I visited Gigrin Farm last Sunday and have been busy editing all the images. This is when you find that your most used key on the keyboard is delete! The image above is of an immature kite at the feeding. It is a vertical crop of a horizontal original image. For those of you who have never been to Gigrin Farm in Rhayader, but are planning to go here are some photo tips:
- Lenses: most of my images are taken on a 300mm lens with my digital crop factor of 1.5x on my Nikon . I also use my 70 – 200mm zoom as well. I do also use a 500mm tripod mounted lens, but find it easier to use the shorter lenses handheld.
- Make sure your shutter speed does not drop below 1/1000th of a second. The birds move very fast and a faster shutter speed will ensure your images are sharp. I set shutter priority on my cameras and adjust the ISO rating to obtain an aperture of F5.6 to F8 if possible.
- Set your auto focus to continuous/servo (depends on camera manufacturer) and either select all focusing points or a group that you can control the position of. This will speed up your focus acquisition time. Sometimes the kites stall in the wind or glide into the wind and slow their flight speed down, at this point using a selected focus point if possible will ensure accurate focusing on the eyes of the birds.
- If you have two camera bodies, set them both up to allow a quick change of image perspective.
- At the start of the feeding, take your time. There are normally lots of the kites in the air and it is difficult to isolate single birds. Use this time to watch where the birds are flying in from and where they go to start their dive onto the food. You can also use this time to check your exposure histogram and practice your focusing.
- The birds come in waves and can be present for over two hours. Later on it is easier to get individual bird photographs and the light will have improved with the sun lower in the sky, so lighting up the underneath of the birds better.
- Unpack all your storage cards ready to load into the camera and take a back up device to load full cards onto or make sure you have plenty, and I mean plenty of cards to use. You will take more images than you expect.
- Use the photographic hides to get a better view of the feeding site and because their viewing area is wider it is easier to move with your cameras. You don’t always have to be in a hide, and successful photographs can be taken outside the hides on the path or from the viewing area in the field next to the feeding site.
- Expect loads of useless images, just press delete! Be really critical of your images and be ruthless. Check the focus on the eyes at 100% in your editing software.
- And lastly, enjoy yourself and if you can, stop taking photographs and watch the kites for a while.
A great day at Whiteford Point, Gower peninsula
I had a great day at Whiteford Point, Gower Peninsula yesterday. I was originally planning to do some plant photography as there are orchids and other coastal species present. The wind was a bit too strong to get sharp images when out on the dunes, so I switched to more general photography and experimented a bit as well. The image above is the last photograph I took. By this time it was quite dark, but digital capture still picked up a lot of detail. Too much detail in fact! In post processing in Lightroom I had to create the silhouette I had originally envisaged. The photograph is a horizontal crop of the original image which removed excess foreground and sky to emphasis the tree more. I think with some further fine tuning this image may work with some toning effects.
As a loction Whiteford Point is hard to beat. On one side of the sand spit is a long beach with sand dunes which catch the setting sun. The other side is a large tidal marsh area where lots of sea birds congregate along with the grazing sheep and semi wild horses. There is also a great selection of bird life as well with a resident Buzzard family every year, plus large flocks of over wintering migrants in the winter.
The beach is open to the full force of the Atlantic Ocean so unfortunately lots of waste pollution thrown off ships and generally washing around in the oceans gets washed up on the beach. I currently have a project going documenting this, but would like to tie it into images of the impact of tourism on the local beaches. Hopefully I will move further forward with this project this summer. Through the hard work of the National Trust and their volunteers the beach is cleaned of all the rubbish each year, so it never really builds up. Also with some of the highest tide ranges in the world here, a lot is picked up and taken back out to sea.