Barn Swallows at the lake (second attempt)

I switched from 1/2000 of a second shutter speed to 1/5000 and I also switch from the RF 100-500mm f/4.5-7.1 to the RF 70-200mm f/2.8 L IS USM Z lens. The photos are better but still not as chrisp and clear as I am hoping to eventually get. I posted a question on a forum asking for advice and got some. Also included are some other feathered friends.

Barn Swallows at the lake (first attempt)

We are back at the lake house near Malakoff. The boat docks have barn swallows. I'm trying to configure my camera after watching some videos. Thsi is an on going task. The cameras today have so many options that I am always learning new things about the cameras.

I thought I would try and capture the Barn Swallows. If you have seen them fly, you know they are very fast and agile. I eventually set the camera at 1/2000 of a second shutter speed and got some ok shots but if you zoom in, you can tell that there is motion blur. The highlight on the eye for example is three to five spots instead of just one. I plan to try again with a faster shutter.

Here are the results:

Baby Geese at Richland College

Hi Folks,

I go out and take photos and I feel like I don't have a good way to share them. I could blast large groups of photos via text to various people but that seems invasive to me. So I'm going to try to post a blog entry more consistently. I will then send a link to people who might be interested in the topic. I would encourage you to subscribe so that you get notified when I do an updates. It would also encourage me to be more consisten knowing that others are enjoying my content.

I'm visiting my brother up in Richardson. Richland College is close by. They have a dammed up stream flowing through it and it seems to be a gathering place fo Canadian Geese. I saw two broods of chicks and at least three females sitting on eggs. I've posted the best here and created a gallery of more if you are curious. Also in the group is a barn swallow, an egret, a scissortail flycatcher, among others.

I hope you enjoy:

Testing various techniques for photographing flowers

I am hoping to start making blog entries more often. Of course, I've made this decision at least twice before and didn't follow through. I would appreciate folks subscribing and adding comments. I think that would cause me to be more consistent. I believe you need to create a user id for this and since this is a Google product, using a Google ID should work. I am experimenting with different techniques taking pictures of flowers. This started from watching a YouTube video that suggested a longer lens, wide aperture, and shooting down low. I used my Canon RF 70-200mm f/2.8 L IS USM Z lens and some sample shots are thus:

The problem I see is that the close and far edge of the flowers are not in focus. These were shot at 200mm, f/5.0, 1/640, ISO 100. The calculated depth of field is 1/32 of an inch with the subject distance at 20 inches (roughly the closest this lens can focus). To address this issue, I tried focus bracketing and stacking. A few samples using this technique are here:

If you look very closely, you can see stacking artifacts. The wind was blowing slightly when I captured the images. So, the challenge would be to either wait until the wind behaves or spend more time in the software that stacks the images and remove the artifacts. From experience I know that even with stacking the depth of field has issues when two surfaces overlap in the image that have a large difference in depth. The close surface will create a fuzzy band when the far surface comes into focus creating a halo edge around the close surface. Kodak calls this "subject failure". Only hand editing using area cloning can resolve this tyep of issue and with the details of the flowers, that's not going to work. So... how about ignoring the YouTube video, go with a wide angle lens, stop down, and get a depth of field that is the depth of the flower? The DOF calculator in PhotoPills says a 35mm at first/8.0 has a depth of field of three inches if the subject distance is 20 inches. Great!! Well... No. For a 35mm lens, the subject distance is closer to eight inches. At that subject distance, the depth of field drops back down to 17/32 of an inch. But... here are a few samples anyway:

The problems here are multiple. The far back edge of the flower still isn't in focus and the soft defuse background is gone. The background could be faked by post processing but that defeats the purpose of all this experimentation. So... I think strategic use of focus bracketing will be what I will do if the conditions are right. Otherwise, I'm going with the single shot at 200mm perhaps stopping down as much as possible but the DOF is still not going to cover the entire depth of most flowers. The other challenge is most flowers point up so to get a good shot of the open flower, the camera is more verticle than recommended.