All Change

So I made a mistake.

About a year ago I decided to give the Sony A7RIV a go – lured by the promise of the 61mp full frame sensor, low light performance and superior dynamic range.

Nuthatch

I’ll been watching a pair of Nuthatchs all spring – they started nesting in a tit box months ago and now appear to be raising an unknown number of young ones. The Nuthatch is actually not that common a bird here in this part of West Yorkshire and not seen at all most years (at least by me).

£6,499 too far

An important aspect of my photographic interest is wildlife, an interest that requires long lenses and good field craft. The field craft I am ok with but my relationship with long lenses is a long story.

Stepping back a few years my go to wildlife kit was the Canon EOS 7d mk ii and the venerable Canon 500mm f4 big white. On the Canon APS C crop body this gave me an effective focal length of 800mm a good focal length for birding and coupled with the Canon 100-400mm zoom on a Canon 5d mk iii a good all around wildlife kit, all be it with one major problem, well actually 2 major problems, size and weight (those 4 items alone weighing in at 6.43kg).

Olympus 40-150 + MC20 or Olympus 300

By popular request, well a couple of people asked, I thought I would attempt to answer a question that I quite often see discussed online that is “How much better is the image quality from the Olympus M Zuiko 300mm f/4 Pro than the Olympus M Zuiko 4-150mm f/2.8 Pro with the MC20 2x teleconverter ?”

Olympus 300 + MC14 or Pana-Leica 100-400 ?

Following on from my post yesterday regarding getting extra reach out the excellent Olympus M Zuiko 300m f/4 Pro lens where I concluded that the MC14 and MC20 teleconverters do produce better image quality than simply cropping the image in post production, I thought it would be useful to look at the fifth option for getting extra reach namely not using the 300mm at all but replacing it with something longer.

To MC or to Crop ?

As primarily a wildlife photographer my most used lens by some margin is the excellent Olympus M.Zuiko 300mm f/4 Pro.  For a 600mm full frame equivalent lens it is light and compact these being the key reasons why I use m43 cameras.  It is as sharp as any lens I have ever owned, including Canon’s big whites, and the optical image stabilisation combined with the IBIS of my OMD EM1 mkII is nothing short of astonishing.

Birding Habarana

2 March 2020

After a hectic couple of weeks we decided to have a fairly lazy day with just some early morning and late afternoon birding around Habarana.

Asian Elephant

29 February 2020

The target species this afternoon and surely the easiest of all the Sri Lankan Elephant, the native sub-species of the Asian Elephant.

Elephants are now found only in the dry lowland areas of Sri Lanka and inevitably this does lead to conflict with the human population not least because it has been estimated that about 65% of their range is outside protected areas.

En route to Habarana

28th February 2020

Following our 2 days in Wilpattu we had a transfer day over to our home for the next few days near Habarana.  Habarana is the gateway town for the Minneriya National Park one of the best spots to see Asian Elephant on the island but more of that tomorrow.

Wilpattu National Park – Day 2 (Mammals)

27th February 2020

Large mammals are well represented in Wilpattu – we had good sightings of many species ranging from Ruddy Mongoose upto Sri Lanka’s apex predator and everyones number one target the Leopard.

Wilpattu National Park – Day 2 (Birds Part 2)

27th February 2020

More birds – Willpattu really was heaving with life on our second day in the park.

Wilpattu National Park – Day 2 (Birds Part 1)

27th February 2020

Today was a full day in the park i.e sunrise until sunset – 6.00am to 6.00pm, so an early start.

We arrived at the park entrance at about 5.45am and joined a few other “jeeps” waiting for the park to open.  Had this been Yala Block 1 there would have been many dozens if not hundreds of “jeeps”, fortunately Wilpattu is somewhat off the main tourist route and therefore is much quieter than Yala and all the better for it.  On reflextion we enjoyed Wilpattu far more than Yala and were really glad we included it in our itinerary, many do not.

Wilpattu National Park – Day 1

26th February 2020

Wilpattu National Park is located in the Northwest coast lowland dry zone of Sri Lanka, it is the country’s largest national park.  The unique feature of this park is the existence of “Willus” (Natural lakes) – Natural, sand-rimmed water basins or depressions that fill with rainwater.

“Safari” Gear & Settings

Safari is a Swahili word that means journey.  In the “bad old days” a Safari was all about big game hunting, fortunately to a large extent those days are past and now Safari has come to mean a vehilcle based wildlife watching/photography trip and whilst the concept of a Safari orginates in Africa, Safaris can now been indertaken in many parts of the world often in search of specfic species, for example Tiger Safaris have become huge business in India.

Grouse at 1200mm

After an absolutely dreadful period of rain here in the UK I finally managed to galvanise myself to actually get out and take some photographs. On various facebook forums that I subscribe to there has been much much talk about the new MC20 2x tele-converter that Olympus have launched that works with the 40-150 f/2.8 and the 300mm f/4.0 pro lenses.

Glasto

A week of trying to get a decent sunrise photograph of Glastonbury Tor and not alot of success largely due to rather inclement weather conditions coupled with a degree of lazyness on my part.  These are the best I could manage.

Lytes Cary

Lytes Cary is a manor house with associated chapel and gardens in Somerset, England. The property, owned by the National Trust, has parts dating to the 14th century, the House is Grade I listed.

600mm

Getting to grips with my new Olympus 300mm f/4.0.  For the last year and a half or so I have been using the PL 100-400 for bird photography, amongst other things, and generally have been very happy with it.