a setting I usually use for general purpose photography as well. This is useful if the overall light is changing and the subjects are not too dissimilar in grayscale tone. However, a fishing session with a tricolor heron and a snowy egret in constant full sun revealed the flaw in that strategy. The setting included both water (with bright blue sky reflection as background ) as well as marsh grass backgrounds -- closer to 18% gray in tone. As the subject birds darted about, the background was constantly changing, impacting the metered exposure . Also, each bird required a different exposure setting, with the snow white snowy being particularly difficult to get right without completely saturating the whites. In the end, I reverted all the way back to a variation of the technique used with film during my first bird photography experience, in 1990. Then, I set the camera to full manual, with aperture set for desired depth of field and shutter speed adjusted for proper exposure given the film speed rating. Exposure compensation was accomplished by varying shutter speed. With digital, there is a great deal more flexibility. Both aperture and shutter speed can be controlled -- thus managing both depth of field and action stopping speed at the same time -- with ISO as a third variable to adjust for the desired exposure, either automatically or manually. In the constant light available, I made test exposures with each subject, and memorized the ISO settings appropriate for each of the two birds, adjusting accordingly on the fly. Problem solved. The upshot is that my seldom used normal exposure mode, aperture priority, disappeared. Various button and dial customizations have been modified accordingly. The revised shooting mode settings are:
Cropping and Print SizingOne footnote to the opening comment about printably sharp images. Even ignoring video requirements, the subject of how many megapixels is enough has been much debated, not surprising perhaps given the wide variety of users and uses, ranging from professional sports photographers and photojournalists to wedding and portrait photographers to landscape and wildlife photographers, especially bird photographers. Sports photographers and others are sometimes under tight time deadlines and, so it is claimed, do not have time to transmit massive high MP files. For them, it is said, 20MP is all they need or want. Not being employed in that manner, I have no opinion regarding the needs of those who are. But, there are photographers who want more. Landscapers and fine art photographers print large and can benefit from more megapixels. And, as a bird photographers I do find high MP sensors useful for enabling surprisingly deep crops that still exhibit good image quality and detail. In that regard, the 45MP R5 has been a revalation. Of course, where prints are concerned, or any output, for that matter, it's always a matter of how big the reproduction and how much the crop. Discussions of cropping sometimes refer to a presumed acceptable percentage crop of the original, e.g., 90%, 80%, etc. This never made sense to me, especially if the output goal is printing. One prints at a specified paper size and on a printer with a specified resolution -- 300 dpi is common. If one chooses, as I do, to rarely uprez a print file, then: Cropped image longest dimension = 300 dpi x longest paper size in inches. For example, my own personal display prints are usually reproduced on 10 x 6.67 inch stock -- following the frame proportions of a 35mm camera. Typically, several of these are printed and displayed as a wall grouping rather than printing a single image at very large size. The result is, for that paper, the crop dimensions should be no smaller than: 300 dpi * 10 inches x 300 dpi * 6.67 inches = 3000 pixels x 2000 pixels = 6 megapixels The R5 can deliver printable images with comparable crops from images taken with a 400mm or 600mm lens and 2X teleconverters -- although more MP downrezzed to that size will deliver a better quality image. That's good enough for the great majority of my personal uses. Email RE New Camera in Town: info@grayfoximages.com |
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