Richard & Caroline's Blog

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Caroline wanted to try out her new bird spotting scope, so we took some of the family including Alan with his Sony A55 and tripod off to Whisby Nature Reserve for the afternoon.

We started off with a nice meal there, venison for most of us, then headed off to the nearest hide.

August is not the best season for bird spotting but we had some luck, apart from the usual pigeons and Seagulls, we spotted a Heron, Coots, Moorhen and some Comorants.

Alan soon learnt that even a 300mm lens is a small telephoto for bird photography.  We had also taken a selection of tripods, a mix of cheap legs up to decent medium quality professional gear.  Caroline quickly learnt that even if your not taking photographs a cheap tripod will soon drive you to distraction.

Yesterday was Nikon’s much waited for press conference. Rumours abounded about new full frame cameras; the D4, the D800; even a brand new interchangeable mirrorless lens system.

Instead we got more compacts.

The Sony announcement was much more interesting. The new enthusiast / professional NEX7 was quite a revelation.

With the Leica M9, Leica X1, Fuji X100, Panasonic GF and Olympus Pen range; and of course now this, we have a number of large sensor Compact Cameras where size does not necessarily have to mean less image quality.

My criteria is interchange lens, high quality prime wide angles and a decent view finder.

As always I’ll be waiting till I can test one in my hands, but the new Olympus Pen 3, and now this are at the top of my lists.

Today was my outdoor shoot with the lovely Alice.

It was a test shoot to try out a few ideas out in the field. A mix of motion and dance themes, some art nude and a picnic shoot.

All of these whether or not they included motion all consisted of creative use of flash, mixed with daylight. Some 80% Sunlight 20% flash, up to 20% Sunlight 80% flash.

This was made easier because of my light meter. The Sekonic L-758D has a neat trick, in that as well as showing the shutter speed and aperture it shows the percentage of daylight to flash. Neat trick and very helpful.

Balancing the light can be difficult in very bright conditions. Studio Flash tends to only sync to between 1/80 – 1/250 second depending on make and model.

You also have to consider the camera flash sync speed. This is where medium format has the advantage over 35mm SLR. With their leaf shutters built into the lens they will sync easily to 1/500 second. Most modern SLR’s are limited to 1/125 to 1/250.

You could resort to your modern camera flash gun, these often have a high speed sync mode, letting you use up to 1/4000 second, but your camera flash has little power compared to a studio flash and your batteries would quickly die.

As you can see in the above photo, I have also tried to be a little creative with my post processing, giving a stylised feel to the shot.

Altogether a great day.

Well I have an outdoor test shoot booked for a few days time.  A lovely dancer is going to model for me and we have a private location with parking and the land owners permission.

Cannot wait!

Still my normal pre-shoot checks to do and a final shot list and clothes list to sort.  The only thing I cannot really plan for is the weather.

Fingers crossed.