Chance Retrospective!

                    This morning I was looking back within my own blog, to simply get an idea of seasonal activity from the past; in particular, what activity I had found on the lakes at Tringford around or before this time of year, when I spotted an entry from late August 2011 when I had the good fortune to witness a wonderful cameo of a lone Grebe parent fishing tiddlers for its young Grebeling chick it was carrying on its back. It was only once I opened that gallery and reminded myself of the occasion, I realised that perhaps others, might equally enjoy the scenes I had enjoyed and recorded back then. So here is the way to revisit that item:

On the right side of the blog is an Archive of previous entries I have made in past years –

Click on the year 2011, and a downward pointing triangle will open that year's entries.

Click August, and the anti-penultimate entry there; "Tringford Afternoon Bird Watching" will reach the shots I was able to capture that day – the particular images appear on the second page of the gallery. The first page of images was devoted to another of my favourite subjects, a Heron.

Enjoy. Hopefully entering a word in my Search Bar, you may find pictures of subjects I have captured since starting this blog way back, a dozen years ago!

PS. Ironically, for those with experience of blog use, the earlier gallery can actually be found by clicking the headline, but the procedure I have described is a way of finding other subjects of interest I may have also photographed – Try: band, butterfly, cricket, Goodwood, Clerkenwell, cricket, Ouse, digicluster, Stockwood, windsurfers – you will notice this can often lead to some rather esoteric subjects!

A Tringford Lake Visit

It seems quite some time since visiting Tringford Reservoir, and having had a brief chat with its Water Bailliff, I decided that despite some occasional light rain, it was worthwhile travelling down as apparently they had been visited by a fair number of Egrets, a bird I have had less opportunity to record.

To get close enough to the activity on the lake I needed to be at the far end of the lake, and for that I needed to enter the woods over a bridge across the stream and make my way through to the shore with my heavy Benbo tripod and set up in the soft mud of the entry stream to the lake, and even then I would still need the 1.4x Converter and some further cropping later! Fortunately the EOS R with its extra pixel density handles this surprisingly well. And certainly in many instances that crop was quite extensive! Up till now I have shied away from using more than the 1.4x crop, but with this body and the Sigma Sports 60-600mm I have it attached most of the time. I will certainly be considering the 2x Converter because it would seem very good sense to use for wildlife and possibly for some Sports work.

As an indication of just how well this lens combo functions, the third picture in this gallery is a full-frame uncropped, and two frames further is a seriously tight crop, capable of an A4 colour print with great detail! Sigma have built a superb lens with fantastic capability which is a real joy to use, and the EOS R is making the most of its capabilities. The Benbo tripod supplies the necessary stability for use at the long end of the range, that I was pushing the envelope on this occasion. For most of the time I was operating at the maximum available aperture as well.

As a further indication of the sheer versatility of this lens, the shot of the mating dragonflies in frame 37 is also a tight crop at less than the full focal length at f/6.3, and that will definitely achieve a Super A3 print, and yes, I would have liked to have been closer, but knew that was simply not practical!

This camera and lens gives me so much joy in use, but it also makes me realise how much I need a more powerful Mac to lessen the post-processing time that invariably follows any outing I make when using the kit to its full potential.

My prediction is that for ultimate quality still images the next step will be a dual processor to accommodate both viewing and shooting as separate, parallel operations to allow for meaningful panning in Sports and Wildlife situations where currently these currently work against each other; my short term way of coping is to use multiple short bursts, but it is a compromise. What is life without a challenge?!