Wildlight

GHOSTS OF THE MARSHES

wildlight NATURE PHOTOGRAPHY

ISSUE 01 - Spring 2015

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GOING 3D: CANON 200MM F/2 GHOSTS OF THE MARSHES A DAY AT THE OFFICE LAB ADVENTURES TRY IT YOURSELF! BACKLIGHTING MIRROR, MIRROR...

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HIGH-RISE LIFE, FOX-STYLE THE WIDER VIEW

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elcome to my first foray into e-publishing. Wildlight is a sort of blog-on-steroids. It’s a collection of recent photos, reviews, thoughts and general musings on wildlife photography. I’ll be sharing some images of birds, beasts and flora, and talking about how they were made. Nothing too technical - it’s not meant to be a lecture series - just some hints and tips that might help you recreate the sort of photos you’ll see here.

There‘s also the occasional report from a (sometimes foreign) field.

In this issue I take a look at the Canon 200mm f/2 telephoto - not usually thought of as a wildlife photographer’s lens, but it’s capable of producing some startlingly 3-dimensional images. There’s a report from a project to photograph the nightlife of Kiskunsagi National Park in Hungary, and a visit to some urban foxes in London. How-to articles cover photographic technique (backlighting), Photoshop (making use of the Lab colourspace) and there’s even a practical guide to setting up a reflection pool for garden bird photography.

I hope you enjoy Wildlight, John Gooday

JOHN GOODAY

WILDLIFE PHOTOGRAPHER

John Gooday is a wildlife photographer based in England and working in the UK, continental Europe and Southern Africa. He travels extensively to photograph birds, beasts and the occasional landscape. Most of his work is shot for agencies, book publishers and magazines. John also leads a limited number of wildlife photography workshops both independently and for The Field Studies Council.

welcome

www.johngoodayphotography.com

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GOING 3-D A Week in The Field With The Canon 200mm F/2L IS Telephoto Lens.

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ecently, I spent a week shooting in the Czech Republic with Canon’s 200mm f/2. Not an obvious choice of lens for my sort of work, but it turned out to be a great piece of glass which gave a new look and feel to images. I was very reluctant to return it when the 7 days were up. To use the 200 f/2 to its best you’ll need to get pretty close to your subjects – something that’s often problematic in the real world. But if you can manage to use the thing at close quarters, it gives a unique feel to images that few other lenses can match

Initial Impressions The first thing you notice about the lens is that it’s pretty hefty, weighing 2.5 Kg – that’s a kilo more than the 70-200mm f/2.8L IS, and it’s even a shade heavier than the 300mm f/2.8L! It’s not as long as the 300 and all that weight is packed into a small space. Perhaps this is why it felt a bit awkward to hand hold. It actually feels heavier than 2.5Kg. For the week of testing I used a tripod for the majority of shots as I found it quite tiring to shoot freestyle (and I’m used to hefting a 500mm about…). One reason that the lens is so heavy is that it’s a mark 1 lens and isn’t constructed out of the same fancy lightweight materials that Canon’s latest mark II 04 / WILDLIGHT

super telephotos are made from. Being a mark 1 lens, it also has the old style leather lens hood which I find a bit of a pain. I would be tempted to invest in an alternative hood from the likes of Aquatec.

The next thing that strikes you is the price - £4449 at www.wex.com at the time of writing). It’s certainly not cheap, especially when you consider that the 70-200 f/2.8L IS II can be bought for £1750 or less. Is the one-stop increase in maximum aperture, and prime lens sharpness, worth an extra £2750 over the aforementioned excellent zoom?

That depends…

What else do you get for your money?

Well, there’s a ‘5 stop image stabiliser’ (at least a stop more than other Canon lenses). In reality, I find manufacturer’s claims for stabilisation optimistic - I tend to knock off a stop or two. When hand-holding it seemed pretty much equivalent to that in the 70-200mm.

I suspect the extra weight of the lens makes it hard to hold the lens as steady as the ighter the 70-200mm, hence the lack of apparent stability gain). It has the usual two modes of stabilisation - standard and panning.

There’s a focus range limiter switch, and the ability to preset a focus point which the lens will immediately jump to if you press one of the rim buttons.

At wide aperture, subjects seem to almost leap out of the picture.

The lens may be a lot shorter than many of the L-series telephotos, but at 2.5Kg it’s far from being a lightweight.

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The wide aperture allows blurring of relatively close background, as in this shot at f/2

Using ultra-wide apertures You might think that f/2 would produce such a shallow depth of field as to be virtually unusable. Not the case - I was surprised by how much was still in focus around the origin enough to keep both eyes and beak sharp in head-on shots at f/2. More interestingly, the focus dropped away very smoothly making the transition from sharp to soft much less noticeable than I’d expected. But it did drop away quite spectacularly as distance from the point of focus became mid-range -more so than human vision. This has the effect of really separating the subject from the background in a way that isn’t possible with a 200mm f/2.8, or the human eye for that matter.

Images shot this way can seem almost three dimensional, certainly very different to other telephotos.

The photo below shows how the background, less than 10m behind the eagle, drops out of focus at f/2.2. I’ve also included a shot from a previous visit to this site taken with a 70-200mm f/2.8. The eagle’s slightly further back from the camera (it didn’t seem to be listening to me telling it to fly down the same path as before), but even so you get an idea of how f/2.8 doesn’t separate it from the rocks in the background nearly as well.

This shot was taken with a 70-200mm at 200mm and f/2.8. Not nearly as much separation of subject and background.

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But what’s that I hear from the back of the classroom?

“Couldn’t I get the same effect by standing a bit further back with a 300 f/2.8?”. Er, no. The laws of physics get in the way.

To get the eagle and scenery the same size in the frame with a 300mm as I did with the 200mm I’d need to stand 1.5 times further back from the bird. Using the standard formula for calculating depth of field, I calculated what would happens if I shot at 10m with a 200mm @ f/2, compared to shooting at 15m with a 300mm @ f/2.8. The total depth of field (distance of the image actually in focus) with the f/2 is 31cm. With the f/2.8, it’s 44cm - that’s more than a third more, which makes a big difference. (Shooting at 10m with a 200mm f/2.8 will also give an depth of field of 44cm, in case you were wondering...).

Sharpness and focussing I used to think that the 300mm f/2.8 defined the meaning of ‘sharpness’. The 200mm f/2 is in another league. Raw images produced on a 1DX were so sharp that I often ended up turning off raw image sharpening in lightroom to avoid images from other lenses I was using looking soft by comparison. I honestly can’t imagine how a mark ii model of this lens (which doesn’t look likely anytime soon) could improve on the current version’s sharpness.

I was a little worried that focussing would be slow – Canon’s other ultra wide aperture lenses (I’m thinking of the 85mm f/1.2 and 50mm f/1.2) are not renowned for locking on quickly, and fairly hopeless at tracking fast moving subjects. The 200mm actually focusses very rapidly – I found it no slower than the 300mm f/2.8 or 500mm f/4, and mounted on a 1DX it had no problem tracking a Goshawk in flight (and that’s a fairly rapidly moving target). I’d say that the lens was eminently suited to action photography.

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Background blur I’m not sure quite how you can objectively measure how nice the background blurring created by a lens is, but I find the 200mm f/2 to produce some of the most pleasing blur I’ve seen.

The narrow depth of field that creates the three-dimensional look discussed above also creates pleasing blurs out of backgrounds that are relatively close. Shooting in a forest (as I was a lot of the time while testing the lens) that’s a real bonus as some things (like trees) are pretty hard to move further away by hand. Rather than try and explain what the blur is like, I’ll let you examine some images shot at wide aperture and decide whether you like the effect yourself.

Other considerations and conclusion There’s a bit of vignetting at f/2, but not that much. A lot less than you’d see on a wide angle prime. I also felt the tripod shoe was a little small. I needed a reasonably long plate to allow me to balance the lens in a tripod with the 1DX and 5D Mark III. The plate I ended up using (125mm) dwarfed the lens foot.

This is a very special lens that, in the right conditions, can produce images that look very different to normal telephoto shots. Very few wildlife photographers have one, so you won’t see that many photos similar to yours. It’s a differentiator.

The only reason I’m not rushing to the nearest Canon Pro dealer to obtain one is down to the price - £4500 is a lot for 200mm.

No problem locking on and tracking this speeding Goshawk, photographed at f/2.

Moving a little further from the subject and the background blur is still very pleasing at f/2.

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GHOSTS OF THE MARSHES At night, the marshes of Kiskunsagi National Park in Southern Hungary are alive with ghostly apparitions silently stalking their prey. Earlier this year I spent a week photographing the after dark activities of the herons and egrets that gather to feed there.

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I’ve visited Kiskunsagi many times over the past few years to photograph the incredible variety of bird life there. Last summer I tested out a new hide for my friend Bence Mate, spending several days and a couple of nights in it. I was amazed by the amount of bird activity after dark. The way that the herons seemed to almost glide through the darkness was almost eerie. I returned earlier this year to try to capture some of these night phantoms Birds weren’t the only visitors – a steady stream of otters came to fish.

Otters move surprisingly quickly when you’re trying to photograph them in the dark, but after a few initial failures I learned to predict their movements and managed to capture some images of them feeding. For the otters, I used only radio-controlled flashguns, placing one at the back of the marsh firing towards the camera to help define the edge.

In the spotlight: Grey Heron silhouette.

Canon EOS 5D Mark III, EF300mm f/4L IS II, 1/100 sec @ f/4.5, ISO 1600, tungsten backlight, tripod, hide

Grinning otter.

Canon EOS 1DX, EF70-200mm f/2.8L IS II, 1/250 sec @ f/3.5, ISO 2000, 2 x Canon EX580 II speedlights ;eft and right of camera 1:2 light ratio tripod, 1x EX600-RT speedlight behind subject, hide

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INTRODUCTION TO WILDLIFE PHOTOGRAPHY

Next Available Workshop: Saturday 18th July, 2015 Lee Valley, Essex £90 (includes lunch)

Join us for a day of hands-on wildlife photography tuition in the beautiful Lee Valley on the Essex/ Herts border.

Overview Working with professional falconers we’ll guide you as you photograph a variety of native British owls and birds of prey in natural settings.

You’ll learn how to set-up your DSLR for wildlife photography, how to compose habitat portraits effectively, the best techniques for capturing birds in flight and how to post-process your images to bring out the best in them.

• • • • • • •

wide range of native species to photograph portrait, close-up and flight shots photograph in afternoon and early evening light printed how-to guides to take away places limited to 8-10 students 5 miles from the M25 junction 25 buffet lunch included

Level Suitable for wildlife photography beginners and intermediates.

Moderate activity level - we’ll be walking up to 1/2 mile in woodland and fields.

Equipment You’ll need a DSLR camera and a telephoto lens, with a focal length of 200mm or greater. There will be opportunities to use wide angle and macro lenses for those who want to, but these are not essential.

Please wear footware suitable for walking in the countryside and comfortable clothing. Pack a waterproof coat in case of showers.

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A DAY AT THE OFFICE

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ne of the best things about being a wildlife photographer is the office environment.

My daily commute is generally to somewhere outdoors, and the location changes frequently. One week you might be wading through a marsh in Hungary en route to a floating hide, the next up a tree in Wales lying in wait for Kestrels. True, I often have alarmingly early starts or late finishes but the same thing could be said for many of my friends working in more sensible jobs in the city.

Last week, the ‘office’ was the island of Texel in the North Sea, a few miles off the Dutch coast. Texel is renowned for its diverse and numerous bird population which includes large breeding colonies of hard-to-find waders, raptors such as the Hen Harrier and Rough-legged Buzzard, and many exotic species that make landfall on the island during their annual migration.

The varied landscape of dunes, beaches, farmland and an extensive network of channels and dykes make it an ideal place for photography. It’s also a popular destination for many Dutch holiday makers in summer so there’s a good choice of hotels and excellent restaurants to recover in after a day’s filming. It’s a nice location and, when the weather is as good at it was last

week, it’s hard to think of many better workplaces.

The office dress code is a little unconventional by most people’s standards: water-proof trousers, gloves, balaclava and generously cut camouflage netting. All designed to make it a tiny bit easier to get close to the quarry. You get used to it after a while – after all, it’s just a uniform in the same way that a business suit is, and a little more comfortable if I’m honest as you don’t have to wear a tie. I’ve learned through experience that it’s usually best to remove the balaclava and webbing before leaving the field (something I’ve been careful to do since the unfortunate screaming incident of 2012...)

As is often the way, my working week was a mix of great (finding the Bluethroat pictured at the top of the page and managing to get close enough for a decent shot), mundane (many hours spent waiting for things to show up) and the odd disappointment (I was about a week too early to catch the Avocets nesting).

So that was my office last week.

Next week, it’s the Tatra Mountains (in search of Brown Bears, in case you were wondering). It would be the perfect working environment, if only the coffee facilities were better..

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Pheasant in a flap Canon EOS 1DX, EF500mm f/4L IS II + 1.4x III, 1/1250 sec @ f/7.1, ISO 320, tripod

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Correcting colours in selective areas of a photo without using selection tools.

LAB ADVENTURES

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hen I need to correct colours in an image using Photoshop, I generally work in the LAB colour space. A lot of people seem to avoid LAB and stick to either AdobeRGB or sRGB, but LAB has a number of advantages and can help you do some things a lot faster than the more usual colour spaces. Here, I look a little bit at what Lab is (the theory…) and show how it can be used to target and change specific colours in an image.

I’m probably shooting myself in the foot when I say this but… you can skip to the practical example without reading the theory bit – you don’t need to understand the theory to use Lab, I just think it’s nice to know why things happen the way they do.

The theory bit: What is Lab? Well, let’s start with what a colour space is. A colour space is model that your camera, Photoshop, and various other applications and devices use to work out what colour, and how bright or dark, things are. You’re probably familiar with the RGB method of representing colour – here, every point (think pixel, in practical, if slightly inaccurate, terms) has a separate Red, Green and Blue value. These three values together define a unique colour and that’s how your camera records each pixel’s colour – it saves a Red, Green and Blue value. The values usually go from 0 to 255 for each colour. If Red, Green and Blue are all 0, then that represents black. If they’re all 255, that’s white. If Red is 255 and the other colours are 0, then that’s a really

bright, vibrant Red… and so on for various combinations of the colours.

An RGB colour space is just a three dimensional graph with three axis (Red, Green, Blue… surprise, surprise) that maps RGB input values to colours. In order that everything (camera, monitor etc.) are speaking the same language and know what colour a particular RGB value should correspond to, they use a standard, documented colour space. (Actually, there is a bit more to it than that – to ensure that the blue of a blueberry as seen by the camera matches the blue of the blueberry when the photograph taken is displayed on a monitor we also need something that takes into account each device’s characteristics and their effect on the way it records/displays colour – this is called a device dependent colour profile, in case you’re interested… but we’ll ignore this complication for now to make things simpler).The two most common RGB standards are the sRGB and AdobeRGB color spaces. AdobeRGB is structured to represent a wider range of colours than sRGB – we say that AdobeRGB has a wider gamut, to use the appropriate technical term - although it isn’t possible to display all of the colours in AdobeRGB on a standard monitor or print, so you probably won’t see a noticeable difference unless you have a high-end graphics monitor designed for AdobeRGB. So, having defined what a colour space is, it’s time to look at what’s special about Lab. Like RGB, Lab colour space has three different values but they represent rather different things. The first value,

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L, represents lightness – how bright or dark a point is. (In RGB each of the colour values represents a colour at a particular brightness R=100, G=0,B=0 is a brighter and more vivid red than R=10, G=0, B=0. In RGB, there’s no separate lightness channel).

The other two Lab values - ‘a’ and ‘b’ - represent colour. Both must have values between -128 and +127. In a, -128 represent pure Green, 127 represents pure Red. The values in between are how green or red a particular colour is, with 0 being neutral.

The ‘b’ value works in the same way, but has Blue at -128 and Yellow at 127. (Remember that complication of device profiles we mentioned when talking about RGB? Well, lab doesn’t suffer from this – it’s device independent. In fact, it’s so independent that it gets used a lot under the hood of programs such as Photoshop, especially when you are converting an image from one colour space to another).

Lab has some nice properties from an image editing point-ofview that RGB colour spaces just don’t have. Remember how RGB wraps brightness information into the Red, Green and Blue values? Well, that means that when you change how bright or dull something is with an image editing program working in RGB you also change its colour as well (have you ever noticed that colour fades and shifts a little as you turn up the brightness…?).

That’s not a nice side effect. In Lab, you can change how bright things are by changing the L value without causing any change to their colour.

Lab is a very wide gamut colour space - it can represent a very large range of colours, more than sRGB and AdobeRGB. This allows us to have many more shades of, say, purple than in the other spaces. That’s very handy when we are trying to make up for the limitations of our cameras – we can stretch out a colour in Lab to give the impression of subtle variations in shades.

Lab’s wide gamut also makes it easier to select a specific colour or colour range using, say, curves in Photoshop than if we were working in RGB (which is the aspect we’ll look at in the practical section below).

Lab was designed to represent colour in as close a way to the human visual system as possible. Shifting colour shades in the a and b channels gives very natural looking changes rather than the sometimes weird effects you get from moving the Red, Green and Blue sliders in RGB space.

If a=0 and b=0 in Lab, then you have a neutral grey – the brightness of the grey is controlled by the Lab value. This makes it much easier to target neutrals in an image and monitor them for changes (very handy if you’re a people photographer and want to keep skin tone carefully controlled while you’re editing colour).

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The practical bit: fixing unrealistic colours (or ‘Do you have something for my bird – he’s a bit off-colour’) Let’s start with the problem. This image of a Red Kite on a fence post is suffering from a washed out and generally insipid sky. The sky looked nice and blue on the day that I took the shot, but in bright sunlight my camera couldn’t reproduce the strong blues and also cope with getting the shadow details as accurately as I’d have liked. I had to settle for either a darker, bluer sky with not much shadow detail elsewhere, or shadow detail and a washed out sky (note that I said washed out rather than burnt out - Lab won’t magically fix loss of detail in overexposed areas). The grass also looks a slightly unrealistic colour, sort of yelowish green – as humans we’re especially sensitive to slight nuances of green, so this is more noticeable than I’d like. The bird itself is fine. So, how can we quickly fix the sky (a problem with blues) and the grass (a problem with greens and yellows) without changing the appearance of the bird?

You could carefully select the sky in Photoshop, using magic wand, lasso or another tool and push up the blue saturation in the sky. Then you could select the grass and work on that, maybe using Color Balance / Hue Saturation / fiddling about with the RGB channels. This would no doubt make the photo look better, but all that selecting and adjusting does take time, patience and a degree of skill if it’s to look natural.

So, here’s an alternative using Lab and one curves adjustment layer…

Once you’ve got your image into Photoshop, the first step is to convert it into Lab colour. You can do this either from Image -> Mode -> Lab or Edit->Convert to profile then select Lab Color as the target space.

Next, create a curves adjustment layer (Layers->New Adjustment Layer->Curves). When you open the curves you’ll see the L channel of Lab displayed, something like Figure 1.

First things first... if you look at the icons running down the left hand side of the dialogue box above, you’ll notice an exclamation mark on the bottom one. This is telling you that Photoshop has only created an approximate (rather than accurate) graph to save time. I’d advise you to remedy this by clicking on the icon – that tells Photoshop to go back and try harder. More importantly, you’ll now get an accurate graph to work with. As you can see from the drop down box second from the top, we’re currently looking at Lightness – that’s how bright or dark things are and won’t help us fix colour problems. To fix colour we need to change to the a or b channels, so select one of these from the drop down menu.

all in the region I’ve labelled S. So these are the parts of the curve we need to adjust if we want to change grass and sky respectively.

Start by clicking along the diagonal line to add some anchor points either side of the S and G regions – the purpose of these is to keep the rest of the curve in place when we start adjusting G and S. Now click in the middle of S and drag down or up and observe the change – dragging down immediately intensifies the blues in the sky – just what we wanted! You might need to add a few more anchor points to keep the rest of the line in place, as I’ve done here. Try the same in with a point in the G area – this time, dragging the point down makes the grass less yellow. Note that the other colours in the picture don’t change – just the sky and grass.

You can see my adjusted curve below. That was certainly a lot quicker than making lots of selections and adjustments

Here’s the b channel graph in figure 2 (ignore the red labels that I’ve added for a moment...).

The lefthand icon that looks like a pointing hand with two arrows is key to finding out what we need to change. Click this and then slowly move the mouse around the photo itself – you’ll see a dot moving on the graph to show you the b value for whatever point on the picture your mouse is over. You’ll soon notice that the grass colour values are all in the region I’ve labelled G and the sky colour values are

You might have noticed that I’ve also squished the bottom left and top right of the original diagonal line in towards the centre just a bit - this intensifies the colours a little more) You can now do the same kind of adjustment to the with the a channel. As it happens, in this particular picture the b curve is really all you need – you’ll get a feel for this once you’ve worked on a few images. In our Red Kite photo, all the colour we need to change lies in b which, if you remember, represents blue and yellow. If I wanted to make the grass a more vibrant green, rather than just less yellow, then I’d adjust also the a channel (the a channel holds all the data about reds and greens). The approach described here won’t work on every image, but it does work on the majority.

Hopefully, it illustrates one advantage of working in Lab.

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TRY IT YOURSELF! BACKLIGHTING In this series of articles I explain techniques that you might like to try out for yourself. Today: backlighting.

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ack-lighting can seem daunting at first. It’s all too easy to end up with a photo that’s not quite a silhouette, but is still too dark to make out the subject clearly against a bright background.

Wedding photographers have been dealing with just this sort of lighting situation for years when photographing bridal parties on sunny days. They don’t want their subjects to face the sun as that would make them squint so and they usually fix the problem by using a flashgun, or a reflector, to illuminate the dark front of the happy couple. Sadly, flashguns aren’t always practical with wildlife which may be too far away for the flash to make much difference. It’s also not very practical to wave a big reflector around to bounce sunlight back to the subject as that rather negates all the trouble you’ve gone to to conceal yourself from the animal.

However, there is one large natural reflector that you can use: a body of water. Water has the happy habit of reflecting light very well and by photographing animals on the edge of lakes, some natural light will bounce back onto your subject and help illuminate the side facing you.

This also has the advantage that it’s the same kind of light (the same colour temperature) as all the other light in the picture, so you don’t have to worry about using gel filters on flashes to try and match their contribution with the ambient light.

This technique works best with large bodies of water (a puddle won’t make much difference to a back-lit swan). It’s often best to use spotmeter mode to set exposure for the subject.

I often dial in a bit of negative exposure compensation to slightly darken the subject to emphasis the rim of light on the feathers or fur at the subjects edge. Keep the highlight warning set on your camera’s playback to make it easier to see if you’ve overexposed the image (a few spots of pure white around the edge of the subject are usually fine). Dark backgrounds usually work best (the brighter the sunlight, the darker the background that you need for this to be effective - a light background will usually burn out when you set exposure for the subject in midday sun.) It’s a good idea to keep the sun itself out of your image, unless you want a lot of lens flare. And speaking of lens flare, if you want to avoid it then it’s a good idea to use a lens hood and to make sure that your lens and any filters you are using are clean and free from dust. Depending on the angle of the sun, you can get some nice internal lens patterns (the roundish shapes in the water in the image above).

It’s easiest to back-light effectively when the sun isn’t at it’s brightest, so shooting early in the morning and late in the afternoon is a good way to get started. You don’t have to use water as the only reflector - with winter coming up, don’t forget that other great natural reflector when shooting back-lit images: snow.

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MIRROR, MIRROR...

Blue Tit reflecting on life Canon EOS 1DX, EF500mm f/4L IS II, 1/640th sec @ f/5, ISO 1600

Building a portable reflecting pool can help transform your garden bird photography

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lthough it’s nice to photograph in exotic locations, we shouldn’t ignore the wildlife photography opportunities on our doorstep (literally). Most gardens are visited by a variety of birds. Even small plots in the middle of towns can draw in quite a few species with the help of a few carefully positioned bird feeders.

To make the most of this, it’s worth constructing a simple set to photograph birds in. The idea is to provide an aesthetically pleasing setting that is also attractive to feathered visitors. It’s quite easy to set-up a reflecting pool using cheap, easily sourced materials.

The additional advantage of the one I’m going to describe here is that it is easily taken down when you need the garden to be nice and tidy for, say, a barbecue A Robin surprised in the bath Canon EOS 1DX, EF500mm f/4L IS II, 1/400 party. sec @ f/7.1, ISO 1600, tripod, hide The heart of the set is the pool and I’ve found that large plant trays make ideal water holders. You’ll need something fairly long if you want to ensure that there’s enough water for a decent reflection - I’ve found that a meter is is about the minimum size. You’ll need to ensure that your tray is at least 2cm deep, is dark coloured (black is best for reflections) and doesn’t have 26 / WILDLIGHT

any drainage holes. Plastic trays sold for hydroponics fit the bill nicely. In Europe, Garland manufacture a variety of shallow plastic trays, several of which are ideal. The tray I’m using here is their 120cm by 55cm model (they also make 100cm by 100cm and 120cm by 120cm). If you shop around you can often pick a new one up quite cheaply on ebay (I paid about £12 for this one).

Unless you enjoy lying on the ground, you’ll want to raise your tray above ground level. Ideally, your camera will need to be level (or just above level) with the surface of the water so that you are at eye level with the birds. A garden table works well or wooden fruit boxes are a cheap alternative, although they don’t look quite as nice. As you’ll be filling the tray with water and other heavy items it’s a good idea to place some supporting wooden beams under the tray to prevent it from bending, as shown below (your local DIY shop will have a range of these in stock).

It’s important to place the tray so that it’s both somewhere attractive to birds and has a nice background for photography. Birds like to have nearby cover, so positioning the tray with bushes , trees or a hedge on one side is usually a good idea. Quite often

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Starling having a good splash about Canon EOS 1DX, EF500mm f/4L IS II, 1/640 sec @ f/5.6, tripod, hide

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birds will drink straight after eating a dry food, such as bird seed, so placing feeders around the pool will help bring birds into the right vicinity. Make sure that the feeders aren’t hanging over the tray or you’ll end up with seeds dropping into the water which is both unsightly and a health risk to birds as they may rot and poison the water.

Usually an uncluttered smooth background is best. The easiest way to get this is to have bushes or trees in the distance behind the tray, and the camera near to the front of the tray. I tend to find that placing the camera so that it will just focus on the nearest part of the water is usually a good starting point. Obviously, this will depend on how close your lens focuses.

If the minimum focus distance of your lens is quite long, then you could try reducing it by adding an extension ring between the lens and camera (most camera manufacturers make these and, as they are just spacers without any glass in them, they don’t reduce the optical performance of the lens).

Cheaper third-party alternatives are available - just make sure that any you buy support autofocus as some don’t). Extension rings work best on prime (i.e. fixed focal length) lenses - on many zooms, they won’t work as the complex optics of the lens often means the focussing point of the lens

with the extension ring can be shorter than the length of the lens itself. The ideal distance from the tray to the background will depend on the lens you’ll be using. Lenses with long focal lengths (300mm upwards) and large maximum apertures (e.g. f/4 and wider) will let you get away with a shorter distance to the background than if you use an f/5.6 or 200mm lens. The only sure way of telling is to take a picture and see what the background looks like.

Finally, you’ll need to make sure that the light is in the right place for photographing. This depends on taste (although most people like the light to be behind them). You’ll need to check that the light is where you want it at the time of day you’ll be doing most of your photographing.

Wherever you position the camera, you’ll need to ensure that it (and the photographer) are concealed. A popup hide (as shown in the image left) is the most flexible solution (a wide variety of inexpensive models are available from Amazon, or if you’d like something a bit more serious www. wildlifewatchingsupplies.co.uk offers very good cloth dome hides). You could shoot from an (open) window in your house / garden shed if you can position the tray appropriately

for cover, background and light.

Camouflage netting draped around the camera and window is very helpful for remaining hidden from the birds visiting the tray.

The next problem is how to make sure that birds land in the right part of the tray for photography - i.e. the far end.

You can dissuade birds form landing at the sides of the tray by putting large branche/small logss along the edges - these need to be high enough to make it awkward for a bird to reach down to the water when standing on them. At the far end of the tray (where you want the birds to land) place thinner branches, or bark to just cover the plastic wall from view. Building a ramp into the water from bark also helps smaller birds. The final trick is to prevent your feathered visitors landing at the near end of the tray with their back to you. I use a couple of ridged plastic cat deterrents under the water (the ones I use were labelled ‘ Cactus spikes’). These are not sharp and won’t harm the birds, but they make it difficult for them to wade in the water so they will usually use the far end of the tray in preference.

The top right image shows the sort of view you should get looking through the camera once everything is in place.

This is shot with a 500mm f/4 lens with

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a 12mm extension ring about 2.5m from the tray. The background is a bush about 5m behind the tray. As the bush is tall, it gives a nice green reflection in the water. Hard to believe that this is just a plastic tray with a few bits of mossy branch added, isn’t it?

As the water is still rather than flowing, you’ll need to change it periodically to prevent it from becoming stagnant.

Popping a hosepipe in for five minutes a day helps but a complete change of water will be needed after a few days.

Once everything is in place, you’ll probably need to leave things for a few days to allow birds to get used to the set-up before you start photographing.

Although reflections are the most obvious photographic option, you’ll also be able to get images of birds splashing about in the water and, if you’ve used nice branches at the sides of the tray, images of birds perching on these. (Drilling holes into the top of the side branches in which you can hide peanuts and bird seed will help).

One of the nice things about this setup is that it’s very easy to change.

Bored with a mossy branch? Why not try pebbles instead? Or aquatic plants, or sand... it’s up to you.

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HIGH-RISE LIFE, FOX-STYLE Visiting urban foxes that live their lives on the rooves and garden walls of an East London street.

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An urban fox on the prowling the flat rooves in East London.

Canon EOS 1DX, EF500mm f/4L IS II, 1/320 sec @ f/4, ISO 5000

R

ecently I spent what seemed like a long time balancing precariously at the top of ladders or crouched low behind walls in the East of London. Such is the life of someone photographing wild urban foxes.

I’d been invited to see the foxes by Gill, a lovely lady who is passionate about her local wildlife and has been keeping an eye on the foxes for several years, providing food and medical care throughout the year (Mange is a nasty disease that is fatal to Foxes, and Gill has treated many animals with the help of The National Fox Welfare Society).

Talking to Gill, I learned a great deal about foxes. For instance, urban foxes typically live for less than two years traffic accounts for a depressingly high number of early deaths.

The foxes I visited live in gardens in the centre of a very populated area. As many of the houses have dogs, which are not generally friendly towards foxes, the foxes had developed a cunning strategy. By keeping to rooftops, shed roofs, walls and trees the foxes live life on a separate level to the dogs and can move freely around their territory while the dogs watch from below (hence my need for a ladder).

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A WIDER VIEW

Using Captive Animals To Get Unusual Viewpoints

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I love photographing wildlife, but sometimes I take time out to shoot captive animals, usually to get shots of particular species for image agencies. Looking through my image database, roughly 20% of my portfolio is made up of captive animals.

Working with captive animals makes it possible to get shots that would be almost impossible with wildlife. This gives you an opportunity to get creative and show the creature in a different way. On a recent shoot of captive birds of prey in the Czech republic, I got the opportunity to photograph a Little Owl. The falconers obligingly placed the owl in a natural hollow in a tree which made a nice shot (see previous page).

It’s nice and natural looking, with a distant background that’s blurred to avoid distractions and lots of texture and detail in the feathers and tree bark made possible by close up, low ISO shooting (something that’s pretty rare with the owl’s wild cousins). So, overall a pleasing image, but to be honest, not much different from most other captive little owl shots. Time to get a bit more creative.

I wanted to get something that exploited the approachability of the tame owl but still showed it in the context of it’s surrounds. Obviously, getting much closer would give a more dramatic view but how to include some of the environment, and give the shot a different feel to the telephoto images I normally get of wild owls? You’d hardly ever use a very wide angle lens to photograph wild owls - you normally can’t get close enough to them - so using one here would be the opposite of a conventional shot. I duly attached a 24mm lens and got close to the owl - about 30cm away. This gave me a view of the owl staring into the lens with the tree trunk some of the forest in the background. Not bad, but could we go further?

Normally, I try to shoot animals at their eye level. Shooting down detaches the viewer from the animal, eye-level puts them into its world. So eye level is ‘normal’ shooting, and

The Rogue Flashbender with diffusion panel fitted to a speedlight. This extremely portable softbox softens the otherwise harsh ight from a speedlight very effectively.

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above is not that good... what about below? I got the camera to the base of the tree and pointed upwards at the owl. This gave a much more dramatic viewpoint. The wide angle lens exaggerated perspective making the tree trunk seem taller which gave a sense of the little owl being a small creature.

It also gave a view of the forest from a different angle. BYou can see my initial attempt top-right. While I liked the unusual perspective, the white sky and shadowy base of the tree meant that the shot didn’t really work.

A couple of days later the weather was sunny and I had the opportunity to try the shot again. This time I exposed the image for the sky in order to get a little color rather than white. This meant that the foreground and owl were very underexposed. From my previous attempt, I was ready for this and had a solution: flash. I used a radio triggered Canon EX600-RT speedlight fitted with a a small softbox (in this case, the very portable but strangely named Rogue Flash Bender and diffusion screen). The radio triggering meant that I could get the flash off camera and avoid the rabbitin-the-headlights look common in hotshoe-mounted flash images. I was fortunate in having a Voice Activated Light Stand with me to hold the flash in the right place (in this case, the ever obliging Filip Fabian of Tatra Photography www. tatraphotographyworkshop.com). The centre of the soft box was positioned at owl eye level about 30 degrees right of camera, tilted slightly upwards. By having the light source a little off centre, I kept a little shadow on the right hand edge of the hollow which gave the impression of depth. The soft box produced a much less harsh light than bare flash, and created a nicer catchlight in the owl’s eyes. I used the flash in TTL mode, but with flash exposure compensation at -1 stop as I didn’t want the owl too bright compared to the sky. I also used a wider aperture than previously as I didn’t think stopping down to f/8 had made for a good image in my previous attempt. The final image is below right.

The final image - adding a flashgun has allowed the aperture to be reduced just enough to give a hint of colour in the sky.

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