Working on a project or two...

Greenfinch

A new year and new challenges - well not quite. No I have been working on photographing birds in the garden which hopefully will fulfil at least two projects, perhaps three. I have written about this before but this year I want to concentrate on just a few overall projects and then use the resultant product to service a number of different projects - that way I can concentrate on the photographs rather than think that this could do for this competition and so on.

Greenfinches and Goldfinches on feeders

Well the past few days have certainly fallen into this plan. So I have been freezing myself at home, and sitting in the warmth making some interesting photographs. Very rewarding.

Wren

I have not been neglecting the book project either. I have spent the past few days colour correcting the selected images ( I managed to cut the number down to 50, in part due to the problems of CMYK printing/colour correction.) One interesting thing that has come out of this is that most bird photographs seem to need little colour correction for a CMYK printer - not sure why that is - hope it doesn't mean I have been going about this thing the wrong way. Only time will tell!

Reed Bunting

One final thing - Flickr. I have become more obsessed by this over the past few days. This is just wrong and I am going to reduce my time spent using Flickr. Like any social network system you can loose yourself in this. That being said there are some outstanding photographs on Flickr, hopefully mine can be included in them in some small way

Best laid plans...

Well I was supposed to get out and make some landscape photographs.   It was supposed to be thunderous this afternoon, hopefully with some magnificent clouds to increase the dramatic nature of the photographs.  Well, needless to say the weather didn't materialise leaving me with flat light and a grey sky.  No use for what I wanted to achieve.  So back to capturing the birds in the garden - not a bad way to spend an afternoon.  Just hope the weather picks up and produces some beautiful light and powerful skies.  However, this is england so expect another day of flat and unteresting light.  La de da.

So much for the plan....

House Sparrow in the Rain

Starling on a feeder

Dunnock

Female Blackbird

So I was going to go out and takes some landscape images.   It was going to be a nice change of pace, something different, something fresh.   Well it didn't happen.   instead I decided to test the 1D with the 2 x converter to see what sort of images it may produce.  Well I was blown away.  Period.   I used to think that the 40D worked well with the 2x converter.  Not anymore, the 1D is simply a brilliant camera.

All these photographs were captured in my garden around about lunch time this morning.  As you can see it was raining and the light was patchy.  I had to shoot at 640 ISO, something I don't like doing with the 40D as the results can get very soft but with the 1D there was not a trace of softness.  The images were sharp and well saturated and are able to deal with cropping very well.  In short they are outstanding.

This does make the question of the 40D a whole more complicated.   With the 40D you do get an extra amount of magnification (I know this is not strictly true but it will suffice for this post) which might be useful at places such as Bempton.  However, the final image is nothing like the quality of the 1D, not surprising since one is about 3 times the price as the other and the fast FPS can be really useful when taking nature shots.  In short do I go the whole hog and get another 1D?   I think I know the answer and I suspect reading you may too.

Goldfinch

Starlings