robert100

I've never been supremely impressed by the iso range of my 7d.... my experience has been dark colors show substantial noise at anything above iso 1250 out of my 7d.......if you expose in raw (i always do, and always in "faithful" setting, with no in-camera application of anything) and process in DPP, be careful about applying 'sharpening' in the rgb section of the tool palette..........especially if you do so 'in addition to' applying sharpening using the unsharp mask in the raw tools section...... .....stick to 4 max sharpening in unsharp mask, and keep your threshold in the unsharp mask set at level 6 or 7.......you'll be able to get decently clean edges without blowing apart internal areas...... however, having said that, you also may want to consider that part of it may be the specific lens you're using and what f-stop you're using it at......ie i primarily use, and like very much, a tamron 70-300 on my 7d.....i hike reasonably long distances and often up steep mountain slopes so the light weight is a great boon........but at 300 mm reach at 5.6, i imagine that lens, although still producing sharply focused images, is likely partially responsible for noise in shadows in the images..... David Steven's opinions on it, and re how much may be the body -vs- how much is lens aspect will be the most valuable because he has both a 7d and 5diii and an array of glass. (if nikon had a decent buffer on one of their mid-affordable bodies which could handle repeated bursts of 5-pause 6-pause, 2-pause- 7-pause, etc like the 7d can instead of bogging down and playing like it's permanently dead after 5 or 6 images, the cleanliness of their 24 meg sensors would wipe the 7d off the planet.......but, they don't have. That is the one thing which makes the 7D the camera to carry, it's not the 8fps "burst rate", I also have a 40D and 6-6.5 fps is liveable. what makes the 7D a 7D is that the buffer can handle the quick bursts of "noisy images" all day long. The noise is annoying, annoying enough that i could very easily switch....but that's why I live with it, the 7D's buffer capacity and empty speed.....)

go get your sensor cleaned

i'm not posting anything (no time right now to do conversion and resizing) but popped by for a look and need to pass along a couple of compliments. Peter Meade, what a fascinating juxtaposition, the horse/rider of yore and the airplane and its present day riders, climbing side by side into the same sky. Nice timing. And Rick Du Boisson, as always, your composition is superb. The thing which really caught me with this one was that about two weeks ago, i caught an almost transparent dragonfly against a clump of totally dried grasses, and your ship on the beach image is virtually the same image, the beach is the color of the dried grasses and that ship is the shape of a beached dragonfly. My compliments gentlemen, well done, added enjoyment to my day.

i for one certainly appreciate your input and knowledge Mark, I'll be looking into the things you've outlined

actually the only truly annoying thing out there was the dog. You'll never get photographs of true "wild life" if there's a dog within a half mile of you. In a real event versus a role play..........ah heck, snarl at the lady and tell her to go drown her dog and learn to appreciate what true wildlife actually is.......

I was one who used it extensively. I in fact maintained my site on it constantly. The "bad" part of the timing on its cancellation was that in fact the very day, 24 hours, before the email bomb was dropped on me and it just disappeared, one of the Fire Departments I work with had put ten new "facebook albums" on its facebook page, which is subscribed to and followed by hundreds of individuals and other Fire Departments all over North America, Each of those ten facebook albums which were sent to be viewed by those people and departments are contained the credit line "all photos by Robert C Anderson, website at www,robert100.photography,com". (those albums showed just over 830 of my images of Firefighters to all the subscribers of that fire department) The timing,of this cancellation of that website, in a word, "stunk". There are now people all over the place who are going to that website, and instead of seeing the type of work I produce, are getting the words "this site is no longer available" staring at them from a plain white background. The plain white background with those words does not say "and it;s not because Robert doesn't maintain his site,,,,,,,it was sold, without him knowing it was coming"....it just looks like I personally screwed up. Not impressive. And is there anything any of you at photo.net could have done about it ? Nope. C'est la vie.

actually, organizations like the Professional Photographers of Canada and the Professional Photographers of America have answered this question quite thoroughly and accurately. They in fact have specific judging criteria which are followed by their accredited judges each year in determining awards like "photographer of the year" etc.

I spent five days last week as the designated Official Photographer on behalf of the Justice Institute of BC at this years Regional Fire Training program. Over 120 Firefighter-Rescue Personnel gaining intensive training at four locales across southern Vancouver Island in operations including hands-on full-action in Live Fire Ops involving automobile, structure, and oil spill fires; Aerial Tactics (ie Ladder Trucks); Tender Operations (water provision and relaying ops); and Hazardous Materials Incidents. I put close to nine hundred kms on the wagon running from locale to locale and back to catch the actions, and hammered off over Four Thousand Two Hundred raw exposures (108 gigs worth) on three cameras (7D T3i, 40D). Over the next few weeks I'll be editing that down to maybe five or six hundred for use in future training programs, safety posters, and recruiting posters. Support your local Firefighters folks, they bust their behinds and give up a lot of their personal time training, and the majority of them are Volunteers.<div></div>

Gup, interesting story and fascinating insight into the maternal psyche. Learn something new every day. My photo is of a snake who wasn't quite so lucky, Last Thursday afternoon I'd just poured myself a coffee after comingt home from scouting a photo location for an assignment I'll be doing, when a whole herd of Stellar Jays started raising h down in the trees below the studio, Anticipating it would be the Great Horned Owl which hangs around the yard picking off squirrels (and hoping for a mis-step by Harley-the-Art-Cat) which is usually what sets the Jays and Robins off like alarm-bells, I strolled down for a look. Sho' nuff, it was he/she, as usual, tucked deeply enough back in the thick trees it's like trying to get a photograph inside the bat-cave, but there he/she is, and when you look below the owl, that black rope-like thing hanging down from the branch is about a one meter long garter snake whose name had just become "early evening meal".<div></div>

depends on where you're at. Here on Vcr Island you could drive a fluorescent orange five ton truck onto the sand at the ocean front, hang an iphone out the window and photograph shore birds and gulls etc from ten feet away because they're used to people throwing mcd's greasy fries out the window at em. Back in Northern Alberta, if you're anywhere within five hundred miles of my farm you'll never get a photograph of anything from a vehicle. You could be driving a camo painted silent running electric jeep and it wouldn't matter, the instant anything moving on a roadway in that country stops moving, any coyote, fox, badger, deer, elk, porcupine, or moose on the ground anywhere withint seeing distance with binoculars instantly dives for cover and starts yelping in anticipation of life ending pain from a rifle bullet. Same goes for hawks on fence posts. Wildlife in that area lives in constant fear of vehicles manned by farmers screaming they have the "right to protect" their cows and their wheat fields from "varmints", It is not nice country. Ninety percent of the time a vehicle on one of the gravel roads stops, it's because the thing the moron behind the wheel is going to hang out the window and start shooting with isn't a camera, it's a 30-30.

what a superb bunch of images, great photos every one of 'em. Special nod to Rick for that marvelously stark dramatic composition simply because (a) i'm a cat guy, and (b) camo adaptation is one of my favorite subjects to photograph and to write about Cedar Waxwing. C7D Tamron sp70-300<div></div>

second one, 8 hours later, in tree (and that pizza photograph made me hungry!)<div></div>

Camoflage. If you a predator and you can't see me, you cant hurt me. If you're prey and you can't see me, you could be my next meal. There were a number of flickers in this area in spring, hadn't seen any around for a couple of months until yesterday, and then bumped into a group of four of em twice. First, just a hundred meters away digging for grubs around 0900 as the morning sun finally climbed high enough over the southeastern ridge to throw light on a small hillside covered in dry grass. Then around 1700 hours when i took a along the lower part of the mountain a half kilometer away, a single one landed to catch the final rays of the sun before it dropped out of sight over the top of the north-western ridge. Perfect adaption to their environment. Their colors are perfect camo letting them disappear in the thick dry grasses, rocks, and dirt, and perfect camo letting them appear as just another branch with peeling bark of a half dead tree even when brightly lit and contrasted in the wide-open space against the dark distant hillside. Both images, 7D with tamron sp70-300 at 300.<div></div>

what a superb bunch of mages and what a SUPERB and priviliged insight into the minds of the photographers who capture them. I've actually spent most of the past week on firefighting photography, but did get a couple of birds within the this week time-frame. The attached photo was taken with a 7D with a Tamron sp70-300, which has been the camera/lens combo i've carried here on the mountain the majority of days the past three months. This lens doesn't have macro, so the minimum focusing distance even on the bees and bugs is about 6 feet, thus any images i post of them are greatly cropped. What the lens does give me is very light carry-weight and a ring- usm focus motor which allows me instant manual over-ride without having to switch out of af mode. For images like birds such as this which are darting in and out of a tangle of branches and shrubbery, this allows af to get me to being “close” to being in focus, and then i can hot-tweak it manually to bypass the branches and get to the bird even while i'm already starting to press the shutter button. I carry the camera set to iso1250 tv 1/1000, spot metering, and the focus point set to dead-center on the smallest point the 7D gives me. The reason for carrying the 7D and its extra weight is simple: 8fps burst rate, and a buffer which takes bursts of 22 raw images in stride. (I tested a Nikon D7100, I liked it and it has the burst-rate, but the buffer “died” after 7 images), Weight is a real factor, my morning walk along the mountainside up here takes me on a three km walk with a vertical rise of just over 180 feet, and i occassionaly do little “scrambles through the brambles” side excursions. On the occassions I do carry a second body it's either a T3i with either a matching Tammy 70-300 for video, a 40D with a 17-85 to widen up for landscapes, or a simple, old, and relaible Fuji s2000hd 10 meg compact. I did buy a Nikon d3200 with a true Nikon 70-300 specifically to get to “light and long” and which i found to produce superb images “but” the palm of my right hand just doesn't fit the camera, the pad below my thumb presses the dial everytime I squeeze the trigger, and throws everything off. The t3i for video has one feature Canon put on that one camera and it alone. a 3 to 10 “crop zoom” feature in-camera on 1080p video, which is superb. With that 10x “crop zoom” combined with the 300m reach on the Tamron, I have video of less than 1/2 the moon filling the entire frame, and not had to use expensive video software to get the crop. It also has the same 18 meg sensor as the 7D, a flip screen which protects it in the brambles as well as flexible live-view angles, and better high iso performance than the 7d. If I didn't need 8 fps 22 raw image bursts, the t3i would the one i'd carry most of the time. You people are GREAT, you have given me so much valuable insight today. Particularly interesting to note Siegfrieds use of flash (i never use one), and Laura's mention of using a fill-reflector. That one tip....the fill reflector...is something I will begin carrying with me again instantly. Years ago I never went anywhere without one of those dollar-store silver vinyl “emergency blankets” which fold up into a pocket, and which i had left silver on one side and painted gold on the other side for a warmer fill. I don't know why I stopped carrying it, but Laura's tip reminded me how valuable it is and that it's a useful and featherweight item to have with you. But you have all given superbly valuable insights, there are enough valuable tips here to keep me reading and re-reading them for weeks. Thank you, every one of you.<div></div>

my third image is another of the birds photo'd down in the trees by the hidden pool. I chose this as the third image specifically as it shows a personal preference, referencing back to Thom's comment that he preferred the second of the two Redbreast images - ie, the one with a "clean" view of the bird, versus the first image in which the bird's body is partially obscured by a thick branch of the tree about a foot in front of it which I was able to throw out focus to get right to the bird;s head and eye, and then use it, out of focus, as a specific and deliberate compositional and instructional element. I've always been intrigued that people automatically go for the "clean" view, when in actual fact out here in the forest where I live and function, a clean, unobstructed, branchless, view, is so extremely rare it's actually "un"-natural, and is missing the nature of the environment in which these smaller birds live, and how they deliberately use the branches as a "defense".mechanism to make it hard for predators like owls and hawks to reach them. It's actually very rare out here for me to be able to use AF, 90 percent of my bird images are manually focused to let me "walk past" a foreground element which is so tight to the subject it's extremely difficult for even the tightest finest AF point on the 7D to avoid being affected by. This third image doesn't contain a large out-of-focus "blocker branch" I had to walk-past like that, so it offers people a "more-clean" view, but at least it still has branches moving from fore to aft blocking the lower half of the bird and showing more environment, not just open-space. And the image of the red interior of submarine Robin opened the day with is superb, as is David's Big Sky along with the explanation concerning why he likes the effects obtainable with the lens . Both images have Great instant dramatic visual impact, and I really truly like reading the photographer's explanations of the how-and-why. Well done.<div></div>

thanks Thom. I envy you your finch, I have spent my entire summer trying to get a photo of a Goldfinch, and of a Western Tanager, which is like a Goldfinch with a red head. No publishable results There are numerous Goldfinch which hang about in the thick growth on a sunny slope 4 hundred meters away, and there is one pair of the Tanagers around, I've spottted the male four times. But both are so shy, elusive and quick it's been almost impossible to get a lens on 'em, and on the few times I have to even do that, not once have I managed a sharp, in-focus, and properly exposed frame. It's been like chasing a fart through a barrel of nails.

second image same juvie redbreast<div></div>

Juvenal Redbreasted Sapsucker hanging out on the tree above the hidden pond on Camsusa Creek. The odds are pretty good this will be an offspring of one of the pairs I photographed together in the cedars higher up on the vineyard in mating season back in the spring.<div></div>

to Michael Chuang, I've been debating having a smaller rig i can have along with me specifically as a landscape camera rather than carrying two full dslrs but uncertain as to quality. Your grasshopper is telling me maybe I should be carrying two NEX6's, one with a long lens for birds, one with wide for landscapes, instead of carrying a heavy 7D at all. WOW ! Great image. (while I'm back on, there are two typos in my post I can't go back and edit..."be" shud read "by", and the bird beastie is obviously a WaxWing, with a "W" in there). And I repeat.....good topic, Laura.

Weeks of extremely hot dry conditions have turned Camsusa Creek which runs in a torrent along the mountain below my place much of the year, into nothing but a spindly trickle connecting a few pools which have lasted only by being totally hidden from sunlight be dense overhanging vegetation. There is absolutely no vantage point from which you can see there is water fifteen feet below the tree in this photograph. The evidence there is water remaining in a pool down there is purely circumstantial: that birds, like this Cedar Waxing, emerge from below, absolutely as soaked as a sponge. They are managing to take relief from the heat, the dust, and the bugs by taking a full-immersion bath, then rising to this tree to fluff, preen, and dry themselves in the mid-day sun. Ten meters behind the vantage point I took this photo from, the earth is scorched bone dry, the grasses so dry that despite three days of light rain last week, the fire risk is still rated extreme. And yet to get to my camera-vantage-point I scraped my way through thick, lush, blackberry brambles.....and paid the price to get this photograph....four blackberry thorn slashes across my right wrist in the gap between my jacket sleeve and gloves.....each 3 cm long, spaced 2 cm apart, and which bled profusely down my arm (and which, along with bee stings, wasp stings, and spider bites, taught me long ago to always carry a small spray bottle of ispopropyl alcohol in my photography cargo-pants pocket). Micro-climates ? You betcha. It's why rhubarb will grow in one corner of your garden in the city and not in the other corner 20 meters away. Differing levels of sun and water. Life on this earth survives because of one simple word. Diversity. Without that, there is nothing. Good topic<div></div>

to Paul, good photo of the ants.....and in that you've posed it as a question in reference to what you've called "kissing", in all likelihood what you're witnessing is mutual grooming. One of the most difficult areas for any animal to keep clean is its own face, especially around its mouth. so mutual grooming is actually an almost universal behavior, ie lions, wolves, etc all commonly lick each other's faces to cleanse the facial fur of blood and meat clinging to fur, cows lick each other's faces, etc etc. (in humans, mothers often annoy their children by imitating this by licking their own fingers and then using them, coated with their saliva, to give children a usually fought-against rudimentary face-wash. For some reason they seem to feel this is more socially acceptable than just licking the kid's face). It would definitely be in the ants mutual interest to give each other a face-grooming to remove the salt before it dries to their faces.

to Thom P, i admire the action you took, it takes a genuine understanding to have the patience you did and not interfere until it became obvious it was okay, and then have the wisdom to take only the action of removing the man-made barrier and then step aside and let the interaction between the animals take its own course in determining whether or not the orphan was to be adopted and have a shot at survival in a natural upbringing under the tutelage of its own kind. Well done.

bee and skipper<div></div>

a photograph from Wednesday while the sun was still out full blast. The little black dude on the left was on the thistle first, the much larger bee with the gold markings was the interloper, flew in, landed beside the smaller one, stuck out its left foreleg and gave the little one a massive push. The little dude didn't give, he (she) raised its right foreleg and pushed back. The two of them spent the next 15 or 20 seconds pushing like hell against each other, doing that "loop your arm over the other guy's arm and shove him with your elbow" move, fighting for the advantage, while they worked their way across the flower......and both of em with head down foraging the entire time. The thistles are quickly going to puff-ball and disappearing on the wind, so there is immense pressure on all who forage on them to "get it while it's there<div></div>

The little gold beast is a Skipper. There's a lot of em around right now. I've been photographing them and a variety of bees and butterflies each day for the past few weeks in the thistle patch at the corner of the main yard. The First Nations from this area of the island call the grass it is on“Saxwul”. Others call is Reed Canarygrass. The latin is Phalaris arundinacea. This one's about 4 feet tall but it grows to 8 feet. It's classified as an “invasive” species here, but at one time the planet was totally covered in ice, so if yer a plant or animal and you intend to survive and propagate, i guess you've bee'n invading somewhere ever since the ice started to melt and you started draggin' pollen around stuck to yer legs. C'est la vie.<div></div>