Thursday, May 5, 2022

In the blind

The DSLR with PIR motion sensor has gotten some decent flight shots of the bluebirds this spring, but for a static shot of a bird on the fence I decided the remote trigger would be more effective. Basically I'm sitting in a blind (my house) waiting for a bird to land on the fence next to the nest box. When the bird lands, I trigger the camera with my Canon LC-4 IR remote. I got this remote more than 20 years ago. It has an incredible range of 300 feet but it was insanely expensive at the time. I had a camera equipment addiction in the early 2000s.

The first image was taken just after sunrise during the golden light, but the focus point is a bit too far forward and it is slightly out of focus at f/5. I did some Photoshop processing to make the image good enough for posting here, but I'm not 100% satisfied with it. The other two have a bit more depth of field at f/8. The vertical image is an extreme crop because there is nothing to the left of the bird in the original image, the hazard of prefocusing on a selected point.

When I was in Massachusetts circa 2005, my house was a lot closer to the landing area and I would shoot through an open window. To get even closer, sometimes I used an actual hunting blind. The advantage of doing that was I could frame the bird properly and let the autofocus do its work. I'm sure the other person in the household will think I'm weird if I drag out the hunting blind (she wasn't around the last time I did it), but sometimes you do what you gotta do. You won't see those images here because they won't fall into the remote trigger/motion trigger category.

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