36 years in science communication
News and views about photography, cameras, social media, as well as pointers to Dave Bradley’s photographic output. You can also find me on Imaging Storm, Instagram and Flickr as “sciencebase”
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.
It’s a slow burn, but the Sciencebase Instagram following is edging towards 400 people. Follow me there for even more of the wildlife photos – birds, mammals, moths and butterflies, dragonflies, wildflowers, sunsets, moonshots, and more often with some of the science detail that I don’t necessarily post on the Sciencebase site.
I say local…most of them are anything but local having winged their way back to Old Blighty from their winter homes in Sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere.
Our local bird world is awhirl right now, with lots of the summer migrants. Of course, the farmland residents, Meadow Pipits, Skylarks, Corn Buntings, Yellowhammers, are all very active too, and the countless Linnets and Goldfinches.
Cuckoo and Turtle Dove have been heard near our home, Swallows and Housemartins abound, Common Whitethroats and Lesser Whitethroats are along and around the local lodes and droves and there are Reed Warblers among our reedbeds.
Sporadic Swifts have been sighted around the wider area and not too far from our patch a migrant Montagu’s Harrier has been on the wing.
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!
A 7- or 8-mile hike from NT Wicken Fen car park out through Burwell Fen to The Anchor in Burwell and back via the electric sub-station. Timing was perfect, just ahead of sunset by the time we got to the western side of Burwell Fen, there were about 20 others with cameras waiting for the local Short-eared Owls (Asio flammeus) to emerge for their late-afternoon prandials. Reckon we saw three of possibly six that live around this Fen.
Like I say, there were quite a few people on the Fen watching out for owls and hoping for a great photo.
Oh, and here’s that 7.65 mile route to the pub and back via the owls…
Then, there were these snappers who seemed to be snapping me rather than the shortie heading across their bow.
Oh, and one last shot just the sun was sinking and one of the shorties headed off over the Fen.
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.
Did a bit of a marathon fenland crawl yesterday. Started mid-morning at Kingfisher’s Bridge Nature Reserve and learned a lot about the local setup and the Cranes, the Marsh Harriers, the otters, and the buffalo there from Bruce Martin. That’s a name any Cambridgeshire birder will know, he holds the record for the longest ticked list of species in the county, apparently, well over three hundred. Here are a few snaps from Kingfisher’s Bridge, NT Wicken Fen and Tubney/Burwell.
Birdlist for the day: Marsh Harrier, Coot, Wigeon, Pochard, Shelduck, Shoveler, Pintail, Whooper Swan, Sparrowhawk, Goldfinch, Greenfinch, Long-tailed Tit, Great Tit, Blue Tit, Great Spotted Woodpecker, Mallard, Mute Swan, Kingfisher, Reed Bunting, Wood Pigeon, Collared Dove, Robin, Kestrel, Lapwing, Black-headed Gull, Lesser Black-backed Gully, Great Black-backed Gull, Herring Gull, Cormorant, Greylag Geese, Canada Geese, Egyptian Geese, Gadwall, Tufted Duck, Wren, Blackbird, Fieldfare, Starling, Little Egret, Teal, Black-tailed Godwit, Little Grebe, Moorhen, Buzzard, House Sparrow. Mammals seen: Buffalo, cattle, Muntjac deer, otter, grey squirrel, Konik ponies.
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.
UPDATE: This was backfilled and reverted to what looks like farmland a couple of years ago. The opposite side of the drove is now being excavated and has attracted a few interesting birds just the same on the pits that fill with water and the margins. Presumably, this area too will be backfilled once they have extracted all the sand and gravel they can.
Yes, for they are men driving those diggers and lorries on the Cottenham quarry north of Cambridge. Didn’t see any women there. And, The proto-Beatles allusion in my title referencing The Quarrymen would have failed if there had been…
I drove down Long Drove once again, yesterday, dog and bins in tow, in the vain hope of spotting the Hooded Crow and the Iceland Gull that have been hanging around with the other corvids and gulls in this part of our village for months now. No sign in the fields opposite the dump and no sign on the quarry.
So, herewith a few snaps from the Drove of the quarry activity (they’ve shaved away the raised edge along the drove so you can see clearly into the site just standing alongside dog and car. There were a few gulls and crows but nothing Icelandic, despite the snow and nothing corvid.
As I understood it, as with virtually all of the East Anglian gravel and sand quarries, there might have been aspirations from consverators and ecologists to see this quarry converted into a nature reserve once they’ve scraped out everything they want from the Earth here. Unfortunately, there are no plans in place to make that happen and the contractors will simply “make good” the land and the scars they’ve created, which is a crying shame.
As many of you know, one of my musical outlets is playing with the Cottenham Theatre Workshop pit band led by Aunty Babs. This was a finale jam we did on last night of our Worzel Gummidge performance back in December 2018 with Babs on piano, Rob on clarinet, Adam on drums and Darren on bass, me on electric guitar and camera.
For CTW updates check out their website or follow them on Facebook. They’re rehearsing hard for their spring 2019 show right now!
