squinting sparrow
Originally uploaded by j_wijnands.

Doesn't that sound like a ubuntu version?

I was in the Dolfinarium, our dutch version of seaworld but a lot smaller.

Anyway, places like that where food is sold and eaten you find house sparrows. Usually mangy little birds that clearly show they live on junkfood. Not this little lady, a healthy looking bird taking a few seconds to enjoy the sun while the whole clan is busy getting the seeds from these plants.

I really like this shot, it's extremely rare for me to find a small bird such as this relaxed enough to display this kind of behaviour.

Back to shooting deer

Or, sometimes it comes together. After my earlier success I did something really well when I came back from vacation and did my first sanity walk.

First I met this big fallow, ehh, fellow:



Exposure 0.005 sec (1/200)
Aperture f/5.6
Focal Length 300 mm
ISO Speed 1600

And a few minutes later this nice roe deer male came out of the undergrowth, stood there looking at me and continued it's way.



Exposure 0.013 sec (1/80)
Aperture f/5.6
Focal Length 300 mm
ISO Speed 400

It's these things that the 70-300 VR does very well on the D300. Not too small, not too far away. I am quite proud of these. The fallow deer stands out well from the background and the roe is so typical for the way you often see this species.

Sandisk Sansa Clip+ review
A review of the Sandisk Sansa Clip+ 4gb mp3 player.

Over the last year or so my taste in music has changed dramatically. From a lot of pop, rock and country I've shifted to classical, opera and jazz. A taste in music that my old player, a Creative Zen V plus, could not cope with well. So it was time for a new device.
Last of a dying breed?
At least, so it sometimes seems to me. Look around in any shop and you will see multimedia devices in abundance, capable of playing videos, games and who knows what else? Devices dedicated to playing just music are becoming a rare breed.

Sandisk? Don't they make memory cards?
Yes they do, good and expensive cards. But they also make a series of fine mp3 players. I found this particular model trough a lot of searching and settled on it after reading this:
http://www.anythingbutipod.com/archives/2009/08/sandisk-sansa-clip-plus-review.php

So, what do you get?
Well, for not quite 50 euros I got a player, a set of cheap earbuds and a standard look usb-mini usb cable. Oh, and a manual in just about every European language.

What does it look like?

Tiny. A very prominent screen, slot on the right for a micro sd card, the same card used in almost all mobile phones, headphone connector. Tiny powerswitch on top and that's it. Oh, and a clip of course, integrated in the player.

Using it
Well, that's what's important isn't it? If you bought it for the looks you should have bought an ipod.

At first power-on it asks you the language you want to use and the region of the world. If you select Europe then you will get a volume limiter to prevent hearing damage.
There's a few free tracks included which I wiped immediately.

Transfering data is a matter of hooking it up to your computer, waiting a few moments and that's it. After that you can either use mediaplayer or another specialized tool such as mediamonkey or you can simply copy/paste with a file manager like windows explorer.

I loaded the device with a mix of medium and high quality mp3 files and a few flac files, plugged in my trusty sennheiser pmx-60, fiddled briefly with the album selector and settled down for a good listen.

OK, wow! Or WOW! Now, this bit is hard to describe. Clarity, pureness, depth. Suddenly a 192kb mp3 file sounds a bit mediocre, higher bitrates sound a lot better but with FLAC it really shines. This unit can easily give the kenwood set in my living room a run for it's money.

I compared this with a current generation Ipod touch. It's very close, mainly a matter of taste. Personally I think the Clip+ sounds just a bit better, crispier.

Sound quality aside, there's more to like. The clip is designed very well, you will not loose this, even in the gym. The control buttons work, providing just enough feedback. The screen is readable enough in the sun. The player charges with every standard mini-USB charger. Unlike the creative players which force you to buy a special charger this works with everything.

Conclusion
Costing only 40% of an ipod touch the Sansa Clip+ brings impressive sound quality in a very manageable package. If you just want to listen to your music and you value sound quality more than buying the same mediaplayer everyone else has then this is highly recommended!

Swallows in flight

I've seen swallows in flight quite a few times. Up until recently they proved to be very elusive models since the average swallow has a very erratic and rather random flight path. Combine that with their small size and high speed (I am going to do my very best not to quote Monty Python in this post!)

So, what I ended up with was a lot of blurry pictures of landscape where a swallow had just passed.

Untill a few weeks ago during our holliday in Somerset. There on the roof of a pub I noticed three fledgling barn swallows making an incredible amount of noise. Then I saw one of the parents swoop down and very quickly stuff a morsel of food into the fledglings. Despite having consumed most of a pint of Cotleigh's "snowy" ale already on an empty stomach I managed to get my camera out of the car and shoot a few frames.

Now this was at 1730 on a very overcast afternoon. Not much light. I quickly found out that I needed 1/2000 to freeze the action which ment shooting at high iso and almost wide open. Even at 300mm I had to crop so I ended up running Dfine 2.0 to remove the worst of the noise.

(all pics clickable)












Despite the obvious shortcomings I think these are excellent examples of behavioural pictures, they show behaviour that you don't see all that often or easily.

It's diffiicult to avoid

DSC_9537
Originally uploaded by j_wijnands.

A black and white conversion if you're dealing with steam engines. However in this case it wasn't because I wanted to emphasize the mood. No, I just had to deal with a high contrast and a blown sky. I n color I just didn't get the emphases on the three guys.

Intense pictures from the Vietnam war

Found this via nikonrumors which featured it because #19 is a photographer with a Nikon. All the rest is interesting as well.



And a free documentary on frontline photograhper Robert King:

Watch more free documentaries

Crossing the channel

DSC_8601
Originally uploaded by j_wijnands.

After our summer holliday in Cornwall last year turned out to be very nice we decided to go back this year.

First thing to solve is how to cross the channel. Last year's ferry crossings where somewhat less than a spectacular success. On the crossing from Calais to Dover we had to wait aboard the ferry for more than an hour because of a problem with the moorings in Dover.

Add to that the fact that you are herded from your car to the upper deck where there's a load of overpriced shops and restaurants and bars and very little possibilities to sit quietly. Throw in a mix of unwashed truck drivers who lie down wherever they can and busses full of schoolkids, half of them acting like getting an ASBO is a more important ambition that actually graduating school.
Oh, and most of the family gets seasick on a ferry.

So, this year the train, the tunnel or the chunnel or whatever else you want to call the eurotunnel. I loved it. You drive up, your number plate is scanned, you confirm your departure time. There's time to visit the toilettes in the terminal building (unlike the ferries the terminal building is cleaned at least a few times a day) and you drive your car in the train just like this. Relax for half an hour and drive away in Dover.

Esther staring out the window

Esther staring out the window
Originally uploaded by j_wijnands.

Somehow my 50mm f1.8 and the light in my kitchen work so very well together. Like this shot. Focussed on the eye. Ran the pic trough capture nx, applied a touch of skin softner and a bit of glamour glow and this is the result. I like it!

Reality check

For lack of a better word let's call it that.

Anyone who spends any time around the major photography sites on the internet will notice there's an almost insane obsession with gear. We want top notch, a lot of us are willing to pay a lot of money for it and when we don't get what we want the first reaction is to throw money at it.

Now take a look at this:



Of course it's not serious, it's poking fun at a certain kind of photographer. But, let's be honest, how many of us haven't been in this frame of mind a little bit at one time or another?

Now let's take this one.



It's kinda long but this guy says a few very good things.

• know your gear
• if you buy a new lens get to know it before buying another one
• visualize your shots

I think all three are equally important. The last point is perhaps the most interesting. If you visualize something but you can't get it to turn out the way you want those website I mentioned earlier can be useful. Post your pic, with full exif, describe what you did and what you are not happy with. Good chance someone can help.

Of course sometimes the conclusion that you are expecting unreasonable things from your gear. Take this one.



Shot at iso 800 and a severe crop. ISo 800 will already show noise. A high contrast situation such as this will only make that worse. At a crop and you will see even more noise.

Conclusion. Lower the iso and bring my monopod. Or get closer. Or replace the 70-300 by something longer.

Sometimes techincal perfection doesn't matter as much as mood

fallow males
Originally uploaded by j_wijnands.

At least, that's what I think when I view this shot. Early morning, not much light. There's noise, I probably didn't get the best out of it in photoshop and still..

Getting out of your photographic comfort zone.

I think it's important to get out of your photographic comfort zone once in a while. Most amateur photographers, myself included, start out shooting absolutely everything they see. After a while they focus a bit more on a few subjects, take the occasional foray in unknown territory and find a niche they are comfortable with. For me that's nature and birds.

Recently I decided, together with a friend, to go to a motor cross event in a nearby village. Loads of people, noise, action, quite the opposite of what I usually do.




It took me a few minutes to get used to it all but then all the practice I put into shooting birds in flights started to pay off. I got an almost 90% keeper rate on most of the action.




But then the composition challenge started to hit me. How on earth do you shoot something that will interest other people? Get any sort of emotional reaction?

So I started to look for patterns.



But it's hard! Everything moves all the time.



In the end I decided to put it off as a learning experience. Technical proficiency doesn't mean interesting pictures. It takes some creativity and a good eye for what's going on around you. It also made me realize that I enjoy my niches much more. When I see this:



I get a sense of, well, fulfilment, joy, no matter what you want to call it. This is the kind of photography I want to do and excel at. And, since it's a hobby and not a profession I can do it and I can continue trying to improve myself.

I'd forgotten how much fun macro can be

DSC_7108
Originally uploaded by j_wijnands.

I had a spare 20 minutes this morning and I decided to see if there was anything interesting to shoot in my garden. Now that the summer progresses it's becoming more and more difficult to get good bird shots. Foliage gets in your way and with the weather we've had the last few weeks there is an abundance of food so they no longer need to come and beg in my garden.

So, I decided to dust of my Tokina 100mm f2.8 macro and go insect hunting. Immediately I was reminded of the difficulties that you face when shooting insects. DoF is very, very shallow, with macro F8 is pretty much wide open. Your models don't sit still and even the slightest movement on the part of the photographer cause an out of focus picture.

I got out my monopod, adjusted the length and move the head far down and went hunting. Focussing tends to go best manually.

This is a bumblebee snacking on the chives flowers in my herb garden. Nice combination, chives is a tasty herb, goes great in an omelette, can endure harsh winters and it flowers intensely. Bumblebees are also good. Good natured little girls, won't harm any humans unless you really, really corner them.

Nikon predictions 2010

If there's one thing common on all the gearhead forums (dpreview for example) it's the continuing debate of "when will Nikon release something new?" quite often in combination with "I want to buy a D-whatever but am afraid that something new will come out just after I bought it".

The latter seems silly to me, the current lineup (with the exception of the Nikon D3000 perhaps) is so good that any camera will still be good enough for 99% of the users even after Nikon has released their latest model.

Having said that, here are my predictions for 2010:

Based on history as I remember it and my gut instinct.

D90 follow-up
(your guess is as good as mine as to the name of that one) sometime mid this year. I'd expected it already but end September at the latest. Slightly more mega pixels perhaps, (14mpix Sony sensor perhaps) certainly a big jump in video capabilities to full HD. A stop more usable high iso if we are lucky but I doubt that.


D3000 replacement
In my opinion this is desperately needed. It's the black sheep in the line-up with that old sensor from the D60. Don't expect video there but it needs to beat the Canon 1000D. Knowing Nikon it may not materialize this year if at all. I suspect a lack of a proper camera is hurting them more than they may realize. On any gearhead forum people will advice against buying this so first time buyers go out and get a Sony or a Canon instead and stick with that brand if they like the hobby.

D700S:
Tricky to predict. I'd expect something that fixes the few flaws in the D700 and at the same time will try to hit the 7D/ 5dmk2 segment of the market hard but which will fail to compete on price.

Nikon EVIL
(EVIL stands for electronic viewfinder interchangeable lens. These cameras are now also being called m 4/3 even though that's Olympus' solution for this class.)
After the succes of the olympus Pen other companies jumped on this bandwagon. Sony has just entered this market with two cameras. Based on that and recent patent applications I expect Nikon to enter this market as well.
I'm 99.9% sure Nikon has prototyped this already. I suspect the first iteration encountered technical or marketing problems and had to have some major rework done. I still expect this in Q3. If it does reach the market by then it may very well mean the end of the D3000 part of the lineup.

Lenses
Difficult to predict. I'd expect a 80-400 follow-up and the rumours of a 24-120 replacement in f4 are too strong to ignore. Possibly a medium long tele prime early next year (135ísh with VR but without DC)
I expect no new kit lenses and nothing really surprising in DX although I suspect quite a few people at Nikon are wondering how they can exploit and repeat the 35mm f1.8 G success even further since the 85mm f3.5 micro doesn't seem to be nearly the success Nikon has hoped for.

Flashes:
A SB-600 follow-up is long overdue. Outside chance that if the EVIL does reach the market there will be a baby SB-400 especially for that.

Other goodies
Hopefully Nikon will realize there's a huge demand for good software as well. View NX is horrible as a catalog tool and Capture NX is expensive and not well suited for bulk work.
In an ideal world we would get a workable View NX and a free Capture NX lite and we would see the prices of a full featured Capture NX positioned to undercut Lightroom.

If you want more predictions head over to Nikon Rumors.

One of the nice things of my new office location

Blue tit
Originally uploaded by j_wijnands.

Is a wooded area with a lot of birds. There's nesting blue tits. I've spotted a woodpecker. The most common waterbirds. According to http://observado.org/index.php there's even some rarer species of woodpecker and Kingfishers have also been spotted.

Of course shooting these small birds with a 70-300 in a densely wooded area at the middle of the day is tricky to say the least.

How I feel right now

HDR world
Originally uploaded by j_wijnands.

Yep, this symbolizes it rather well.

I start therapy on Monday, bit apprehensive on one hand but also very looking forward to it. We'll see.

Bird photography, putting in backyard practice.

Any regular reader must know by now that I'm trying to improve my nature photography and that I am putting in a lot of practice to get better at bird shooting. The reason for that is simple, there's a lot more birds, both in species and numbers, to shoot here than mammals or other big animals.

Last night after dinner I noticed that the house sparrows had managed to empty the feeder in 24 hours. Since I am low on seed for the feeder I decided to get some stale bread, cut it really fine and treat the birds to that. Soon after I noticed that this totally changed their flight patterns, from their usual hops to and from the feeder they now went on different routes. Why not put in a bit of practice? There wasn't much light left but I could still practice framing and focussing.

I was right, this is good practice and it's fun too!

I especially like these three showing typical house sparrow behaviour. After the young have left the nest you can still see them begging for food from their parents. Af first they will always give in to the begging but after some days they are left to fend for themselves. I think there's a bit of a teaching aspect as well, the chicks watch from a safe place and see their parents swoop down and pick up food.

Pics clickable for bigger version. Everything Nikon D300 + 70-300 VR

Ridiculous contest rules.

As you can see at the top of the page I am trying to participate in a nikon sponsored contest. Unfortunately I made the mistake of choosing a contest where the first round is a popularity contest. And I just don't have the social network for that.

Take this shot: http://www.whoareyouwithnikon.nl/index.php?a=inzending&code=4be2a464a53bc still top of the list. And this http://www.whoareyouwithnikon.nl/index.php?a=inzending&code=4be42edc38d67 is stuck at 5 votes.

That's no photography contest, that's just a popularity poll.

I'll pull those widgets tomorrow.

Succesful hunting.

A good morning's hunting today. All pictures are clickable for the big version.

First of all a woodpecker, great spotted woodpecker if I am not mistaken.


Normally these birds are difficult to approach and almost impossible to get on eye level. Today I was lucky. It spotted me, flew a circle and decided to inspect this young tree, something I've never seen one do. I approached slowly with the camera on my eye and took care to gently "roll the shutter.
Exposure: 0.001 sec (1/800)
Aperture: f/5.6
Focal Length: 300 mm
Focal Length: 302.0 mm
ISO Speed: 720

Next a blue tit. Common as muck but still a nice bird.



I should have taken a bit more care with my settings.
Exposure: 0.003 sec (1/400)
Aperture: f/13.0
Focal Length: 300 mm
Focal Length: 302.0 mm
ISO Speed: 640
If I'd gone down a bit on iso, up a touch on shutter speed I could have ended around f8-f11 and would have gotten something just a bit sharper. The 70-300VR is reaching the diffraction limit at this aperture and the D300 has already passed that.

Last shot, a mute swan.


I noticed two serious photographers working on something near the water. Big lenses,lens coats, tripods, camouflage gear and taking their time. So I walked up slowly as not to disturb whatever they were shooting. Mute swans are not easily scared, you see this species in parks even. This one swam up to see if I was going to offer any food but was distracted by some water plants.

Settings:
Exposure: 1/2500 sec
Aperture: f/9.0
Focal Length: 270 mm
Focal Length: 277.0 mm
ISO Speed: 640

Now why is the shutterspeed so high? Simple, I metered on the swan and by this time the sun was out already. I did pull a bit in processing but not too much. If I'd used matrix metering here I would have ended up with proper exposed water and a fuzzy, somewhat overexposed swan.

Sharpness is as good as it is going to get with my gear.


All in all a good day. I was glad I was wearing my hat. We are approaching the time of the year now where half a liter water for a 90 minutes, 7.3km walk is not enough anymore.

I got this one from my wife and absolutely love it. The way it makes people look at every day surroundings in a different manner. That's what you can also accomplish with really good photography

Reading ebooks on a nokia 5800

History
Back in the latter half of the 1990s I got my first mobile phone, a Nokia 8110 and my first PDA soon after, a US Robotics Palm pro. Back then phones could do little more than be used to call people with and to send them a text message. The PDA was used to sync my mail and agenda and, soon after, to read ebooks using cspotrun as my reading application.

A second palm followed and then a series of Windows mobile devices. With windows mobile I soon discovered Microsoft's Reader. The first application designed by a big company with usability and a good user experience in mind. The, back then, pretty much closed lit format was a nuisance at times but by and large it all worked.

Present day
These days the PDA device, something running windows mobile but without a telephone option, is about as rare as an honest politician. HP has 2 models left in it's range and that is pretty much it.

Instead we now have companies like HTC turning out a constant flow of nifty devices running Windows Mobile and Google Android. Samsung tries to rival that and Nokia makes devices with or without touch screen running various versions of Symbian.

Nokia 5800
Last week my business phone a Motorola V8 died on me, I couldn't hear anyone on the phone any more but they could still hear me. Since it was two years old and quite battered and worn I decided to replace it with something else. But with what? I wanted to get something that could potentially replace not only that phone but also the Ipaq I am using. So it had to sync with outlook, had to be able to run navigation on, play a few casual games and it needed to have the option to read ebooks.

First I started looking at the HTC offerings but couldn't find anything I liked for less than 400 euros or so. Most of the cheaper models didn't have a scoll button and I did not like the 2.5-2.8 inch QVGA (320x240) screens much.

So I looked elsewhere. Samsung didn't have much and I still have this prejudice that this company is not able to build something that will last me for two years. Next supplier was Nokia. I've had good experiences with Nokia in the 1990s and the early parts of this decade but we lost touch around 2002. Last year I bought a 3720 classic which, despite a few design stupidities, still does a good job. This time I wanted something with a bit more power. In order to use navigation you really want Series 60 symbian. For reading you want a high resolution screen, preferably of a decent size and a touch screen is nice.

After looking at the E-series (E52, nice speedy processor and a friendly price tag, E75 with it's flip-out keyboard) I broadend my search and noticed the 5800. On paper it seemed to have everything GPS, Wifi, the latest version of Series 60 Symbian and a 3.2 inch 640x360 screen.

I won't bore you with all the other details about the phone, there's plenty of dedicated phone websites and blogs out there that can do that. Instead I want to continue this post on my attempts to make this into an ebook reading device or ereader.

Ebooks
An ebook is nothing more than a file containing the text of a book. It may contain layout and formatting or even DRM or none of these. There's an abundance of these things available on the internet from the latest best-sellers in shops to freely available classical works in the Gutenberg project.

Since this is still a relatively new technology and since there are many parties trying to capture a part of what they perceive to be a lucrative market there is also an abundance of file formats in the ebook community. Depending on what you want to read on what kind of device and in which language you may end up with a different file format.

Reading applications
To read a book you need an application that allows you to do so. On my Microsoft Mobile devices I mainly used Microsoft's reader which is free. Unfortunately it seems to be largely abandoned now by Microsoft. There has not been a new version for quite some time and support for the current versions of Windows Mobile is absent.
On Symbian I found for main reading applications.

Mobireader, once the market leader on palm and early Symbian. Bought two years ago by Amazon and since then development has halted in favour of the Kindle. Despite the warnings you get during installation is does work. Since it pre-dates the S60 5th edition on the Nokia 5800 it doesn't understand a touch screen. Scrolling is done via the volume buttons on the side of the phone and there are users that report the need to reset their phone to get it out of full screen mode.

eReader Pro, an application brought to you by Fictionwise. They've been around for ages and it shows. The application is slick, the website is well thought out and they support S60 5th and explicitely name the 5800 as a compatible device.
I found the app sluggish to start and couldn't get anything out of my old collection to display on it. If you happen to have compatible files this may be the reader for you.

Qreader: The opposite of eReader. It looks and feels like a hobby product. It installs and starts up quickly. I could not get it to open any files. It might be me but I found file navigation horrible. The website seems to be "temporarily" down it just offers the file for download. Perhaps it will return with a revamped version but this didn't do anything for me.

ZXReader. An application made by a Russian. Website is also in Russian. Download link is here at the bottom of the page. Get the link under the header: v1.5.0 РЕЛИЗ
Скачать: Symbian 9.4

ZXReader supports fb2 format and plain txt. fb2 allows for more formatting but I've had some conversion issues, try it first if that doesn't work, try txt. The application has a somewhat uneven look, in parts it is very stylish, in parts it looks basic and unfinished. Despite that it starts up quickly, slows down slightly on displaying your cover image and then works fluently. Scrolling can be done by ticking the screen or making a swiping motion. It works well in automatic landscape mode as well.

For now ZXReader is my tool of choice.

Conversion and management
I mentioned earlier that there is still no single format for ebooks. ZXReader proves that. Everybody knows txt of course but I had never heard of the fb2 file format. There's a wiki entry on it here.
For file conversion I also did a lot of googling. I came across this blog post which had some tools. None of those worked well. After a lot more googling I found Calibre, a fine management and conversion tool for your ebook collection.

Calibre allows you to manage your collection, to keep the same book in various formats and, incredibly enough, to convert from and to almost all relevant file formats. It even has a build in previewer to see your new conversions.

First reading experiences
I tried to build a few fb2 books with limited success. Things like page breaks and especially special characters didn't seem to translate well or were not being shown properly. For some reason ZX Reader insisted on treating my fb2 conversions as though they are in the cp866 codepage which messes up a lot of special characters such as " or ó or ć and ň. I suspect this may be a bug in ZX Reader, after all it is a Russian application. Unfortunately I don't speak Russian so it will be difficult to submit a bug report.

In the end I decided to test a few text files and that works very nicely. It flows beautifully, it's rendered quickly and all the characters match.


Final thoughts
Symbian S60 Fifth Edition has a long way to go yet as a mature ebook reading platform. And which the rise of dedicated reader devices I wonder if it will complete that journey. What it desperatly need is a good application capable of reading the most common file formats. ZXReader has definite potential to be that reader.
Another alternative is that someone high in the Nokia corporate hierarchy accepts the fact that people do other things with a mobile besides listening to music or watching video clips of people hurting themselves. That seems unlikely since Nokia aims most of their products at people younger than 30 and they are notorious for having short attention spans. Even so, it may happen and if it does they could turn out a useable reader in a very short time. If they don't hurry and if ZXReader get it's act together, adds file types and translates it's website then they will corner the (niche) market of S60 5th edition reading applications.

Anyway, my compliments to Kovid Goyal for creating Calibre and the unknown Russian(s) that made ZXReader.

Just bought a nokia 5800 as a replacement of my defunct motorola V8 and aging ipaq. One of the things I want to do with it is reading ebooks. That proves to be rather tricky. A good reader for Symbian 60 s3 fp5 is tricky to find.

These sources seem interesting.

http://www.nokiaphoneblog.com/?p=2112
http://chathuraw.wordpress.com/2009/10/14/best-ebook-reader-s60-5th-edition/

I am so glad I do not live in the US of A.

From: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/03/pregnant_woman_tasered/

A federal appeals court says three Seattle police officers did not employ excessive force when they repeatedly tasered a visibly pregnant woman for refusing to sign a speeding ticket

So... either you sign the ticket or they will shock you until you give in. We've put people on trial for methods like this 60 years ago in Germany. Nice little town called Nuremberg was home to most of those trials.

Red squirrel backlit

Red squirrel backlit
Originally uploaded by j_wijnands.

Recently I blogged about how I improved a horrible shot of a squirrel into something acceptable.

Normally I get maybe half a dozen photo opportunities for squirrel a year. Now the second one right after the first.

Problem here is that the squirrel noticed me at the same time I noticed him. And squirrel tend to flee when they notice humans. This little guy was rather curious about me so decided to watch me from the safety of a tree. I shot about 8 frames of tihs animal before moving closer and spooking it of course.

On reviewing it closely I noticed I've focused a bit too much in front of the animal. Despite that I decided to keep it. I love the way the ears are accented by the backlight.

So, basically the age old question comes into it, do I go for technical perfection? Or do I let the mood into the picture? I decided on the latter.

Procrastination isn't the problem, it's the solution. So procrastinate now, don't put it off.
- Ellen DeGeneres

Bird Photography Part 3

(all pics are clickable)

Sunday morning, solid grey sky which is supposed to be good for bird photography since it provides a uniform diffuse light.

Now, my D300 tends to produce a fairly exact white balance in this kind of weather. That means that all the pics on automatic WB will get a rather blueish tint. I like to produce pictures that are a bit warmer in tone so I set it to 5880K. A value I know from experience will produce something I like. I gambled that it would work and save me time in processing.

There must be spring in the air, everything was rather restless. First thing I noticed were some very common mallards. Probably the most common waterfowl species here but good practice nonetheless.



Worked a bit on the exact crop and contrast. The result isn't too bad.

Exposure: 0.002 sec (1/500)
Aperture: f/5.6
Focal Length: 270 mm
Focal Length: 269.1 mm
ISO Speed: 1600

So, autoiso worked this time. I'd set the camera for 1/500 in S mode and the camera put the lens wide open and upped the iso all the way. Not very much light then.

The egyptian geese were feeling the spring as well, chasing eachother, even landing in trees to make noise at eachother. Using the AF button still does the trick:



Exposure: 0.001 sec (1/800)
Aperture: f/5.6
Focal Length: 300 mm
Focal Length: 302.0 mm
ISO Speed: 1600

Good thing I raised the shutter speed I think. Still, wide open at 300mm and iso 1600, it's not going to get me the best of pics.

In a stream in the woods I noticed a grey heron. Rather small bird for a heron. Not entirely sure what caused the focus error here but I do like the lines and the reflection.



Exposure: 0.002 sec (1/500)
Aperture: f/5.6
Focal Length: 250 mm
Focal Length: 254.0 mm
ISO Speed: 1600

Now, the first red squirrel of the season. Rather tricky animal to shoot, they don't sit still and if they do its often at the top of the tree. Up there the challenge is an often bright background and a very dark subject. That requires careful metering.

The unedited shot:




Click it and you will see a squirrel. Settings:
Exposure: 0.002 sec (1/640)
Aperture: f/5.6
Focal Length: 270 mm
Focal Length: 277.0 mm
ISO Speed: 1600

Ah, the camera did what I told it to do. Shutter speed is the speed I set, iso is at the limit I set in auto iso and the lens is as far open as it can go. That it's underexposed is not the cameras fault, there just wasn't any more light.

But, I'm shooting a D300 and that allows for some room in post processing. So, into capture NX and see what I can do with it.




By no means the best squirrel shot in the world but it's a lot nicer. I correct exposure here by almost 1.5 stops, played with the curves, cropped, adjust color balance somewhat, slapped on a contrast adjustment filter and this is the result.

Of course there is noise, there are limits to the D300 sensor and certainly to my processing skills. No matter how good your sensor is, when you underexpose and correct that you will get a load more noise than on a properly exposed picture.

Last shot, something you will encounter sometimes, the leftovers of a predator's meal. There's a big flock of pigeons in that area and occasionally the buzzards get lucky and catch one.



Gruesome perhaps but nature all the same.

So, lessons learned

• Auto ISO in S mode is good for birds in flight and rapidly changing light conditions
• If there isn't enough light your pictures won't come out as nice.
• Fieldcraft continues to be a challenge
• There is at least some truth to diffuse light being good for birds.
• Presetting white balance will save time in processing if you get it right.
  

Bird photography part 2

all pics are clickable

After blogging about my first problems here I decided to give it another try with the new settings in my camera.

First of all, using the AF button proved to be an interesting experience. It takes a bit of getting used to, at first you're jabbing the AE-L button by mistake but after that there's certainly a speed advantage there.

My first chance I got when an egyptian goose decided to fly around. Came almost directly over me to give me this shot:


Not bad at all but not quite the level of sharpness I am aiming for. Let's look at settings:

Exposure:	0.001 sec (1/800)
Aperture:	f/13.0
Focal Length:	270 mm
Focal Length:	269.1 mm
ISO Speed:	640

Hmm... 1/800 and still movement? Why? According to a quick google the canadian goose can fly anywhere between 50 and 90 km/h. Let's assume this goose can do the same and let's assume it was doing 40 km/h. That's 11.1 meters/second which means still about 1.4 cm of movement in that 1/800. Of course part of it was compensated for by my panning movement but still... So shutter speed remains an issue there. Spot metering worked very well here.

Next I encountered a flock of great tits and blue tits in a pine grove. Even though these are about as common as muck they are still good practice. Working distance is a factor with these birds. If you can get as close as 5 meters it's already a lot and then it's still a tiny bird.

Exposure:	0.001 sec (1/1250)
Aperture:	f/5.6
Focal Length:	300 mm
Focal Length:	302.0 mm
ISO Speed:	640

The issue here is that my settings didn't do what I'd expect them to do. Despite auto iso I was shooting wide open here and the 70-300VR isn't at it's best wide open.

1/1250 is enough to freeze these birds if they are just sitting there. If they flutter from one branch to the next it doesn't do it.



OK, so shutter speed remains a focus.

Now, standing still about 5 meters from the trees did allow the birds to get used to me and ignore me which resulted in these two:




and



On this shot you can see a few ticks around the bird's eye.

Now, later in the day this setting came back to bite me in the behind.



Granted, it's a unique moment, pre-mating activities of Storks. And yes, I had about 30 seconds before she fled the nest. And 1530 is not a good time for black&white birds. But why is this pic unsharp?

Exposure:	0.003 sec (1/320)
Aperture:	f/20.0
Focal Length:	300 mm
Focal Length:	302.0 mm
ISO Speed:	640

There we go. At f20 most consumer zooms the diffraction spook rears it's ugly head. According to Thom Hogan the d300 itself shows diffraction from f11 onwards.
What happened is that my spot metering adjusted perfectly for the focus point on a white part of the stork And since I was at a relatively low shutterspeed the camera raised the aperture to prevent overexposure.

Next stork shot, a bit later.



A lot sharper and no wonder since I was at f9.

So... lessons learned?
- shutter speed is so important with birds
- watch your metering, you don't want to enter the diffraction zone
- Birds in flight depend at least as much on you and your reaction speed as they do on your gear
- A 70-300mm zoom is short but it's still possible to get some decent bird shots with it.

I'm already looking forward to my next experimental session.

Anyone familiar with me, this blog or my photostream on flickr knows that I try to go at least once a week for a walk in nature. Usually I visit the Amsterdamse Waterleidingduinen and usually I carry my camera.

I’m skilled enough to get decent fallow deer shots almost weekly and the occasional good bird shot. I’ve been doing that slightly over a year now and I was so overconfident that I thought I was pretty good at it.

Now this Wednesday I visited the Island of “Tiengemeten”. It’s a small island about 30km south of Rotterdam that is being returned to nature. Lovely oasis of piece and quiet that is so rare in this country. A dyke has been breached to create a wetland area and the island is populated by several hunderd very noisy Barnacle Geese.

But, let’s start with this shot, the common shellduck

Looks good this small, best of about half a dozen. Click trough to the big version and you see there’s a few problems with it.

Next shot:

Click on that and it will be sharper. Too far away but sharper.

Let’s look at settings. The first;

Exposure: 0.001 sec (1/800)
Aperture: f/8.0
Focal Length: 300 mm
Focal Length: 302.0 mm
ISO Speed: 400

And the second pic:

Exposure: 0.001 sec (1/1250)
Aperture: f/8.0
Focal Length: 260 mm
Focal Length: 261.4 mm
ISO Speed: 400

Substantial difference in shutter speed.

Number three:

Exposure: 0.001 sec (1/2000)
Aperture: f/8.0
Focal Length: 260 mm
Focal Length: 261.4 mm
ISO Speed: 400

I got a few more but all in all perhaps 2 dozen keepers out of more than 200 pics. Not a good result. So I started looking for help.

http://www.birdphotographers.net/forums/showthread.php?t=58615
http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1039&message=34700638

Now it turns out my errors had a few causes.

1. Pretty lousy fieldcraft on my side. I’ve been spoiled by a landscape with loads of cover and animals and birds used to humans. On this island I encountered about a dozen other walkers the whole day. In my weekend walks I meet that many in 20 minutes.

2. Poor understanding of my camera. “automagic AF" just doesn’t hack it. I found this: http://johnfriend.blogspot.com/2009/10/nikon-d300-auto-focus-for-sports-i.html which explains a sports shooter’s setup for his D300. Most of that will be useable here.

3. No knowledge of my surroundings. Every encounter was a surprise, most flight paths were unexpected.

4. No knowledge of my models. I met at least 4 new species.

So, I now know more or less where it went wrong. I used my D300’s AF system ineffectively. I was overly optimistic on my shutter speeds and I was unrealistic in my expectations. A 370 euro zoom is no substitute for a 3000 euro zoom and a casual shot when walking is no substitute for spending 4 hours in a hide. Next step, go to a place with loads of seagulls and practice.

One final shot:

Rain

wet sheep
Originally uploaded by j_wijnands.

Rain. And not even a downpour but one of those steady persistent types that can last hours and hours. Hardly any colour difference in the sky, mostly solid grey. Missed a herd of male deer by about 150 meters or 3 minutes..

Now...do sheep shrink when they get wet?

Borough Market black & white

DSC_2669_DXO_agfa_apx25
Originally uploaded by j_wijnands.

Shot this at London's borough market. One of the few really nice spots I found in my weekend visit.
I tried to get something contrasty here and ended up with something I like but isn't likely to draw in the flickr crowds.

Synology DS110j review, part 2

Part 1 is here.
A little more than a month after I started using the Synology DS110j NAS I think it's time to share the experiences.

Web interface
It works, it works well. Only thing I had to get used to is that you need to grant access to the various applications on a different tab than where you create and manage user accounts. I do expect some changes in the 2.3 firmware which is in beta now.

Speed
A lot of question I see are things like "is 800mhz enough" and "is 128mb RAM enough?" My experience up until now is that yes it is. OK, granted, you can really stress that little box. I did so just last night by running a backup from an EXT3 volume to an NTFS volume, that conversion takes some power.

Downloading
What can I say. It works, it works ok out of the box and with SABNZBD on it it works like a dream!

Hooking up an additional drive
It works. On all three USB ports. A drive shows up in the file manager tree and you can use it, that's all there is to it. Speed is decent enough although copying 45 gb of DVD images took about 50 minutes.

What doesn't work?
Well, my main problems are with audio. OK, it can share my mp3 collection, that part works. There's a web player interface that works sort of but is cumbersome to create a playlist on the fly.
Squeezebox server is installable as a service on the device. And it may work if you have any squeezebox devices but it is not a viable solution as a web player. There are various other web solutions but most of them start the installation instructions by letting your PHP and webserver out of the webroot, not something that sounds very secure to me.
The web player is supposed to get a major overhaul in the 2.3 firmware and squeezebox server may work very well in conjunction with a Squeezebox touch which should be released this spring.

Should I buy this or a bigger unit?
Well, that really is up to you. I think 120 euros for what is basically a 800mhz miniature linux system is very reasonable. It does what I want it to do. Performance is OK for my needs. Yes you can have your backup disk in the same enclosure and if you don't already own a USB disk that would make sense. Yes you can buy a DS109+ and get more CPU power. But do you need that? With 3Tb disks scheduled to be released this year and 2Tb disks rapidly dropping in price ask yourself what you really need.

Any questions, feel free to contact me.