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| TITLE: | Canada Geese swimming in light morning mist by Reedmace plants
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| INFO: | "A misty February morning in Ivy North Hide, waiting for the mist to clear fully and for a Bittern to show. I've always liked the view out of the front windows, one-way glass and non-opening as they are, a view which includes this old dead Birch tree and the Reedmace bed. Often various water birds are in this vicinity and on this occasion I'd noticed that several of the regular Canada Geese were mooching around near the tree. When they began to form this line I thought it must be worth a picture, even through the darkened (and not very clean) one-way glass, and, as I've always wondered whether shooting through this glass is practical quality-wise, I grabbed my second camera with short zoom lens already attached and quickly lined up through what looked like a clean-ish part of a window, zoomed to frame the image, and took a couple of quick shots just before the line up of geese broke up as they swam on.
This resulting image is quite pleasing to my eye, and the slight misty conditions have given a feeling off depth to the image, though I did feel the need to digitally remove a few out-of-focus background ducks to simplify the composition and keep attention on the main elements (geese, tree, Reedmace). The immediate effect of the one-way glass is the loss of two stops of light, but it also introduces a blue-ish colour shift (not too much of a problem with this image in cool misty light) which can be compensated for in post-capture. Sharpness-wise I was pleasantly surprised - the thin tips of the Reedmace heads seemed quite sharp and with no double-imaging. However, I was shooting about a metre back from the glass which meant that some of the dirtiness on the window or (possibly inside reflections) shows in the image - in this case there is an obvious darker streak down the left-hand edge of frame and other areas of the water look a little uneven. These blemishes can be cleaned up in post-capture (I've just not bothered yet) but otherwise can probably be eliminated by shooting with the lens close up against a clean part of the window. Bear in mind that the shot is also into the light (though in this case the sun was obscured by mist) which may also impinge on image quality. Notwithstanding these potential issues, I think shooting through the glass is viable, at least with a short zoom lens." February 2011 |
| TECH: | Nikon D200, Nikkor 70-180mm f4.5 Micro-Nikkor zoom lens at 105mm, ISO 200, f11, 1/500 sec.
Hand-held. Slightly cropped image. |
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