Richard Parker’s Photography Blog

I have just returned from a trip around the Sheltands. The tour was the ‘Ultimate Shetland’ organised by Shetland Wildlife.
We spent seven days on Shetland travelling from site to site observing the excellent array of flora and fauna Shetland has to offer at this time of year. The group size was pretty small (10 of us all together) and our guide David was excellent, very patient and extremely friendly and knowledgable.
We stayed in a couple of Hotels both of which were very comfortable with excellent food!
Although this wasn’t a dedicated photo hoilday (Shetland Wildlife organise those as well) as I was travelling with my partner who is not a photographer there were plenty of opportunities to get some great shots.
All in all it was a fantastic trip, well organised and a great time was had by all! Highlights for me were Storm Petrels flying in from the sea in near total darkness and the Puffins who are great characters and also extremely photogenic!

For more details of this and other tours operated by Shetland Wildlife visit: Shetland Wildlife Holidays

Here a few photos from the trip, more can be found in my Flickr Shetland 2009 set.

As April was mostly spent playing with a new Macro lens there is a bit of a theme for the month!

Or bird or butterfly. One of the tricky things for wildlife photography can be identifying the animal you have just photographed. I find this especially true when photographing insects as there are so many species that not all will be covered by one book and you could spend a small fortune on reference texts.

I have created a new ‘reference’ links section and will add sites that I have found invaluable for helping with indentification.

But of course you should always have a go at identifying animals yourself as this is all part of the fun. One of the things you will need is a field guide, there are many to choose from on the market and the choice can be bewildering.

For information I am based in the UK so will be discussing books aimed at UK wildlife!

In my opinion a great starter book is the Collins book ‘Complete British Wildlife’ this covers everything from plants to animals. It isn’t a huge book so as you can imagine not everything is covered but there is an impressive range all illustrated with photographs.

After that you get into the more specialist area of a book for each area of interest.

For birds I have the ‘RSPB handbook of British Birds’, I find it is best to try and get a guide for Britain only, many cover Europe also which means you can end up with a bewildering number of species to flick through.

For insects I have tried a number of books but the one I find most useful is the Collins ‘Complete British Insects’ a vast number of insects are covered and all are illustrated with photographs. Of course the number of insect species in the world is massive and it would be a massive book if it were to cover them all! So I wil often supplement this with a vist to the Wild About Britain website for help confirming or finding and id.

I also have a number of the Pocket Nature guides for butterflies, wildflowers etc. these are quite handy guides as the name suggests they are pocket sized. Not hugely comprehensive but cover a large number of species with handy identification guides.

Another great set of guides are the fold out laminates produced by the Field Studies Council. Each one is specfic to a group of animals or habitat etc. and has colour illustrations of plants and creatures you are likely to see. A list of those available can be found here

I have just bought myself a wildlife camera from www.flyonthewall.co.uk, the aim was to spy on the bird feeder while I am at work and also to see what comes into the garden at night.
I am not expecting any award winning shots but hopefully I will be able to see who is visiting. I glimpsed a hedgehog recently and I am sure we have a fox visiting also.

Unfortunately there were no reviews I could find on the Internet so it is a bit of a gamble, I will keep the blog updated with the outcome.

The camera features:

* Motion triggered and adjustable PIR sensitivity
* Long life rechargeable battery - 2 weeks
* 2.5 inch colour LCD screen
* Auto-switch full colour Images in day / B & W night images
* SD card slot - max 2GB
* Multi-shot of 1 or 3 pictures
* Programmable video length
* Programmable 10secs to 990secs delay between triggers
* “No Flash” uses 54 infrared LEDs to illuminate the coverage area
* Water proof housing
* Date and time stamp on each picture
* Power jack for external DC 12V input

One of the drawbacks to the canon MP-E 65mm Macro is the limited depth of field at higher magnifications. The answer to this is to use a narrower aperture, this leads to other issues such as aloss of sharpness due to difraction. I have found with the MP-E that f11 is the optimum for sharpness.

Also with the narrower aperture a tripod or other form of lighting such as a maco flash is essential as light is very limited at high magnification and small apertures. One option I have been playing with is focus stacking. This is where a number of images are taken of the same subject at different focal points, they are then combined to give a much larger in focus area.

The software I have been trying is CombineZP which has a big advantage in being Freeware. This software aligns, auto balances brightness and then stacks the images. I haven’t had an in-depth go with it yet but preliminary experiments are hopeful.

Shown below are three images of a flesh fly taken at f16 using the macro flash, as you can see the depth of field isn’t great even at the narrowest aperture offered by the lens.

Using CombineZP the three images where combined, some cropping takes place as due to the slight changes in subject placement some artefacts are seen at the edges.

I am really pleased with the results and hopefully as I practice the technique for capturing the image sequence improves so should the images possible.

CombineZP can be downloaded here

At the risk of turning this blog into a wildlife gardening blog rather than photography I thought I would update you on my lates efforts to encourages photogrpahic subjects into the garden. I have set up a series of ‘houses’ around the Garden.

- Solitary bee nest

Bought online and set up on top of a log pile in a sunny part of the garden.

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- Bumble Bee Nest

Made out of an upturned Plant Pot with a draining tube from an old dishwasher leading in. Inside is a chicken wire nest containg dried grass.

- Ladybird House

Also bought online and set up on top of a logpile

- Bird House

Bought from the RSPB and set up on the side of the shed.

At the moment there aren’t any residents but you never know why might turn up although wolf spiders have taken up residence in the solitary bee nest.
Blue Tits have shown an interest in the Bird Box but there has been a lot of activity in the Garden which may have scared them off.

If we are lucky enough to get a visitor I will update the blog!

With the new house taking up most of my time at the moment I haven’t been able to get out as much as I would have liked. Luckily the garden provided a few subjects, my favourite being the frog in our pond. So this month the choices are two shots of the same subject.

I was lucky enough recently to be able to borrow the Canon MP-E 65mm macro lens and MT-24EX flash combination from a freind, what an incredible set-up!
It’s not that easy to get to grips with but the results acheivable are fantastic. I only had to use it for a couple of weeks before making the decision to buy the kit myself adding a pair of sto-fen diffusers to the set-up.

For those of you who don’t know this lens, it is a true macro lens starting at 1x life size and ‘zooming’ to 5x life size. At the higher magnifications lighting is a must as the viewfinder becomes very dark, the MT-24EX has a custom function that allows the modelling lamps to be activated with a double tap of the shutter button, my previous flash required you to press a button on the unit itself which was very inconvenient.

All in all it’s a great combo but a steep learning curve, you don’t get a massive amount of working distance and very little depth of field at the higher magnifications.

The set-up is shown below with a shot I took of a fly at about 4x magnification. More images can be seen on Flickr - Flickr MP-E 65mm Set

The backbreaking work is now complete. This area of the garden was completely overgrown with grass and was mostly paved.
Most of the paving has been lifted and the ground levelled slightly. In the pic you can the new bird feeders which are starting to do a good trade, a lady bird house and dead wood pile.
A trellis has been put up on the shed and spaced away slightly to allow bird access.

It’s a bit bare earth at the moment so the next stage is the planting!

It turns out the pond in the new garden wasn’t as bad as I thought we have a resident frog!

The only chnage I have made is to preapre a ramp as the sides seemed a little steep and it could have ended up as a frog prison. He/she seems to be fairly bold so I managed a couple of shots with my 100mm macro lens.