Last night I was at the wildlife refuge with the goal of playing with the camera settings trying to find the best metering/focus settings. The D7000 is a different animal than my D80 when trying to capture birds in flight (BIF).
I did not bring anything but my basic camera bag that contains the flash, lens cleaner, etc. . No tripod and no flash light. So . … but of course as the sunsets when it was getting dark the illusive (till this night) Sandhill Cranes started landing in large numbers 30 feet from the trail. I want a good Sandhill Crane shot so bad!
I tired to shoot the landed birds using high ISO but at 6400 and hand held they were grainy – Ok for small prints but not good for on screen computer viewing. I got out my sb800 and took two pics and then the batteries in the flash went dead.
Mumbling to myself for not having packed the tripod I walked back to the car. Fumbled in the dark and found I had no new batteries for the flash, put a new battery in the camera. Now it it was real dark. Somehow the camera battery door had come open and caught on something and came off. Well s$@&!
I will spare you the comedy of hunting through KRP’s dirty car for the door finally locating it on the blacktop of the parking lot. It had somehow flung itself (notice I take no responsibility here LOL) up and out the open car window – go figure. Whew – found and put back on panic over. I walk back to the landing zone.
By now it is very dark. I am now hand holding a camera set at 6400 ISO being attacked by mosquitoes, in a crummy mood because of the battery door incident (like that incident?) and watching these great birds come in wings open not 10 feet overhead – I could feel the air their wings created – and I ended up ducking a few times :).
I am now left with trying to hold the camera still enough to capture the birds after they have landed. Even with the VR (vibration reduction feature found in some Nikon lens) the ISO has to be bumped up so high that grain is a show stopping issue. If I only had the dang tripod! I decided to try something else and used the on board camera flash again while trying to hold the camera still enough. I even switched over to shutter priority. Then I tried the evil green auto setting. Oh and cranes with white eyes is rather dork.
This is the only shot worth showing really – not a great photo but I think it is kind of cool.
You can only push the settings so far. So I headed back to the car and will try another day or night and will bring my flashlight and tripod.
This evening I stopped by to watch the cranes come in and took a couple sunset pics.
I left one with the vivid settings I had set and the other I went with the more neutral on the color saturation.
Your two cranes look great to my ON eyes on my con’t+++ screen! Not grainy at all. What I would give to have legs like that [small joke]. And thanks for the nice sunset shots. (they were for me, cough* cough*, weren’t they?)
It didn’t look very dark, though, which must be the camera setting. And WHY DON’T YOU keep a flashlight in your car?; you know, in case of an emergency?
Yes Webster the sunsets were for you. I always snap a few off while there so since you enjoyed I figured I would include ;).
I set the camera to shoot in the RAW (NEF) format plus JPEGS. The photos are the RAW files converted to JPEG so the lighting was adjusted. The lower photo is as close to how the sky really looked. In the upper one the color saturation was bumped up when I converted them just because – I dunno it looked different and I liked the lines (bands?) of color it brought out.
The cranes were taken when it was dark. I did not know if I had captured them until I got home and looked on the computer screen and increased the light settings.
In defense of myself – we were in KRP’s car not mine – in my truck I have those little glow flares that light when you snap them, a first aid kit that covers human and canine items, an old military shovel, snow chains, blanket, misc maps, and a flashlight that probably needs batteries 🙂 .
When it comes to vehicles think Oscar and Felix.
Glad you got to see the cranes even if you didn’t get the pics you wanted. They’re pretty incredible birds. Hope you get another peep before they move on or do they stay there a bit?
The cranes usually hang around until February. They arrived a little late this year – about two weeks behind their norm. Once the rest of the fields are plowed there should be thousands of them out there. Right now most areas have just a few hundred sitting around at a given time.
I watched a couple fly ins. Hopefully next weekend they are dancing at the refuge. Woodbridge DFG site
Well, you wouldn’t want it to be too easy, would you? Shouldn’t you have to Suffer for Art? Isn’t it supposed to hurt? Or at least it itch? Still, the picture of the cranes is pretty cool. Looking forward to more!
Yah I would like easy once in awhile just to change it up a bit.
I finally decided that all the focus and metering problems that have been driving me nuts with this camera might not be me – gasp. Turns out the camera was a dud.
I might post a series of a couple of cranes I took tonight landing.