Welcome

I am Rod Wynne-Powell, and this is my way to pass on snippets either of a technical nature, or related to what I am currently doing or hope to be doing in the near future.

A third-person description follows:
Professional photographer, Lightroom and Photoshop Workflow trainer, Consultant, digital image retoucher, author, and tech-editor for Martin Evening's many 'Photoshop for Photographers' books.

For over twenty years, Rod has had a client list of large and small companies, which reads like the ‘who’s who’ of the imaging, advertising and software industries. He has a background in Commercial/Industrial Photography, was Sales Manager for a leading London-based colour laboratory and has trained many digital photographers on a one-to-one basis, in the UK and Europe.
Still a pre-release tester for Adobe in the US, for Photoshop, he is also very much involved in the taking of a wide range of photographs, as can be seen in the galleries.

See his broad range of training and creative services, available NOW. Take advantage of them and ensure an unfair advantage over your competitors…


View any Gallery by Clicking the relevant TEXT Headline

Thursday 21 August 2014

Birdlife Lens Test

I took the opportunity to give my latest acquisition another test; this time down at Marsworth Reservoir. The lens is the new long telephoto from Tamron, with a really useful zoom range of 150mm to 600mm, and it has taken some getting used to – the weak link was myself and my preconceptions – it has always been a belief that I should consider the size of maximum aperture to be useful only for giving me a bright image to focus, and to always stop down to achieve the best from the lens. Well, I was wrong!

I was wrong because I was also limiting myself to trying to use the lowest ISO setting to give me a clean end result. By so doing I was forcing myself to use too slow a shutterspeed, and simply not taking into account that at the far end of the zoom range, both my own movements and those of my subject were meaning that I needed a significantly faster shutterspeed to keep the image sharp. Also, I was ignoring the advances that have been made in the reduction of noise at slightly higher ISOs.

I did however know that travelling to my chosen location was a good distance and carrying a heavy tripod was burdensome, especially once I had the shots and was now cold and stiff, so I tried a different tack – I took my monopod instead, and added the comparatively light extra; a bungee. Once I reached my destination I extended the monopod, braced it against a branch and tied the bungee around both tightly. The end result was more stable than my tripod, with only a few inches from where the bungee was strapped, to the ballhead atop the monopod. If I really wanted to be clever I could likely replace the ballhead with my gimbal head, but that would mean extra weight to carry!

This morning the light was fairly good, so I was able to get a series of shots mostly taken at the full 600mm and wide open at the aperture of f/6.3, which allowed me at one stage to fire shots off at a momentarily hovering dragonfly.

Whilst waiting for a possible static kingfisher, I had no less than three flybys, two of which were of a pair of kingfishers, one of which landed on a branch to my left unfortunately almost completely obscured by intervening leaves. It remained there for the longest time I have ever seen a kingfisher at rest: a full five minutes, before it rejoined its mate when s/he next made a flyby!

It was a really satisfying time spent with the new zoom, and my purchase fully justified my buying decision and lived up to all the reports I had read about the quality of results expected. I am really pleased I travelled to Rutland to Birdwatch 2014 which made it possible to buy the lens at a good price.

1 comment:

  1. Useful article, thank you for sharing the article!!!

    Website bloggiaidap247.com và website blogcothebanchuabiet.com giúp bạn giải đáp mọi thắc mắc.

    ReplyDelete