Today's flicker

It was a cold, gray day so putting out the DSLR motion trigger seemed pointless. And most of what the Gardepro T5CF #14 has been picking up at the big birdbath has been sparrows, with the occasional magpie. So I moved the Gardepro back to the small birdbath in hopes of the female flicker making an appearance. No such luck, but the male came by three times between 5:15 and 8:30 pm. The sun broke through the clouds late in the day, resulting in this weird lens flare. A magpie also stopped for a drink.

The small birdbath is so low it presents a problem when mounting the close focus Gardepro on one of my cheap tripods. They just aren't low enough, and I don't want to leave my versatile Manfrotto tripod out there in the rain for days at a time. Many years ago I bought a telescoping spike with a tripod screw at the top. It's probably not real stable when extended, but it seems to be good enough with six inches sunk underground and 10 inches sticking up. Tomorrow looks sunny so I'm not sure how long I will leave it there. After I've gotten my fill of flickers, I'll probably move it to a nearby rock just below the platform feeder that is loaded with sunflower seeds.

I've decided Browning #11, currently out in the woods, has the best image quality of all my trail cameras, even better than the two more expensive Reconyx #2 and #7. So my next trailcam will be the new Browning Dark Ops DCL Nano, which I should receive sometime next week and will be designated as camera #15. The current plan is to replace Browning #11 out in the woods, bring that camera home to replace Browning #5 pointing at my shed (deer funnel), and use the Gardepro T5CF #14 for closeups near the bird feeders and baths. Browning #5 and #6 along with Primos #4 are on the obsolete list now, although I may use them once in a while if the need arises. The other cameras on the obsolete list are Bushnell #1, which I think I gave to my wife's cousin a few years ago, and Moultrie #3, which was destroyed in a forest fire in 2017.

Real Blur

After yesterday's post about artificial lens blur using Photoshop, I decided to deploy the 500mm f/4 (set at f/5.6) with the motion trigger today to get some real lens blur. The good news is it worked. That bad news is the depth of field is so shallow that some other images that would have been better than this were out of focus. Any bird at the front of the bath and a small bird at the back of the bath is out of focus. And with the 1D's 1.3x crop, the field of view is a bit too tight with the long lens. In four of these images where the tail is off the screen, it wasn't cropped that way by choice. But these are good examples of real lens blur.

After collecting the first five images shown here, I swapped out the 1D for the 5D, which is a 1.0x crop vs. 1.3x, gave me a little more tail room without moving the lens. But it's still not as much as I want. Also, I bumped the aperture up to f/8, which will make a very slight difference in depth of field. Next time I shoot with the 500, I will take a few more steps back OR focus on the left edge.

Looking at the images that were not in focus, I spotted a female flicker lurking in the background (no red slash on chin). Hopefully she steps up and gives me the chance to get a portrait.

Photoshop

With my journalism training, I usually approach photography as a record of reality, not an artistic medium. In the past I have used Photoshop Elements to correct color and contrast, and apply some sharpening. Now that I have full Photoshop, there is the temptation to do more. One feature new to me is Lens Blur, often also referred to as Bokeh although they are not exactly the same thing. I have a 500mm f/4 lens, so I know how the choice of lens and f/stop affects background blur. The blurred background you see in most of my images is what came out of the camera. But I have been shooting with the 70-300mm lens at f/11 on these motion trigger images the past few days, so the background is out of focus but not totally blurred. These two versions of an image from today are before and after the application of Photoshop Lens Blur. If you flip back and forth between the two images of the sparrow and look at the stripe on top of the bird's head, you see where Photoshop doesn't quite get it right. There is bit of pixelation at the boundary between the blurred and unblurred parts of the image, and the very end of the tail got clipped off. I suppose it is impressive that Photoshop does it as well as it does, but I still don't know how I feel about this.

The wind picked up during the day and eventually I got tired of hearing the 1D click at nothing, so no "Flicker of the Day," just the sparrow. The hummingbird is from June 8 and is an example of real lens blur from the 500mm lens nearly wide open at f/5.6. The camera for all of these is the Canon 6D Mark II #12.

Unblurred

Blurred

No manipulation necessary, 500mm lens at f/5.6.

Iron

No action today from the small birthbath with the DSLR motion trigger, so there's this goldfinch from the Gardepro T5CF #14 at the big birdbath. I have really got to scrub the bottom of that birdbath. I think there is a lot of iron in the water from our well. The Gardepro is right up against the edge of the birdbath so I think the bird is about at the stated minimum focus distance of eight inches. There also was a magpie that came by, but the camera is so close that the top of his head was chopped off. I cropped from the bottom so I should tilt the camera up just a little bit. The preview screen is on the inside of the front, so even though the camera has live preview, the screen is useless for framing.

The crow is from yesterday, Canon 1D Mark II #9 motion trigger. The background was blurred a little bit, not using the new Photoshop function.

Adverse conditions

If I have one rule in regard to my motion-triggered DSLRs, it is "Save the shutter actuations on the good cameras." In practice that means put the wear-and-tear on the ancient Canon 1D Mark II #9 instead of the Canon 5D Mark III #8 or Canon 6D Mark II #12. I don't want to be firing off 2,000 bad images and get nothing, but that's what happened with the 5D since last evening. I saw in the weather report that it was supposed to be sunny today, so I left the 5D out overnight hoping to get some shots of birds coming to the birdbath just after sunrise. What I neglected to note in the weather report was the projected high winds. I woke up around 3:30 and heard the wind howling, and in the morning found our umbrella table blown over. It was not damaged, but it got moved five feet despite being set in a water-filled base. The 5D worked through the night, responding to every nudge of the wind with six shutter actuations, getting absolutely nothing.

I replaced the 5D with the 1D, and found out the forecast sunny skies actually were intermittent clouds and rain. We had a heavy but brief downpour and some small hail, which put on a show as it hit the water in the birdbath. Fortunately, one of the attributes of the sturdy 1D line is its weatherproofing. And finally, a flicker came and posed while getting a drink. Canon 1D Mark II, 70-200mm zoom at 131mm.

Flicker

Small hail

<--- It belongs over there

One shot

I set up the Canon 5D Mark III #8 with the 17-35 zoom set at 28mm with the remote trigger, and got several images of scared sparrows flying away. The lens was right up against the bird bath, and the noise of a 6-shot burst sent them flying. So I backed off a bit and switched to the 70-200mm zoom lens set at 100mm. I got a lot of false triggers, not sure why, but I also got this. I don't really want to spend 500 shutter acuations on my 5D every time I try this just to get one image, but this is what I was going for.

Maybe I will switch to the Canon 1D Mark II #9 tomorrow, but it has a 1.3x sensor crop so I would have to back off to 70mm to shoot from the same spot. And I have to get my extension cord out because the 20-year-old battery does not hold a charge. It was nice of Canon to include an AC adapter kit with the camera back in 2004. Imagine that these days. The expectation, I guess, was that some customers would use it as a studio camera even with the 1.3x crop.

After that is a horribly flawed image that still made me go "Wow!" With the DSLR on the small birdbath, I moved the Gardepro T5CF #14 back to the big birdbath and got this really close image of a magpie.

Flicker(s)

I have the Canon 5D Mark III #8, zoom lens set at 28mm and motion trigger set up on the small birdbath, hoping to get more flicker images. These are from this morning with the Gardepro T5CF #14 almost three hours apart. My question is whether these are the same bird. The earlier one looks stockier than the later one, but is that just the angle, or the bird puffed up in the morning chill? I have a few dozen images now from the trail camera and DSLR, so if this really bothers me I could try to analyze the spot pattern to determine whether there is more than one bird.

5:46 AM

8:36 AM