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| TITLE: | Coot swimming in slight morning mist by wood posts and 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, dark one-way glass and non-opening as they are, a view which includes this old dead Birch tree, the line of wood posts, and the Reedmace and reed beds. Often various water birds are in this vicinity and on this occasion I'd noticed that this single Coot was mooching around near the tree - when it began to swim toward the line of wood posts I thought it would make a nice composition with the tree, posts and Reedmace, virtually silhouetted against the slightly misty light.
This meant shooting through the darkened (and not very clean) one-way glass of the front windows of the hide but, as I've always wondered whether shooting through this glass is practical quality-wise, I thought it was worth trying and 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 as the Coot swam across. This resulting image is quite pleasing to my eye, with the Coot effectively framed by the tree, posts and Reedmace, 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 (Coot, tree, posts, Reedmace). Although the Coot is really quite small in the composition it is nonetheless an important part, though the image may still work without it. 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 and the Coot itself seem 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 shows in the image - in this case there is an obvious off-focus blob in the middle of the right-hand reeds which I've not yet retouched. Such blemishes can be cleaned up in post-capture 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 82mm, ISO 200, f11, 1/500 sec.
Hand-held. Slightly cropped image. |
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