John Bennett
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Scott.
Just rely on your insurance. IMO and experience extended warranties are little more than a means for retail outlets to pad their margins. If the product is faulty, than it should reveal itself within the standard manufactorers warranty. That said, its your money and if it makes it easier to sleep at night, go for it.Re CPs.
They run the gambit, from entry to professional. Is the end product worth the hundreds you can spend on one? A multi coated CP will cost north of 150.00, many are north of 200.00. A plain jane that does the job can be had for south of 75.00.Hoya, B+W, Singh-Ray are worth looking into and each maker offers at different price points.
The largest resident brown I’ve ever personally seen was 29inches. We both thought it would have been 28. The guy I was fishing with that day caught 4 over 20, that was some kind of day I’ll not soon forget.
How much would it have weighed?
No idea but my guess would have been 9 to 10.Length I dont find hard to estimate, weight I do and I never really trust or give it much thought. Put a 5pd brick in most people hands and the majority wont come close, either badly under or over estimating.
Eitheway as many have said.
Who cares. Beuatiful specimen,Its an EF-S lens.
EF-S lenses are compatible with Canons “Crop” bodies. That being the rebel XT and successor line and the 10D-40D line. They (EF-S) lenses won’t be compatible with the 5D and 1D lines.Aaron I would say the two biggest problems are being limited to a 200 and as Eric pointed out the time of day. One is easy to fix, go out early in the am if you can or after dinner. The other is largely dependant on the species of bird.
If you can find a conservation area near you with paths. They often have feeding stations that the regular visitors top up each morning. Song birds there will be considerably more habitualised to people and not only should there be good numbers and variety concentrated in a small area, you should be able to get closer.
If your stuck and need help and dont mind my watermark (or removing it) feel free to save any of mine from my site to your desktop. Most will be 1024 x 700ish or 800 x 500 but for a digital frame thats more than enough.
Yeah I often wonder how my photos look on others peoples monitors. I know when viewing images on the web from work I dont trust anything I see, the graphic card and monitor here are..shall we say suspect.
Put a great lens on a basic body and you get what? Great IQ
Put a basic lens on a great body and you get what? Basic IQ(IMO)
Your always going to be better off getting the best lens you can. From your post you seem to feel the same, or understand that on some level.My question is more so about the lens.
Yeah I’m trying to figure the tank thing out. Detritus I don’t mind as long as it doesnt cloud the water too much in which case I’ll vaccum it. I wont even mind
Tim I try to do very little in PS myself, atleast with images I hope to use, or learn from.
To me theres two approaches to PS.
1) The stereotypical photojournalism. A minimislist approach2) Art. Creating something thats sellable as print.
Ramping up Sat or Contrast or sharpening in box is no different than in post. The only real difference is that in post you increase or decrease. If you do it in box your stuck and changes to jpegs are lossy.
Take Cardinals or anything vibrant red. More often than not you want to decrease saturation. If you’ve ramped up the saturation settings in box for jpegs………………………. Your only recourse is to try and turn it down in post and youd likely need to be heavy handed.
If I need to spend much more than 5 minnutes on a photo, its heading to the recycle bin. I rarely touch my WB and if I do I slide it 50 to 150 pts on the Kelvin. I check my exposure both visually with the histogram and by checking how many pixels are blown/clipped. If I need to adjust exposure +/- 30 pts its headed to the recycle. Finally I tweak the “recovery or fill light” sliders.Thats all in ACR and takes about 30 seconds. The only real exception is macro shots or landscapes where you’ve stopped down into the teens. F14 or more at which point you learn just how filthy your sensor is. Mines disgusting 🙂 and I really need to the cahonnes to try a wet clean, blowers and artic butterfly do well but, bottom line macros which I shoot at f18 take me about 20 minutes each cleaning up crap.
Either way once adjustments to the raw are done
I open it in PS, check shadow/highlights, maybe add a upto 5 points saturation and if I want a bit more contrast I goto curves and tweak that.Sharpening is applied as per the images destination. Be it web or an editors hands, or my HDD.
In all about 2 minutes per image. While one day Id like to consider myself skilled in PS and do more with select images, all in good time and I figure Im about 2 years from that :).Replacing skies depending on the foreground elements is one of the easier composites, especially when the skies a uniform grey. You “select” the grey sky (the magic wand will work ok) and then move the Blue sky from another file image into your main image.
Done.
3)
Increasing exposure, in itself increases saturation…Becareful in boosting both contrast and saturation when in post. As a matter of personal preference I tend not to like overly saturated images. think fish with unnaturally saturated colours. Also again, personal preference images that have had contrast ramped in post also tend to look overdone and are somewhat easy to distinguish, further if your trying to increase contrast in post, imo the contrast/brightness sliders do the worst job. You can get better results with the levels adjustments and better yet curves. I havent touched the birghtness/contrast slider in a couple years.Bring a tripod, monopod or bean bag. If your not trying to stop action slow yourself and the camera down. Flash can help to add shadows and depth when none exist, but I’ll leave that to others, Im a rank beginner with flash photogrpahy.
Lastly if your not doing anything with the photos other than personal useage your free to do whatever you like with the skies. You can add cooling filters ( blues) and then saturate just that. You can go in your back yard today and tomorrow and take 20 different pictures of just sky with some nice white puffy clouds and then replace the grey dull sky in the images you bring home.
Others here are far more versed in PS than I am but to give you an idea, these 2 images were taken seconds apart.
Peggy’s Cove Nova Scotia in the fog
Peggy Cove 30 seconds before or after in the sun.
and Im not skilled at composites.
Both were shot at ISO 100 1/100th handheld.
That guys lugging my dream lens.
/sighDrifter, while Nikon mounts arent as strong as Canon Ive yet to hear of anyone whos damaged a mount Nikon or Canon due to the heavier lenses. What I have heard of is various devices failing to take the weight of the lens and body. Some have broken, some have come loose and released. End result is lens and body go crashing to the ground. Id never, ever trust my lens (especially a 500 f4) to something like that.
Lens to body, strap to body, strap around the neck.
If it ever fails I go after Canon.I shoot with guys who lug and handhold the 500 f4, 300 f2.8s and even the Sigmonster mounted on a tripod ( 300-800) and all universally rely solely on the body strap and nothing else
***************If your looking for a bag to stow it in while walking around there are dozens that can take a body + 70-200 and little else. The better ones are Kinesis and Think Tank.
One guy I shoot with has Kenises bag for the 500 f4 + body. Its much like a tube he can wear on his back like a back pack. That guy in your photo will have one hell of a sore neck if he does that for any period of time (2hrs+)
Just going to paste my reply from another forum.
Don’t agree with it but there is some fuzzy logic to it.
Simply put.
*IF* Ontario were to do the same wouldnt that reduce how often you go fishing?
I’m pretty sure it would for me if I had to keep everything I caught.Not to mention the frustration of…
You drive an hour, fish for an hour and next thing you know you’ve limited out.
Would you fish every weekend every other? No doubt some would, they do now.But in the grand scheme there is some fuzzy logic that *overall* it would reduce the pressure both to the fish and the enviroment.
Would kill the economic aspects though. Alot of area’s rely on tourist dollars the fishing industry generate
***********What I find really funny and ironic about it is this.
Isnt the EU and Switzerland one of the countries trying to ban Seal products because they dont like hunters clubbing baby seals to death? Further what gets my goat is that in my experience, the sanctimonious types when it comes to hunting/angling ethics are rarely the ones breaking a sweat doing conservation work. They forget, that many of the saved wetlands, park trails alongside streams they enjoy are laregly a result of hunters/anglers. I know more than few who are quick to tell others how to live but when it comes time break a sweat and lift a shovel they are rarely found, or they gripe about possibly having to pay a little extra for “photo” liscences to help directly fund parks/preserves rather than govt coffers.Hopefully this kind of nonsense stays over on the other side of the pond. I really dont have much stomach for it or them.
Bascially you need to overexpose and if possible try to compose so theres as little sky as possible in the frame.
I overexposed this by more than 2 stops. I blew the sky but was able to get some detail and colour in the Merlin. It was a dreary rainy day. If I hadnt overexposed so much the Merlin would hav been little more than an indistinguishable shape. As Chad pointed out the penalty is blowing the highlights in this case the sky.
Not a great shot but a) i illustrates the point and B) is the only time Ive caught a Merlin eating. Ask me if I care about technially good photos at such times:)
The next was during Lightsnow fall, and completely overcast. You can see flakes in the BG
ISO 1600 1/500th flashed and + 1/3 EC
So you can get detail, you can et some colour but you will likely need to overexpose and as much as possible remove the sky from you composition. Else it looks like the sky in the Merlin shot (although that extreme a 2+ stops overexposed). Thats actually a good test to, if your not bowing the sky on those days your not exposinglong enough.
Lastly people that do alot of long exposures with water, live for overcast days rahter than sunny days
It allows for longer shutters speed and you can bring it out and get nice creamy water.I dont mind if Zach doesnt mnd 🙂
I don’t know if theres a real answer to that. There are different situations where each would be the better choice. TCs increase your magnification, Tubes allow you to focus closer (move in closer). So each in their own right increase the size of the subject in your frame. Tubes also increase magnification a bit in the same way a projector on a screen would. By adding the tube you moving the lens further away from the sensor so the image thats being projected onto the sensor is larger.
So there are times where I would use the my TC with my 400mm. Essentially when its harder/impossible for me to get closer to my subject.. Say a Grizzly bear 🙂 I want it as frame filling as possible but I want to remain at a distance.
Then there are times when Id add tubes to my 400mm..Say when shooting Dragon Flies or flowers or song birds that I can get close to but my MFD wont allow me to. My 400 has a MFD (minimum focus distance) of 8.5 feet. All lenses have one. So by adding tubes I cut my MFD roughly in half which alone increases the size of the subject in the frame but it also moves the elements further away from the sensor. End result is more “magnification”. If anyone knows the mathematics off hand feel free to chime in 🙂
Lastly all else being equal Id prefer tubes over TCs as with Tubes your not adding any more glass which always degrades image quality a bit, no matter how good your lens and/or TC and each rob you of about 1 stop of light although the closer you are to 2X TCs you start losing 2 stops.
*********As for why you may not be happy with the IQ of your TC and lens its quite possibly due to the above addition of more glass. Also, its my opinion that TCs are really best used with Prime lenses. Zooms are more complex mechanically than a prime and your adding that extra layer of glass.
Im not aware of any zooms that reportedly take TCs well.I had Canons 100-400 L which is one of the better zooms out there and I was never crazy about the IQ when I added a TC. Thats a subjective thing though (whats acceptable). If it was a choice between getting a ok shot of an eagle or a shot of a barely recognisable Eagle due to distance I added the TC and accepted the hit to IQ.
/edit
As emntioned earlier the other important note about Tubes is that just as they allow you to focus inside your lenses normal MFD, they also prevent you from focusing further out. When I add Tubes to my 400 my maximum focusing distance goes from infinity down to about 20 feet. Meaining i cant foncus past 20 ftAaron if you can bring your body and lens to the store to try them out. As a general rule if I recall correctly the shorter your lenses focal length the less in tubes you may need for desired magnification.
meaning 25mm tube does more for a 100mm lens than it does a 200mm lens but also keep in mind adding tubes guts your infinity focusing capabilities. You’ll only be able to focus so far out, its worth mucking about in store before buying.J
Hi Chad.
Yeah its 68mm in Tubes added to the 180mm. I tried adding a TC last year and while that gave me more working distance to use when going after bugs (Flies) I found the added glass didn’t translate well with Macro. So this year I went the Tube route for greater magnification. Of coarse the downside is losing infinity but so far I’m really happy.I shot a Nymph the other day and for the first time in my life I was made
With this
http://products.lowepro.com/product/Vertex-300-AW,2074,16.htmSomtimes with a Tripod and sometimes with a Manfrotto self standing monopod which pulls excellent doubly duty as a walking/wading staff nd ghetto tripod for long exposures. Fully loaded It comes in around 35 pds.
While not waterproof it is resistant and has *cough*sealed*cough* zippers. I wouldnt expect it to survive a full blown swim but it should be enough protection against a quick dip and perhaps more importantly it offers plenty of shock absorbtion. As much a worry as water imo. Slippin on a bank and crackin your camra is just as fatal as water. So I was never comfortable walking around with it “exposed” anyways even when I went wih just a body and wide angle zoom
This is my Macro rig
No way thats fitting in my waders add the 24-70 and or the 400 and well I dont have alot of options.
🙂However the best thinyou can do to protect your gear is get insurance. That mainly is what gives me the comfort to bring my stuff when Im wading and bushwhacking, pontooning, or otherwise near water. Without it Id have a hard time even with Pelican cases.
Dusty, I use CS3 so the following may not be avialable in Aperature but heres what I would try.
The skies a uniform colour. You should be able to select it and then try a couple things.
1) Add a filter thats either a straight Blue or Cooling
2) Add a new sky (not something Im very good at) and generally not something I do anyways (composites)
3) Saturate the Blues in your Hues/Saturations
4) Cool your WB a wee bitThe key I think would be selecting your sky so that any adjustments are not global. You should be able to that a few ways given that the sky is pretty uniform and different from the rest of the image.
J
