Zooming in on the small guys

Some creatures are harder for me to photograph than others. Specially the small and quick moving guys such as bumble bees pose a challenge for both me and my lens/camera's autofocus. Generally I tend to use my Canon 70-300 lens for this, nowadays in combination with a canon speedlite 430EX ii to make sure that there are some details still visible in the bumble bees' black hairs. Some people that read reviews about the 70-300 lens might now be quite surprised to hear that i've used this lens (succesfully!) for shooting bumble bees in flight. The lens's autofocus has been graded terrible, atrocious, etc in reviews on the internet. In my opinion the AF is slow,  but workable and accurate. Its AF speed is sufficient for me, specially once I got used to working with this lens. This doesn't mean the AF can't use an upgrade in the future but I don't expect Canon to do this: the image quality of this lens rivals the L series 70-200 f4 L (IS) USM lens. Therefore upgrading the AF of the 70-300 IS USM would make this lens perform on par with the more expensive L lens, leaving only (to me) minor reasons to pay twice as much money for  the L series counterpart: (i) internal focussing, (ii) non-rotating front element, (iii) build quality and weather sealing, (iv) constant aparture (f/4) throughout zoom range. To me personally that ain't worth it by a long shot, but everyone has to decide for himself. 

Ok, after this lengthy introduction about the lens let's get to the pictures! The first picture is taken without the speedlight strobe in bright sunlight conditions. You'd actually need quite some light to freeze the motion of the flying bumble bees as i'd prefer to take the pictures at 200-300mm focal length which gives me a minimum f/4.5-5.6 aparture. I sometimes prefer to use an even higher aparture to make sure that the flying bumble bee stays within focus considering the shallow depth of field. I spend quite a bit of time to take a picture of a bumble bee flying towards a flower. One of the tricks that made it easier was to track the bumble bee with the camera and then predict what flower it would go to, focus on the flower, and take the shot as it came close enough. 

[Canon EOS 450D, Canon 70-300 f/4-5.6 IS USM, 200mm zoom, f/4.5, ISO 800, 1/2000 sec]

The following two pictures of bumble bees were again taken with the 70-300 lens but this time at a fixed 1/200 sync speed with my Canon speedlight strobe. Although i was pretty happy with the picture above (without strobe) I found that the blacks of the bumble bee tend to fill, so i tried to overcome this using the external strobe.

[Canon EOS 450D, Canon 70-300 f/4-5.6 IS USM, Canon speedlight 430EX ii, 300mm zoom, f/5.6, ISO 400, 1/200 sec]

[Canon EOS 450D, Canon 70-300 f/4-5.6 IS USM, Canon speedlight 430EX ii, 300mm zoom, f/5.6, ISO 400, 1/200 sec]

I was really happy with both shots, specially the fill-in flash effect of the speedlight strobe. These shots would have been impossible without the flash aid given the amount of available light and backlighting which would have resulted in overexposed background or underexposed foreground. The reason why I used the 70-300 lens sofar was to blur the background. But now that I have the tamron 17-50 f/2.8 i will definately try that lens for shooting the bumble bees. Below is one final picture taken with the Canon 18-55 1:3.5-5.6 IS II kit lens with a photoshop edit. Thanks to all bumble bees for the cooperation!

[Canon EOS 450D, Canon 18-55 1:3.5-5.6 IS ii, 55mm zoom, f/9, ISO-200, 1/125 sec, photoshop]

cheers!

Hans

Panorama series of Nijmegen

Today I managed to post this series of Nijmegen panoramas that were made a year ago. At that time we wanted to have a nice panorama of Nijmegen so I happily embarked on this project. At the start I'd definately wanted a night picture of Nijmegen during the "vierdaagse" (the four days march) with all the carnaval and lights near the Waal river. So I set out with my camera and tripod to the opposite river bank and tried a couple of positions. 

At first I'd thought to have this done in no time but after the first couple of shots I soon realized it would take quite some time to do just a single long shutter time (on average about 45 seconds per picture) panorama (which consisted of about 12 pictures). I first started out taking some test pictures of the brightest and darkest spots within the panoramic view to find the shutter speeds to achieve the exposure that i'd wanted. After that I started shooting the panorama with about 25-33% overlap between pictures using a tripod and remote control. The remote control was definately necessary considering the long exposure times which are only available through manual shutter control ("bulb"). All settings used in the shots were set manualy (exposure time, diafragm, focus, and image stabilization disabled). This was generally going rather smooth except that ship trafficing was quite frequent. That mant that i'd needed to estimate if i'd be able to take a picture of a certain part of the panorama between crossing ships in front of the lens. As a result i'd needed to take a lot of pictures redundantly as a ship might sail into the picture right at the last few seconds of almost a minute exposure. Nevertheless, i'd rather enjoyed this challenge! It definately made it rather exciting to shoot a panorama. In general it took about 15 minutes to shoot each panorama. I also tried different shutter speeds so that i'd have different lightings to choose from in the end. All in all it thus took about 4 hours to shoot the night panorama series of which two of them are shown below.

[Canon EOS 450D, Canon 18-55 1:3.5-5.6 IS II, ~45 sec, f/13.0, ISO 200]

[Canon EOS 450D, Canon 18-55 1:3.5-5.6 IS II, ~35 sec, f/13.0, ISO 200]

Besides the panoramas I also couldn't resist to shoot a zoom picture of the "valkhof" park as it was nicely lit with a carnaval wheel in front of it. For this particular shot i've used the 70-300mm Canon lens.

[Canon EOS 450D, Canon 70-300 1:4-5.6 IS USM, 15 sec, f/13.0, ISO 200]

But back again to the panoramas... Although we were pretty content with the night panoramas of Nijmegen we began to realize that a large canvas print of either one of these would be rather dark in our living room. So I began to think about a rather challenging panorama shot of Nijmegen at sunset. I went back to the opposite river bank of Nijmegen and setup the tripod and camera. As the amount of light varied immensily between the "sun" and "evening" parts of the panorama it actualy took me quite a lot of test shots and panoramas to get the exposure reasonably balanced throughout all shots. To help overcome the dynamic range problem a bit I also used a grey filter (2-stops) to compress the dynamic range of the light a bit. After some photoshop processing of the assembled panorama I was more or less able to achieve the picture I'd wanted. The only thing about It that didn't went according to plan is the saturated light at the sunset part of the picture but I was more than happy with it and we decided to print it as a large canvas for our livingroom :-)

[Canon EOS 450D, Canon 18-55 1:3.5-5.6 IS II, 1/4 sec, f/16.0, ISO 400]

To illustrate the light difference a bit better I've also included a correctly exposed picture of the sunset part of the picture that shows the railroad bridge to Nijmegen below.

[Canon EOS 450D, Canon 18-55 1:3.5-5.6 IS II, 1/45 sec, f/9.5, ISO 400]

I enjoyed this project a lot as It was quite challenging, but I must admit that I was also happy when i finally finished taking the night panoramas and get some sleep :-)  

Cheers!

Short visit to the city park "De Goffert" in Nijmegen

31-07-2011

As we happen te live across the street of the Nijmegen city park i'd wandered into the park to test my new Tamron lens. It was very crowded due to the visitors day at the local soccer team stadium (located in the park). To my surprise i noticed two juvenile tree falcons in the fields near an old farm beside the stadium. After quickly switching the Tamron lens for my 70-300 Canon lens i managed to take a few shots of one of these beautiful birds. The first shot was taken while "sneaking" up on the bird after the lens switch. Although it clearly noticed me it was kind enough to give me a small chance on taking the picture below.

[juvenile tree falcon (Boomvalk in Dutch): Canon EOS 450D, Canon 70-300 f4-5.6 IS USM, ISO 400,  300mm, f/5.6, 1/350 sec]

After it noticed me it obviously flew away to a tree a bit further up ahead. It actually stayed there for quite a while allowing me to take a few more shots as it was screaming to its littermate.

[Canon EOS 450D, Canon 70-300 f4-5.6 IS USM, ISO 400,  300mm, f/5.6, 1/350 sec]

After a while it decided to fly away to a spot out of sight. As it flew away it was quite far away from my lens so I couldn't get the golden shot but at least it enabled me to take a picture of the bird in flight.

[Canon EOS 450D, Canon 70-300 f4-5.6 IS USM, ISO 400,  280mm, f/6.7, 1/1000 sec]

After that i more or less lost track of both birds although they were clearly somewhere in the area. So I removed the 70-300 lens and switched back to the Tamron 17-50 to take some more test pictures. Somewhat further in the park i actually found a site where one of these birds might enjoyed its lunch as a feather left by the predator marked the scene.

[Canon EOS 450D, Tamron 17 - 50 / 2,8 XR DI II VC LD ASP, ISO 400,  50mm, f/5.6, 1/45 sec]

I've managed to take some more shots in the park with the Tamron lens which i will include in a short review in the near future. So far the lens performance is actually above my expectations in terms of image quality, response and feel. But more about that later!

Start blog

Hello and welcome!

I just decided to start this blog in order to share photography experiences and pictures online. Untill recently i've put pictures that I've taken online at zoom.nl, but will now migrate to this blog and picasa. The main goal of this blog will be to share pictures (and hopefully get some responses from you ;-) ) but is also to share my experiences with you. I hope that you will enjoy this blog and please feel free to post comments/questions as I hope to improve my photography.

Cheers!