Two days on Sile river (January 08, 2006)

It does not happen often to know a person since three days and feeling like being with the friend of a life...but there is not other way to describe the two days that I spent on Sile river, with my good friend Fenice. Fenice is a young - and talented - photographer, and a sweet girl....she was kind enough to bring me on Sile river well before the sunrise, and she showed me he best places for photography :-)

When we arrived on the river (near Silea), it was still very dark and the sky was cloudy. I mounted the Sigma 12-24 on the 20D to take some landscape photos - even in complete darkness, it is possible to take very interesting shots. An exposure of 30" at ISO 200 revealed some beautiful colors in the sky, and the threes into foreground created beautiful silouettes.
One hour after sunrise the light was still pretty dim, nevertheless, it was time to begun bird photography: there were hundreds of coots and two beautiful grebes. To get a decent shutter speed, I've set the 20D on ISO 800 with an exposure compensation of -0.7, to get an effective sensitity of nearly ISO 1250. With these setting, even an excellent perfomer as the 20D gives quite a bit of noise, but with good post-processing techniques it is possible to get rid of noise and, anyway, I always prefer a slightly noisy, but sharp, photo instead of a blurred photo. Of course, I used the widest aperture that I could get (in this case f/5.6, since I was photographing with the 600 f/4 + 1.4x) and the image stabilization was active.

I selected AI Servo AF with center AF point (when you photograph a bird in water, I suggest to avoid AFPS, since the automatic selection might focus slightly behind of before the subject), and I placed the lens right on the ground to get the lowest angle. It is very important to photograph animals from their eye level - not yours - otherwise the photo is not as strong as it could be. Placing the lens on the ground, I was almost at the same height of the grebe, and the photo gives the impression of being side by side with your subject, as if you were looking the world with the eyes of a grebe.

The grebes come pretty close, and I was able to take many frame-filling photos. Even with ISO 800 @ -0.7 the shutter speed was quite slow, so I've taken as many shots as I could to be sure to get at least some sharp photo. I'm pretty happy of the results - the colors and the detail are very good. It was the first time that I photographed an adult of great crested grebe (Podiceps cristatus) and I was in awe....this is a truly beautiful bird! Fenice even managed to take a photo of the couple of grebes (male and female)...she used the 100-400 so the subject was a bit too distant, nevertheless it was an impressive sight.

At midday, the grebes were gone and the light was not great, so we take a couple of hours of rest. We come back on Sile river in the afternoon - the sky was clear and there was a sweet, warm light. I focussed mainly on coots...there birds are so funny! :-)
The coot is a pretty aggressive bird, and it is very territorial, in particular in the breeding season...it is easy to see two coots running on water during their frequent disputes. When I've taken this photo, the two coots were eating some grasses on the water - the coot is omnivore, and it eats a wide variety of foods, from fished to eggs of other small birds and grasses.
The late afternoon light gave a beautiful golden tone to the water. Since the coots were quite close, I decided to trade a little of focal lenght to get more brightness - I removed the 1.4x TC from the 600 f/4 and I set the aperture on f/4 (again, I used ISO 800 @ -0.7 for fast shutter speed). These two coots were at few centimeters one from the other, so I expected to see them fightiting - they didn't. Maybe they were male and female? Or they were simply friendlyer than the other coots? Anyway, they gave me an occasion for good photo - here, it seems that they are chatting...

The wide aperture, combined with the low angle, gives a very clean background, that complements perfectly the subject. When I processed the photo with Adobe Photoshop, I've "split" the image on two layers, and I applied a strong noise reduction on background, and a more conservative noise reduction on the subject. With this technique, it is possible to get clean photos even at very high ISO, while mantaining the fine detail of the subject. Other than that, I increased the contrast with Levels, to get stronger color and a more vivid photo.

Grebes, coots, swans, mallards and moorhens are only few of the inhabitants of Sile river. We have seen even various species of tits (Long-tailed tit, Blue tit and other), woodpeckers, wrens and, of course, the omnipresent gulls! Even though the gulls are very common birds, I always enjoy whatching and photographin them. We spent half an hour observing a Yellow-Legged Gull (Larus michahellis) that repeatedly attacked a flock of Black Headed Gulls that were quietly resting on water. It was almost sunset and the light was awesome. I choose to handhold the lens, as I often do when I photograph birds in flight: the 600 f/4 is surely an heavyweight, but it is not impossible to handhold it. Fenice instead preferred to use the much lighter Canon 100-400 L IS, and when we swapped the lenses she used the 600 on the Wimberley head. When the subject are not too distant, the 100-400 is an awesome lens for birds in flight...the more I use it, the more I like it :-)

With the 600 f/4+1.4x, I was able to isolate a single gulls against a nice out of focus background - the most difficult thing was to frame the fast moving birds with a focal lenght of 840mm (1340mm, if you consider the 1.6x crop of the 20D). It was essential to follow the subject during the exposure, since the shutter speeds were ranging between 1/500 and 1/800, and such speed is not enough to freeze perfectly a fast action if you don't follow the subject. The gulls were fliying very low on the water, while we had moved to the riverside, some meters above the water leves: it was a great occasion to photograph the gulls from a different perspective.

I choose to use AFPS, with mixed results - it often focussed on background...I really wish that Canon improves their AF algorithms, it would be great to have a "programmable" AF limiter - the 600 f/4 already gives the possibily to limit the focus range between three options (5.5-16.2mt, 5.5-infinity and 16.2-infinity), but sometimes I'd love to being able to choose an arbitrary range of distances...in this situation, for example, I'd have set the limiter on 25-40 meters, to avoid focussing on the background (that was nearly at 60 meters). Anyway, so far this AF algorithm exists only in my dreams so I had to do my best to focus on the subject with AFPS and AI Servo, and the focus limiter set on 16.2-infinity.

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