Category: Photography

It’s been a funny old year so far, has 2020. I had all sorts of plans, as did everyone else, I assume, the majority of which have been scuppered by the emergence of a lethal coronavirus. From the disadvantage point of lockdown and limits to our outdoor activities from March onwards, the opportunities for photographing animals, landscapes, and life were, to say the least, limited.

That said, on those daily allowed exercise outings I generally took a camera with me, they never said you couldn’t do that, as long as you carried on washing your hands frequently and avoided getting any closer than two metres to anyone you met while you were outside. I also carried on mothing and that provided some photographic input too. Lots more nature, birds, Lepidoptera, wildflowers, pondlife, and more on the Sciencebase Instagram. But, here are a few samples from the lockdown period.

Thursday, 25th June…I believe it was the hottest day of the year, so far. So, as lockdown eased somewhat and we are allowed to cautiously travel away from our homes, we headed for the beach. Not Bournemouth nor Lulworth Cove…North Norfolk and specifically Snettisham. We saw barely another soul other than an RSPB Warden who was reminding people not to walk on the areas of the beach and shoreline where birds are nesting.

We also saw a handful of other birders and a dogwalker or two and nodded to each from at least 20 metres rather than the requisite two. The virus hasn’t gone away, governments and people visiting Bournemouth think it has…but…no.

Anyway, as we pulled into the car park there was a Sparrowhawk hauling itself into the air with a female Blackbird in its talons (sorry, no picture), and as we parked up, a Red Kit with a missing wing feather circling above.

Peregrine Falcon circling above the shoreline scaring the Oystercatchers with their nests and chicks on the lower ranks of the sloping sea defences as the high tide retreated.

Lovely Turtle Dove turring from a tree on the fishing lakes back inland. Also seen Ringed Plovers, Pied Wagtails, and Black-headed Gulls, all with chicks, Sedge Warbler. On the Lepidopteral front Ringlet, Whites, Meadow Brown (far fewer than Cottenham) butterflies, Cinnabar moth.

One of a pair of Egyptian geese hanging out with the mucky ducks

There were also huge numbers of ladybirds that seemed to be swarming in from across The Wash, an irruption perhaps?

 

I just made the least flash flash diffuser imaginable. I cut a hole in an old, plastic ostrich-burger box we have used to store Xmas tree baubles in for the last seventeen years and fitted it to the camera with a redundant ring flash adapter. I switched away from ringflash earlier this year as it’s simply not good enough for decent entomological macro shots.

Anyway, been testing the ad hoc diffuser with some random macro shots of flowers in the garden – Mimulus (#PondLife), cornflower, wet poppy, red valerian, periwinkle, viper’s bugloss, yarrow buds, ceanothus fruit, and fading yellow wildflower…

It seems to work quite well…considering

Always nice when someone notices you got a nice sharp and detailed photo. Happened this morning with a snap of a Figure of Eighty moth that was drawn to the actinic lure last night.

This Figure of Eighty moth was shot with a 90mm Tamron 1:1 lens on a Canon 6D digital SLR. Importantly, on a tripod with a shutter release wire, using Live View (on the rear screen, the camera’s mirror is raised) rather than allowing the mirror-raise to cause vibration as happens with a viewfinder shot. Obligingly, the moth lay flat and spread its wings, usually it curls them around its body to make a kind of twig-like tube.

This is a single frame with f/13 aperture, 1/90s shutter speed, ISO 500.

I almost always crop the original frame to get a nice composition. I adjust the levels/histogram to blacken the blacks and whiten the whites slightly.  I always lift the mid-tones slightly to soften any shadows on these kinds of shots, but nothing more than about 10-15 percent values.. I also pull down the highlights slightly if there’s been any blowout. Increase the saturation a tiny bit and apply a gentle standard sharpening. All in PaintShopPro.

The final crucial step for social media upload sharpness is then to resize the frame to 2048 pixel width. There’s no point in posting full size to Facebook or Instagram as their compression algorithms do something horrendous to bigger files and you end up with more artefacts and a less clear, less detailed image. After this resize I may up the vibrancy (which is a more subtle variation of increasing saturation that only boosts certain pixels to make the colours “pop”. I then apply a fairly subtle unsharp mask. If the image has been cropped to less than 2048 but not smaller than 1000 or so I apply the same unsharp. If it’s < 1000 I’ll pull back the unsharp a lot.

I then add my dB/ logo in the right-hand corner. As you might have noticed, there wasn’t room for the logo in the pre-processed image, so I rotated it and clone the stone background to fill the resulting gaps and then added my logo. I think it usually gives me a half-decent end result.

Here’s the original frame straight out of the camera, saved as a 90% JPEG rather than RAW, I rarely shoot raw…it was cropped and resized to fit the page here. It’s sharp (in focus) but dull and lifeless.

It’s been a few years since we’ve ventured into our old haunts of Thorpeness and Aldeburgh on the Suffolk coast; places we visited family fairly frequently for the best part of two decades. Anyway, yoga and wildlife walking trip, with a wonderful group of people, activities led by Denise and Kevin, respectively. I got a few snaps here and there.