Eagle Owl Attacking Camera at 1000fps

I alsways thought that it was video was never going to be my thing, but this footage almost convinces me... Amazing detail and sharpness, and you would be extremely hard-pressed to capture an owl "attacking" your phot camrea at exactly the right moment. With a slomo video like this, you can have your choice of "right moments"!

From the same website as the dog portraits.

Eagle Owl Attacking Camera at 1000fps

Fieldfare found

The fieldfares returned later in the same day, and that time my camera was ready. Admittedly, I still had to crop the picture enormously, because the birds mainly stayed in the back of the garden and I "only" have a 300 mm (450 mm equivalent, if you count the crop factor).

Where is Frans Lanting when you need him?

In rushed my wife: "A bird of prey caught a dove!" Oh, where is Frans Lanting (or any other nature photographer) when you need one? Rushed out of the study behind her, camera in one hand, memory card in the other (I had just imported some pics into the PC) and switching the camera to Sports mode at the same time. I usually hate those pre-cooked modes, but now it came in handy: ISO 800, fast-shutter time preference, hi-speed (5 frames/second) drive setting. Not that we saw much of the sparrowhawk, because he (it was a young male) found a spot to devour his prey in a secluded corner of the garden and we did not want to go out and disturb him. So photos had to be made from behind the window. The trees and other growth made manual focusing necessary and that was not easy I must admit. How do the Frans Lantings of this world do that? I admire them increasingly. By the way, I mentioned Frans Lanting because he once published this book 'Eye to Eye' (sold out now, there's just a postcard-book at Amazon and a special portfolio at Taschen), and the eyes are the most catching part of my photo too, I think (the rest is sub-zero quality—don't mention it!).

Anti-Zoo?

Last weekend, we visited the 'Noorder' Zoo in Emmen, but the only photo that I found interesting was not of exotic beasts. The hippos, elephants, leopards and what not are simply too exotic to make an interesitng picture. It is as if you are seeking the effect of stupefying your audience if you show these pictures. To make a picture convincing, you have to downplay the "surprise" effect of the zoo animals and do something surprising with a "normal" subject: an anti-zoo picture, as it were. My candidate is shown here: an ordinary grey heron--a bird that is getting all too common in the Netherlands--but if you ask me, crisply sharp with good colours against the blue (patch of) sky and in an unusual perspective.

Making 'My' Picture out of Nature

Making landscape or nature pictures a big question is what makes it special. What does the photographer add to 'what is out there'? Without a personal touch, anyone could have made it, right? Unless one has purely documentary aims, like showing peculiarities and habits of animals, or what they exactly look like. Then making the photo 'nice' and personal is just an added bonus, so to speak. But for the creative photographers, there is little they can do, it seems: find a good composition and good light. From a magazine I picked up recently (UK-based Outdoor Photography), I learned not alone that waiting for good light is a serious business and that some will visit a spot for days just to find that glimmer of sun between the clouds. Inspiring but also daunting: when would I ever take the time for that? Moreover, I noticed that many pictures, although they were digital, were made with filters to regulate the light. Polarisation filters of course, to influence glimmers of light on water surfaces, but also neutral grey graded filters to reduce the intensity of the sky. (Is it time to get into high dynamic range (HDR) photography instead?)

My picture this time is of a simpler make, a shot with just a little addition of composition to it. I guess you can debate if I should not have cropped it more, deleting some of the unnecessary foreground and background. But the point was how the bird, a common redshank ('tureluur' in Dutch), was mirrored by the water of the little pool behind the beach, in which it was foraging. No dear reader, it was not just a lucky shot; it was the best of a short series, and yes, I did wait for it to happen, but no more than a few minutes--I'm just an amateur!

Birds on the wing

Who cares about rules of beauty if nature shows all its beauty? When shooting, all I worry about is: do I get those fast birds in the picture, and in focus? The rest is for post-processing: synchronising the colour temperature to daylight (I leave the camera on automatic white balance--it's in Raw anyway), taking a few tenths off the exposure to keep the white from being too white (in the case of the single wader) or increasing it a few tenths to show some detail in the dark parts (in the case of the geese), and cutting off the foreground and background (too much sea and air in both cases). For the rest: pure nature!