Category: Photography

Myself and Mrs Sciencebase finally made it back to Greece after far too long a break from that beautiful country. The trip was to be yoga, walking, and wildlife, with plenty of wonderful food, a lot of Greek beer, and far too many photographs. I took the equivalent of eight 36-exposure reels on average each day of a ten-day trip, thank goodness for digital and 64 gigabyte SD cards. Anyway, before we hit the island of Kithira for the aforementioned R&R, we spent three nights in Athens, a place we had meant to visit properly back in the early 1990s, but a trip we missed out on because of ferry delays, force 6 gales, and a 10-30 metre swell!

Here are a few of my snaps from our first couple of days in the Greek capital

A sunny Saturday morning, local church opens its doors for a historical tour and a chance for the lay public to climb the stairs of the bell tower to the  roof and take in the fenland vista with views stretching to Ely Cathedral northwards, King’s College Chapel and the University Library in Cambridge to the south and the surrounding villages, farms, fens, and windfarms. Oh, and there was some wildlife, pigeon eggs on the roof and a bat in the belfry.

I could waffle on about the materials used in modern tennis rackets, the balls, the clothes the players wear, the compounds they used to weed and feed the grass courts, but I won’t here, just for the sake of it, are a few snaps from a trip to Wimbledon myself and Mrs Sciencebase made this week. All shot on my relatively old Panasonic DMC-TZ35 Lumix with the Leica lens and the 20x optical zoom.

I’ve just been watching a video that was downloadable from a link in a practical photography magazine. There was a professional photographer discussing zoom lenses and how they work on different types of camera and their pros and cons for photographing birds and other wildlife. He kept talking about “reach”.

The idea that if you put the same zoom lens on a full-frame camera (one with a sensor the size of an old 35mm type film camera) then your zoom is the equivalent of what it says on the dial. A 400mm zoom means a 400mm zoom on a full-frame camera. But, put the same lens on a camera with a smaller sensor (some times referred to as a crop sensor) and the same subject photographed from the same distance with the same zoom will fill more of the frame, they say, claiming it therefore has more reach. Depending on how much smaller the sensor you could see that 400mm lens looking at the distant subject as if it were a 600mm.

This is deceived wisdom, a myth, bovine ordure.

The same lens on the smaller sensor does indeed fill more of the frame, that is because the frame is that much smaller, not because the lens is somehow zooming in further or magnifying the subject. What is actually happening is that you’re not gaining zoom, you are narrowing the field of view. When you get back from the shoot, you can crop that full-frame photo in your image editing software to give you the same narrowed field of view. That is the equivalent of doing a digital zoom on a pocket camera as opposed to actual optical zoom and taking the snapshot.

There are, of course, differences in quality of full-frame and crop sensors and pixel count and pixel count to take into account when discussing the actual quality. However, given that, in general, full-frame cameras are targeted at the more pro than the consumer end of the market, the vast majority have a better sensor, better focusing, and better frame rate for so-called burst mode, when compared to crop sensor cameras. Things do change but the laws that apply to the branch of physics known as optics do not change just because you swap cameras.

Oh, the other thing that irritated me was that they were photographing birds from a bird hide, but they kept poking their lens out of the hide windows. Not the done thing. Kingfishers have pretty much 360-degree vision, you keep everything within the hide (lenses, hands, tongues etc) while observing QUIETLY!

First trip out with the lensball to a specific location – the public art installation at Tubney Fen just before you get to the Reach Bridge over Reach Lode that takes you into Burwell Fen and thence Wicken Fen. The sculpture, as I mentioned in an earlier blog post shows a fen skater, an eel catcher, and an entomologist with a butterfly net, all important historical and perhaps still even contemporary fenland characters.

The main purpose of today’s trip was a long walk with Mrs Sciencebase, a chance to see Short-eared Owls (might have seen one in the distance) and a pub lunch (The excellent Maid’s Head in Wicken, served the purpose given that The Anchor in Burwell was closed for a private wake.

The birding list for today’s visit to Tubney, Burwell, and Wicken Fen included: Pale Common Buzzard (not Rough-legged, sadly), Kestrel, Short-eared Owl (possible), Whooper Swan, Mute Swan, Shoveler, Little Egret, Grey Heron, Greylag Geese, Canada Geese, Starling, Carrion Crow, Rook, Jackdaw, Lapwing, Great-spotted Woodpecker, Black-headed Gull, Stonechat, Reed Bunting, Meadow Pipit, Fieldfare, Redwing, Skylark, Goldfinch, Greenfinch, Blackbird, Wren, Robin, Blue Tit, Great Tit, Long-tailed Tit, Linnet, Magpie, Mallard, Wigeon, Tufted Duck, Wood Pigeon, House Sparrow, Domestic Dove.

A wildlife snapshot can have many flaws…look at this photo of a Carrion Crow I took today at RSPB Fen Drayton…not so great…but it has two redeeming features that can serve as top tips.

First, the eye is photographically “sharp”. Unless there’s a reason to focus on some other aspect of an animal, whether bird, lion, human, the eyes have to be pin sharp in the photo to make it work. Moreover, in a portrait where you can see both eyes, the “leading” eye, the one nearest the camera needs to be sharp.

Secondly, for an animal that is pretty much completely black, including its eyes, it’s wasted shot if you haven’t caught a catchlight. What’s a catchlight? The tiny pinprick of light reflected from the eye. For birds that have black heads, it’s essential for anything like a half-decent shot to have catchlights in the eyes. Moreover, strictly speaking, the same applies to all eyes in any photo, wildlife, pet, human portrait. If you haven’t got that sparkle, that glint in the subject’s eye, the rest of the photo can be perfect, but it will ultimately look lifeless, dead in the eyes.

You can use flash, off-camera flash or natural light, manual or autofocus, but if you’ve snapped the subject a dozen or so times and only one of the photos has a catchlight in the eye, then that’s the one to share, print, publish, pretty much regardless of any other technical aspect of the shot.