Project 52 by Geoff F

[Geoff F]

It does always seem that there are so many bad pictures for the one good shot. These are great!

Often with this sort of shot, John, the main problem is simply caused by the models failing to co-operate.

But there isn't much point in shouting at birds - although it can release a bit of tension.

In fact, once when shooting an insect which 'refused' show the area which was vital for identification, I found myself saying 'Come on you little minx, show me your leg'.

Fortunately, the men in white coats didn't hear!

[Donald]

Having once of twice dabbled in trying to photograph birds in flight (and failing miserably, for the most part), I am ina we of such as you, Geoff, who can produce what you in that Week 8 series. Wonderful things to look at.

[Letrow]

For a couple of hours the grey clouds parted and a little hazy sunshine appeared so I went to the fish quay looking for a suitable subject.

A few black-headed gulls were flying around and picking up some fish scraps. At this time of the year these little fast moving birds are just starting to develop their characteristic black heads.



This quick shot of a turning bird isn't perfectly sharp and has a little bit of noise in places but I liked the fast action of the wings.



These were both taken with my 7D and the Sigma 150-500 lens, hand held. As it turned out, most shots were around 200 mm so I would have probably found it easier if I had taken my faster focusing 70-200 instead. But I didn't know what I would find so I tried to cover myself for all eventualities.

1/1600 F13 for the first shot and F11 for the second; both at ISO 800.

After a few test shots at Tv setting, I switched to full manual camera control because the background was so variable.

Eventually, when I was able to get closer to the gulls I tried my 24-105 and increased the shutter speed a little. 1/2000 F10 ISO 640 for this shot of a bird about to pick up a little tit bit.



The angle of light was a bit difficult because there was a northerly wind and southerly sun. When looking for food these birds prefer to fly into the wind.

So it was mostly a case of shooting into the sun or getting shots from behind the birds without clearly seeing their heads. And the quay cast a shadow if the camera angle was too close.

Therefore, I took over 300 shots to get 6 at suitable angles.

Nice shots Geoff, especially the first one. Light against dark and it fills the frame in a great way. I am surprised that most of these shots were taken at 200mm and less. They look so close, so you must have been pretty close to the birds.

[Geoff F]

Thanks again, Donald & Peter.

Yes they were fairly close, although those images have been cropped a little. I was on the quay and there was a crab storebox just uptide from me which had a few food scraps gradually washing out of it.

One of the main problems with these little gulls is their fast and erratic flight, but when searching for food they tend to spend more time hovering into the wind, which does help.

[Teton Chuck]

Geoff, I am impressed with the quality of these shots. I have been trying to photograph birds in flight and would be very happy to get the quality you have achieved. Just now got to look at your P52 series. Very enjoyable.

[oldgreygary]

Geoff,

I like the range of 'Natural world' shots that you are showing. On my local park and in my allotment there are frequent flyovers of Geese, Swans etc. There are some ring necked parakeets around this way as well, if only I could get a picture of them!
I aspire to being able to achieve the same standard as your images. Great stuff!

Cheers for now

Gary

[Wendy Stanford]

Hi Gary, Your birds in flight are great, really like the expressive shapes of the wings in all 3, all very nicely in focus, makes me feel inspired to go and revist the lagoon and have another go at capturing the birds. well done

[Geoff F]

Chuck & Gary. The main requirement for flying birds is a suitable shutter speed. There isn't any point in getting perfect focus if the bird is causing excessive motion blur.

As a guide, 1/1000 might just suffice for gently gliding birds while those with flapping wings need something closer to 1/2000; or even faster in some circumstances.

Some people like to use multiple focus points but I prefer to work with just the centre point, or a group around the centre. This can make it more difficult to actually 'lock on' to a bird and I do miss a few; but I find it saves me getting false focus problems, particularly when there are more than one bird in the area, or other potential false targets.

Manual focus can often produce better results where there are a number of potentially confusing targets, such as a bird sitting in a tree. But most birds fly faster than I can manually focus. So auto focus usually works best for me under those conditions.

Exposure can be another tricky subject. Spot metering is usually best as the background can have have too much effect on an auto selected exposure setting. Particularly when the background keeps changing. For example one shot against trees and the next against the sky.

In which case, if you are able to work out what are the ideal settings for a particular scene, going fully manual can often produce the best results.

With this example, I took a few test shots at Tv setting then guessed what would be best based on those shots and switched to full manual. After checking the first few manual shots, I refined the adjustment a little more. And estimated the required variations when the lighting changed slightly.

This does, however have some limitations. For example, a case of 'Look at that', pick up camera and take a quick shot as the one and only bird flies past. Or, set up perfectly for white swans, then a black crow suddenly appears and does something really interesting.

But that's life I suppose.

[Geoff F]

For a few hours the persistent grey gloom changed to afternoon sunshine, although showers were beginning to form over the high ground.



This is part of the view from my house; with the Dartmoor hills just visible in the distance.

The excessively yellow sunshine has helped to show the variety of crops which are grown in these rather small fields. Ranging from grass, autumn sown cereals, sheep feeding on autumn sown fodder and newly ploughed soil.

Canon 7D with 24-105 L lens at 73 mm. F11, 1/250, ISO 400, handheld.

I actually walked a few yards along the road to achieve a slightly better angle but this meant getting into a somewhat hazardous position.

A sharp corner with just a crash barrier on the outside. Between the barrier and a 20 ft drop into gardens there is a 2 ft strip of rough grass; where I was standing. So I decided against using a tripod.

Although, on reflection, I would probably have managed with close spaced tripod legs which would have been sufficient to allow a slightly lower ISO.

I didn't fancy standing on the road side of the barrier.

[jeechu1970]

Nice one Geoff......i like it...........

[Goldcoastgolfer]

I'm afraid I don't have the eye for landscapes that a lot of the others have around here Looks like a beautiful scene and certainly doesn't give away the nature of the hazardous shooting location from which you took it!

A lot of interesting lines and shapes but when I looked in Light Box my eye was drawn to that working paddock in the front of the photo - I'm bet the full version has some really interesting detail in it.

[Geoff F]

A lot of interesting lines and shapes but when I looked in Light Box my eye was drawn to that working paddock in the front of the photo - I'm bet the full version has some really interesting detail in it.

That is the 'strip grazing' method, Mal. Plant a field with winter fodder (eg turnip type of plants) then fence off a strip, often with an electric wire. When the sheep, or other animals, have eaten the alloted area you move the fence along a bit.

Eventually the whole field gets eaten, but in controlled stages. Without the fence it's difficult to tell sheep where to feed!

If you look closely at the background you can see a few other fields where the same method is being used.

They are just starting to produce lambs now. I intend to show more farming scenes as the year develops.

When I shot this scene, I was actually thinking more about showing the various farming methods in a small location than producing an attractive landscape.

[Letrow]

Great view Geoff. What is the shadow in the foreground (right). Looks interesting, as the rest is pretty sunny.

[Wendy Stanford]

Lovely Colours and shapes Geoff, my eye follow the lines of the fences or hedges, I like the way they zig zig through out the frame. I find it very restful scene

[Bunty Plumchip]

The diversity is interesting- as are the pocket hankerchief fields- almost showing the old system of crop rotation on a slichtly bigger scale. I also noted the different colours of the soil in the ploughed fields- a strip of the darker one is in the sunlight and the rest in shade, but it is still less red than the soil of the other- is this why the ennclosed fields tend to be smaller, because of soil differences- clays and loams etc. or maybe just a result of different cultivation over the years. The bottom right hand field looks interesting with the ridges, emphasised by the angle of the sun. The colour/ brightness suggests Spring, even if the trees and crops and lambs didn't. A well composed illustration of the patchwork that screams out England in early Spring.

Our fields here in Holderness are now huge and I am (as a Hampshire girl really) amazed at how few people are needed to actually work the land here. Sooner we are going to have yellow rape as far as the eye can see until it meets the blue of the sky and sea. Spectacular in itself, but so different from the scene here.

[Geoff F]

Thanks everybody.

And a couple of answers. The steep field at the bottom right is partially in shadow chiefly because of the sun angle, which was coming from the left and the steepness of the field is giving an odd appearance. Notice how the flatter higher piece is catching a bit of low angle sunshine.

I often look at hedges and wonder why they were placed there, and often at strange angles instead of being logically square. In this case, there are a number of hedges which 'fence off' ground which was too steep for ploughing; at least without modern crawler tractors.

The 'lines' in that bottom field are actually 'landslip' caused by the steepness.

And one hedge, as Carolyn mentioned, neatly divides two slightly different soil types. Another common cause of hedge placement. All of the soil above and to the north of that line is very red sandstone based earth; while to the south, and where I live, it is browner and contains a lot of shale.

So the next time you are looking at a piece of countryside, maybe stopped in your cay by roadworks etc, have a look at the hedges and try to work out their history; you can often even work out where hedges have been removed.

[oldgreygary]

The pattern reminds me a bit of an artist who I think is called Piet Mondrian. He basically painted blocks of colours surrounded by black lines. Translate that into this picture and the fields are the blocks of colours and the hedges are the black lines. Interesting? I wonder if the sky wasn't there, how would that effect the image?

Cheers for now

Gary

[jprzybyla]

A wonderful capture Geoff, so much to see as my eyes wander through. The UK must offer so many oppurtunities for scenic photography, nothing like that in Florida where I live.

[Geoff F]

As a member of a local history society, I have been helping to sort through a lot of material which was obtained from a local auctioneer and farm valuation company.

There is a considerable amount of rather detailed documents concerning local farms going back to the 1900's including tenancy agreements, maps of fields (including original names) and annual stock valuations, etc.

We have also discovered a number of large posters advertising the sale of farms, livestock and machinery. This poster from 1924 is a typical example.



This shot presented a number of tricky problems - and I slightly messed up the shooting settings.

I had taken my camera along to try to photograph some piles of old documents, just as an experiment, and was 'playing around' at shooting a rough arrangement of material, handheld at 1/160, F14, ISO 200, flash with -2/3 exposure compensation; 7D with 24-105 L lens. Then another person found this most interesting poster, so I thought that may make a good shot.

I asked this young lady to hold up the poster; but she was somewhat coy about actually being photographed herself, and tried to hide her face behind the paper.

Realising that a face, and hands, were needed to put everything into context I had to find another option, as gentle persuasion wasn't having any effect.

So I got her to kneel down and hold the poster so that the bottom was touching the ground, then stood up, which gave me a downward angle that showed enough of her face; but she still thought she was hidden.

The remaining problems, after a few quick shots, were that with trying to quickly create a suitable arrangement of model and poster I forgot to alter my camera settings; so shot at F14 which gave excessive depth of field amongst a cluttered background. Also, this angle created too much perspective effect on the poster.

On reflection, a reasonable bit of focus depth was needed because of the camera angle but probably something around F8 would have worked better.

However, a bit of editing has helped to correct the worst of these defects. A perspective crop 'straightened the paper' and some selective use of the blur tool on the background has helped to soften that up.

A couple of adjustment layers with selectively edited masks helped with the tricky exposure.

There was a patch of strong sunlight coming from the left onto the floor but everything else was under fluorescent lighting. Hence the need for flash. I tried with a Stofen diffuser and straight flash. The diffuser, I thought, produced too dark a shot; but if I had more time I would have tried more shots at different flash output adjustments.

I rejected the idea of bouncing the flash due to camera angle and closeness to the subject.

As it was, the reluctant model was starting to get a little irate so I left it after just a few basic shots.

Incidentally, after seeing a print, she has come to accept the photo; although still a little embarrassed by being photographed. And this may be exacerbated by the fact that our association chairman wants to use the photo in a local newspaper article.

Far from a perfect photo but I'm reasonably satisfied with the way this quick shot ended up.

[Donald]

As a member of a local history society, I have been helping to sort through a lot of material which was obtained from a local auctioneer and farm valuation company.

There is a considerable amount of rather detailed documents concerning local farms going back to the 1900's including tenancy agreements, maps of fields (including original names) and annual stock valuations, etc.

We have also discovered a number of large posters advertising the sale of farms, livestock and machinery. This poster from 1924 is a typical example.

Getting engaged in such activity is wonderful. There's so muich important local history out there and if people don't work to archive it then it will be lost. And once gone, that's it. It ain't going to be recovered.

In Glenfarg we're just about to officially open a small community garden. The overarching theme is a celebration of eeh history of the railway (now long gone), which really made this community. The coming of the railway in the late 19th century, led to the development of the community. I wrote the text for a display that's now embedded into the wall surrounding a seating area. Already, a number of folk have commented that they were unaware of the history of the community and how what they have read, has educated them.

So, it's this sort of stuff we have to keep alive. It does matter.

Good work. Geoff. And, by the way, the clarity on that image is super. All the small text is as clear as a bell.