The Little Owl

Little Owl landing, backlit by early morning sun

The last Saturday of May. It is still early morning, and I am cold, getting cramped already, hunched over a camera in the confined space of a hide.

Outside, the sun is well above the horizon. Insects play in the shafts of light created by the shadow of an oak tree. The sky above the tree line is deep blue. It is going to be a gorgeous day.

Martin and Neil are sitting next to me in the hide; Neil with binoculars to his eyes, peering through the camouflage netting.

We wait. A few pigeons and jackdaws cross our view, but not the elusive quarry we are here for. The minutes pass like treacle.

A whisper from Neil. "Movement". Quiet. We still wait. "The male is on his high branch in the oak". From my angle, and with the scrim in front of me, I still can't see the bird. But I can feel the tension rise, and I check my camera settings once more, fearful of missing the moment.

"He's coming". I hear him first -- the slight slap of the wings as the bird approaches. I've got him. The camera's viewfinder blinks repeatedly in front of me as I hold down the shutter to get a series of pictures.

And there he is. My heart is beating with delight that the morning's promise is fulfilled. Backlit by early morning sun, the little owl sits on a perch in front of me. He turns and fixes me through my viewfinder with a stare that communicates that he knows I'm here, and defies my intrusion into his domain.

The owl pecks at something -- food for the young in his nest -- and is gone.

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Thanks to Neil

A few more pictures in my photostream on Flickr

Nikon D810 – some follow-up thoughts

Juvenile marsh harriers at Elmley: deep crops from the D810/200-400 VRII. See text below. Click on the image to see it at full size.

Just a quick follow up to my previous post on the Nikon D810. I said that the look of the prints would be an important deciding factor. So, I got some 18” x 12” prints made (by Proam, who I think are excellent). Alongside the D810 images, I got some “control” D700 prints made from pictures of similar aircraft taken earlier this year.

The first print out of the pack was the Vulcan shot. It was one of those “Wow!” moments – it looks terrific. And the rest of the D810 shots looked terrific. Then I came to the D700 shots … err … they looked terrific as well. Actually, the differences in quality at that size print are pretty small. I showed them to Phil and asked him to guess which came from the 12MP camera, and which from the 36 MP camera. After a bit of humming and hahing, he got it right, and without any prompting from me.

So, yes, there are discernable differences between D700 and D810 pictures as 18” x 12” prints, but they are very slight. A bit more edge acutance, perhaps, but not much. Better tonality on a dull day, I think. Maybe if I got some bigger prints done, it would be clearer, but for normal pictures, normally framed and not excessively cropped, it is not a big deal.

In any case, that Vulcan picture was taken in portrait orientation as the aircraft banked rapidly: it is cropped on the left and right hand sides, and represents a crop from a full print equivalent to about 27” x 18”. The concept of making a print that size, pin sharp with wonderful tonality is stunning.

On the Sunday I had the camera, I headed off to Elmley Marshes NNR. Not a great time of the year – very much in between seasons. However, Elmley is such a magical place, there’s usually something worth seeing. Trundling in the car slowly along the track, I saw a small shape in the far distance on the ground. I pulled over on to the side of the track; a quick peek though binoculars confirmed it was a raptor, as best I could tell it was a marsh harrier. Before I could get the camera set up, pointing out of the car window, a second bird flew in the direction of the first – another harrier. Here is the full frame of the first shot (at 400mm, 1.2 crop).

Juvenile marsh harrier at Elmley: full frame

Of course, this is just a quick grab – not the right lens, fieldcraft or anything. However….

The new arrival made a beeline for the one on the ground, and they started to play. I grabbed a series of shots, just letting the camera go at 7fps for as long as they kept at it. Fairly quickly, one flew off and I lost sight of the other. I followed the one that flew off with the camera: it kept the focus – never wandered – and kept shooting, without the buffer filling up.

They are too far away for exhibition purposes, but at smallish size, suitable crops look great.  The opening image is a compilation from that series of shots.

What was really impressive was the focusing. To lock on to a small moving subject that far away, and never lose it is simply amazing. This is with the group AF, and AF-C setting. The long and short of it is that I could never have got that series on the D700. The focusing would not have been good enough, and the resolution would have been inadequate. A big win for the D810.

Since then, I’ve been to a couple more airshows – the Duxford September show and Shuttleworth Season Finale at Old Warden. I just used the D700 as usual, and I got a bunch of pictures that I really like. Both airshows featured unique opportunities for aviation pictures: the Canadian Lancaster at Dux; two (yes, two) Mew Gulls and the DH88 at OW. The D700 was great to take along because I’m now very familiar with what it can predictably do in my hands. I got some pictures that I’m delighted with. But it hunted for focus once in a while, and I lost most of one series of pictures because the focusing wandered off an aircraft as it accelerated to take off, focusing on the background instead. A low rate of loss, for sure, but I didn’t experience that at all with the D810.

So, for my purposes – and your mileage will definitely vary on this – I think the D810 is the best general purpose camera available.

Is it worth £2400 (roughly the price at present) to me? And what about the D750? Hmm ….

I’ve not shot with the D750, so can’t comment specifically. Before I’d known about the D810, I’d probably have said it was the camera for me. 24MP, 6.5 fps, top of the range AF, tilt screen (excellent for those low down pictures), great low light performance (both the latter being just the job for aircraft nightshoots), about £650 less expensive at the moment: what’s not to like?

Well … Glenn Bloore, an excellent aviation photographer, states the buffer is very small. If he says so, I believe him. Ever since I sat next to Kojak by Derwent Dam as the BBMF Lanc flew over, and he missed the absolute key shot because the buffer was too small, I’ve promised myself I’d never get a camera with a small buffer. I like the idea of the 1.2 crop as well: it turned out so well at Shoreham getting 25 MP on 240-480 mm equivalent. And 36 MP when you need it.

So, if it ever comes to it, the D750/D810 dilemma is quite acute. It is theoretical for the moment, in any case; the piggy bank needs a lot of fattening ;-) .

The trouble with male GAS is that it is never truly rational. I got my LRPS, ARPS and CPAGB with D300 pictures. The D700 is better than the D300.  If I could not get to the next stage of my (extremely slow and intermittent) letter hunt with my current gear, it is not the gear. I don’t doubt that spending £2400 on a trip somewhere exciting would see me closer to the next set of letters. But GAS is like a determined guard dog: once you’re bitten, you stay bitten.

Shoreham Airshow (UK) with a rented D810

DH90A Dragonfly landing in front of Lancing College Chapel

Last weekend I rented a D810, and on the Saturday spent the day at Shoreham for the airshow. I’ve not seen much aviation photography with the D810, and I wanted to know whether it would be a good practical option for this.  My D700 is great for aircraft, which is one reason why I’ve never been tempted by the D800, but the D810 has so many small improvements, it looked very enticing.

I picked it up on the Friday evening and took it out into central London to set it up and give it a first try. Everyone says how good it feels in the hand, and it really does. Once I’d got used to some of the controls, and customized “My Menu” to have my usual items in there (like battery info) and added crop modes (Image Area) and custom setting A6 to turn on/off frame lines, I felt good to go.

Spitfire N3200

The Vulcan banks

The Shoreham airshow is not particularly taxing on a modern auto-focusing system, as there are mainly vintage prop aircraft on display, and even my D70 was (mostly) OK with them ☺. Nevertheless, I wanted to try out the new group AF.

The pictures I’ve put in this post were all taken with the 200-400mm f/4 VR II, except for the monochrome C-47 (24-120mm f/4). All hand held. Just processed through Lightroom 5.6 (except for the banking Vulcan, which had a little additional help from Topaz Clarity). All images were recorded RAW (14-bit NEF, with lossless compression).

Moody Dakota: B&W with Silver Efex Pro 2

I've put a larger set on Flickr. The images here are larger than on Flickr, so worth clicking on these see the full size.

Slightly to my surprise, I found I was using the 1.2 crop a lot. Exiftool tells me that just about 50% of my selects were with the 1.2 crop. About 15% were in DX crop (which I’d expected to use for small aircraft at a distance, but fairly quickly discovered I didn’t really need). The remaining 35% were in FX mode, which was great for anything on the ground or that was large and in flight.

Matrix metering seems very sensitive to any sky in the picture. It is clearly trying to protect highlights (good!) but I found myself dialing in more exposure compensation that usual – up to +1.67 stops for flying aircraft (not helped by the bright grey clouds during the afternoon), and the highlights were still not blown.

F6F takes off. The Group area AF worked perfectly, following the a/c down the runway and not getting distracted by the background.

Focusing worked great. The 200-400 hunted only twice during the whole day (and I’m pretty sure that was due to user error). It locked nicely on to moving subjects and was not distracted by objects in the background. In fact, I don’t think I got a single grossly out of focus image all day. Having said that, I was pushing the shutter speeds at some points to see if the extra pixels would be less sparing on my hand holding technique. My keeper rate always falls off precipitously with any camera below 1/100 when panning at about 400mm, but as it happened, I found I could get enough sharp pictures at 1/80 to get nicely blurred backgrounds on take off or landing. So, all good.

I’m still trying to work out the best processing in Lightroom. Camera Standard and Adobe Standard are very different profiles for the D810, and I’m still trying to decide how best to employ them. Lightroom also seems to have an odd interpretation of the White Balance data. I set the camera to 5560K fixed WB. Lightroom interprets this at about 5950K and adds a tint of -4. Not sure what’s going on there, but not dissimilar to the way it treats my other Nikon images. Nevertheless, Lightroom handles the NEFs well, without much slowing down relative to D700 images.

I also stitched some panos. The image at the end is a three image stitch from FX (36MP) originals. For this, I exported full size 16-bit Tiffs from Lightroom and used the Batch Stitcher in PTGui. This produced a very good pano with no problem. 

RAF Display Typhon pulls vapour: from a 5 MP crop at ISO 800.

Anyhow, I don’t think the pictures in this post will show much that is particularly informative, in the sense that at web resolution, they won’t look much different to a D700 shot. However, the Typhoon shot is a 2841x1887px crop. That represents about 1/6 of the image area, so on a D700 would be a roughly 2MP image: that’s not really enough to do much with, so  that is one extra image I would have missed with the D700. And it was at ISO 800: not too shabby. I don’t like cropping images on the D300 either at ISO 800, so a double win for the D810.

Anyhow, the real test is whether or not the prints look good. I’m going to try to get some images sent off for printing this weekend, so I’ll post a follow up when I have them back.

Two Mustangs and a Spitfire await departure. A three image stitch from FX (36MP) originals. Stitched in the PTGui Batch Stitcher, which handled this with no problem.