The sun she shine, the day she bright

January in Plymouth is often bleak and sunless.  Never is the local aphorism 'if you can see the hills, it's going to rain; if you can't see the hills it's raining' more apt.  But we do get spells when the sun shines and the softer winter light illuminates the city.  Never more so than where the land meets the sea as Plymouth foreshore meets Plymouth sound and the Hamoaze section of the Tamar estuary leading to Devonport dockyard.

I've had a couple of days recently when I've been able to get down to the front and take advantage.  Here's some results:

The Cremyll (Cornwall) passenger ferry on it's way across the Hamoaze to Plymouth.  And, yes, the sea really was that blue.  By January the plankton has largely disappeared as the sea gets colder and, on bright sunny days, the light penetrates deeply to turn it almost tropical in intensity.  40-150mm f4 Pro +1.4 x teleconverter at 210mm for this shot..

Firestone Bay on the west end of the Sound.  12-40 f2.8 Pro.  A very popular all year round swimming spot. As demonstrated by the bathers on the steps leading down to the sea.

No set of images of Plymouth could exclude Smeaton's Tower, the red and white lighthouse rescued from The Eddystone rocks and re-erected in honour of the architect responsible for it's original building in 1759. This shot was taken from close to the sea with the 12-40mm.

Close up, against the deep blue of the winter sky, it's certainly impressive.  40-150mm for this shot.

Round the corner from Plymouth Hoe is the Barbican and Sutton Harbour.  I wanted to show three landmarks of the outer harbour wall in this shot.  From front to back the Mayflower steps, the Barbican 'Prawn', and the National Marine Aquarium are prominent.  

Endlessly photogenic, this area is capable of yielding innumerable shots over time.  I'll no doubt highlight a good number in the future but, in the meantime, here's a closer view of the 'Prawn' shining in the winter sun.

Just south of the Dockyard is the old Royal Navy victualling centre, the Royal William Yard.  This has now been turned into a complex of shops, offices and residential flats within the impressive old buildings.  Again, an area much photographed, but always worth another shot.  This is a shot of the buildings round the small harbour.  Once occupied by warships and lighters, it's now the province of pleasure boats - some of which seem to be worth more than my house!

9mm Panasonic Leica for this shot - and on this occasion very little chromatic aberation.

The three lenses used on my Em1 Mkii all fit in my small camera bag and the excellent IBIS allows me to handhold even the 40-150 + telecoverter.  Even with Pro level gear the weight savings over my previous Canon APS-C gear are significant.  I may end up a little footsore from the walking but at 73 I can stll enjoy my photography!

Photographing birds with the Olympus 40-150mm f2.8 Pro - Part 1

I am not a bird photographer.  To be honest I've never been that interested in them and I've never had the budget to afford the long, fast telephoto lenses required to do the job properly.  But, like any wildlife / nature photographer I'll take the opportunity to get a shot should chance permit.

Stover Park, near Newton Abbot in Devon, is a 114 acre nature reserve centred around a large lake that attracts large numbers of migratory birds in winter,  Because there is a flat road running round the lake it's ideal for Maria's mobility scooter and we can enjoy a day out together.

Now the Olympus 40-150mm f2.8, even with the 1.4x teleconverter fitted, is not, by birding standards, a long lens.  420mm ff equivelent, though great for picking out flower details at the back of borders or capturing butterflies feeding without spooking them, is not really long enough for small, shy birds in distant treetops.

But it's just long enough and fast enough for waterfowl aclimated to human presence.  Water fowl such as this flock of coots...

...or a red billed moorhen.

Of course, bigger birds are even easier, as exemplified by this mute swan juvenile enjoying a wing stretch.

But all too often the bird is just a dot in the viewfinder and even the sharpness of the lens isn't enough to produce useable images.

But there are circumstances when even shy birds will tolerate human closeness.  During my regular days at The Garden House I'm often followed around by one of the resident robins.  They're quite happy to get close and even pose.

Of course, they're looking for food, hoping the human will turn up a tasty morsel at ground level. It's what gardeners do, after all.  Mind you, the need to search for food can certainly overcome caution, as with this song thrush hunting for snails amidst a hard early winter freeze.

Hopefully it found something worthwhile.

Regular feeding, as anyone who's put up feeders or bird tables knows, will always attract birds and some of my better shots have been taken on the feeders in my own back garden.  But that's the subject for my next post...

Some thoughts on the Panasonic Leica Summilux 9mm f1.7 lens

Since I switched over to M43 the one area I'd been missing was wide angle.  On my Canon gear one of my favourite lenses was the Tokina 12-24mm (18-36mm full frame - ff - equivelent).  It did, I admit, have some pretty horrendous chromatic aberation but I loved its field of view range and clarity.  I broke it and it was replaced with a Canon 10-18mm EFS.  Despite being even wider it wasn't the same and, although I generated some saleable shots, I tended not to use it.  

At 24mm ff equivelent the wide end of my Olympus 12-40mm f2.8 gave me a very reasonable wide angle perspective but I still hankered for a bit more.  Looking at the options towards the end of 2023 I narrowed it down to two M43 lenses.  Optimal choice would have been the Olympus 8-25mm f4 Pro.  Weather sealed, an excellent range from wide angle to normal, Pro quality glass and build, the ability to take the same filters as my 40-150mm f2.8 Pro; it had everything except for two factors.  Weight and price.  Even used it was more than I could realistically afford and a bit heavier than I would have liked.

So I looked at the second choice, the Panasonic Leica Summilux 9mm f1.7 lens.  Lightweight, sharp, half the cost of the Olympus and with some degree of weather sealing on Olympus bodies I thought I could add it to the kit as an addition to the 12-40mm.  So, at the end of 2023, I bought one.

First thoughts were positive.  It's certainly sharp, with good colour and clarity.  And then I noticed the downside and it took me back to Tokina 12-24mm days.  Purple fringing in high contrast situations.  Take this example:

Cropped from the top right corner of this image:

Yes, it's fixable in post using the Defringe sliders in Lightroom, but it's an additional step in the workflow and defringing is far from perfect.  It's tempting to say it doesn't really matter - but I doubt that Alamy QC would see it that way should I submit images with that amount of noticeable chromatic aberration.

Here's another example (click to embiggen):

All of which means I have to pick and choose which shots I take with the lens to avoid the sort of high contrast situations - bare branches against a winter sky is just one example - where purple fringing is most likely to be induced.

Apart from that it's a lovely lens, as these recent shots of Plymouth basking in January sunshine can attest.

I do have to admit that, perhaps, I should have saved up a little more and bought the Olympus 8-25mm Pro.  Unfortunately the tax man always wants his share of my Alamy earnings and that, I'm afraid, had to take priority.

 

I have a little list....redux

Back in 2013 I added a post about missed butterfly opportunities.  Time moves on and the last couple of years have actually been very productive in terms of filling a few gaps.

Lets start with holly blues, Celastrina argiolus.  Double brooded, with spring and summer variants, they were prolific during summer in the Plymouth area last year, and, for the first time, I actually managed to get some good shots.  They tend to be a little skittish and my lens combination of choice with the EM1 Mkii was the 40-150mm f2.8 and 1.4x teleconverter to give me both excellent working distance; fast, accurate autofocus; and sharpness wide open.

One was even good enough to land to feed on the potato flowers in my back garden.  60mm macro for this shot.

With the number flitting around I'm hoping the spring brood will be equally prolific in 2024 and I can get shots of the darker spring form - and maybe a few shots with wings open.

I'd already found a couple of locations for small coppers, Lycaena phlaeas, in the Plymouth area and had a few shots post 2013 but I was delighted to find that they'd also moved into the no mow area 100m from my house and that yielded a number of good shots.

Attractive little things, they share a habit with their distant cousins the common blue, Polyommatus icarus.

There is a walk up to the moors at Shipley Bridge, near Buckfastleigh in Devon.  Paved, it's an ideal day out for Maria on her mobility scooter.  Once out of the wooded area and on open moorland I had my first sighting of the lovely small pearl bordered fritillary, Boloria selene.

Here's the male:

And the female:

I'm still looking for green hairstreaks and walled brown butterflies - but that's all part of the fun.  2024 maybe?

High Res Shooting with the EM1 Mkii

The Olympus EM1 Mkii offers a high resolution mode, activated from the shooting modes button on the left side of the top plate.  Although not as sophisticated as with more recent models it offers the opportunity to produce 50MP JPEGs or an 80MP ORF (RAW) file by compositing a series of pixel shifted images in camera.  

Frankly, I haven't found much use for it.  For the system to work without horrible artifacts creeping in from subject movement between the image frames the camera has to be securely tripod mounted and the subject(s) to be absolutely still. Achieving that outdoors in the windy environment of South West England is, to say the least, problematic.

Witness this shot of snowdrops at The Garden House.  This the 80MP version.  Resized for this blog post it looks fine:

But look closer at 100% and the problems start to show:

The slightest trace of wind and the photo becomes blurred.  Even downsizing doesn't help - unless you downsize to the native 20MP resolution of the camera - and where is the point of that.

So, for my garden and nature work, the Hi Res mode doesn't really work for me.

Until I hit a situation where it did.  And, one that, confusingly, involves considerable movement.

At Burrator reservoir, on Dartmoor, there's a man made waterfall that feeds water from Drake's Leat down to the waters of the lake.  I wanted to get a couple of shots using as long an exposure as I could to smooth the water as it cascaded over the rocks.  What I didn't have was a neutral density filter to allow me to get that longer exposure.  The best I could do was 1/15th sec.  Then I remembered that because the Hi Res mode composites a number of shots it also lengthens the exposure time.  Apart from the rushing water the air was still and, being in midwinter, what green existed was hugging the ground so I gave it a try.

Higher resolution files, smoother water, and all without loosing the sharpness in the solid areas.  Here's some 100% crops from the 50MP JPEGs

Not the ideal solution - but it worked

Sharpitor in winter sunshine

Had a chance to get out to Burrator, the reservoir on Dartmoor that feeds Plymouth, on a recent day when, unlike recently, the sun actually peeped out from behind the storm clouds.  Late afternoon, low angled winter sun fleetingly a illuminated the tors that surround the reservoir.  This is Sharpitor, to the north of the reservoir and, at 412m high, a typical Dartmoor craggy outcrop with bracken strewn slopes, golden brown in the sun.  The view didn't last long.  The rain returned - but at least I got a memory of a golden landscape in bleak midwinter.

Four views of Sheepstor

To get from my house in North Plymouth to The Garden House at Buckland Monachorum I take the A386 towards Yelverton.  To the east is the bulk of Sheepstor, a 369M high Dartmoor tor (granite outcrop).  Last January I was returning home after a day spent photographing the garden.  The light was lovely. low angled sun illuminating the massive bulk of the outcrop and a blue sky full of clouds.

I'm not a landscape photographer but I couldn't resist turning off to take these shots.  All taken with the Em1 Mkii and the 40-150mm f2.8 Pro, using focus stacking to get a better depth of field for the first two.

Hardly in the class of Hokusai's famous 36 Views of Mount Fuji - but every artistic journey has to start with small steps.  Tiny in my case.

Capturing insect behaviour - some 2023 favourites

It's always enjoyable capturing insects actually doing something rather concentrating on static shots.  After all, they do have a good range of behaviours.  Feeding, flight, mating, egg laying and being preyed upon are all scenarios that give a more rounded picture of the lives of insects.

I've been fortunate enough to capture a few interesting shots in 2023 that illustrate this range of behaviours.  Let's start with feeding:

Capturing nectar or pollen feeding insects is easy.  Set up your stall by a suitable food plant and wait for the insects to arrive.  I've got hundreds of shots like that.  But it was nice to capture the one above, with a honeybee, Apis mellifera and the UK's largest hoverfly, Volucella zoonaria feeding side by side on the flowers of a planted patch of snowberry, Symphoricarpos albus.  The hard part was getting both insects in the same plane of focus.

Of course to get to their nectar or pollen providing plants most insects have to fly.  Flight shots aren't easy.  Insects move erratically and are often quite fast.  But at least hoverflies hover, making things a little easier.  As with this shot of the marmalade hoverfly, Episyrphus balteatus, hovering in fron of Agapanthus flowers in my garden.

Feeding carries risks.  Predators are out there, sometimes in disguise, as with this shot of a little sweat bee that's come to feed but, has instead, been captured by a crab spider, Misumena vatia, camouflaged to hide among the flowers of yarrow.

Feeding isn't always the reason for landing on a flower head, as these two silver washed fritillaries, Argynnis paphia, demonstrate.  One of Britain's largest butterflies, it's quite common in the Plymouth area.  This was photographed at The Garden House.  The female is on the left of the shot. I didn't need a macro lens for this, the 150mm end of the 40-150mm f2.8 Pro being quite sufficient to give me a nice close up.

The next shot, of two bluebottles mating, did need the 60mm macro.  It was cold outside, but using natural light, ISO 800 and a tripod I was able to manouver close enough to do a focus stack on the rather chilly pair.  A couple of degrees warmer and their movements would have been rather too vigorous!

After mating egg laying tends to follow.  And where better to lay eggs than amongst a food supply that the larvae can eat.  This is the UK hoverfly Syrphus ribesii egg laying among rose aphids on one of Maria's roses.  I don't use chemical controls for aphids so It's good to see their natural predators getting on with the job.

Hopefully 2024 will bring many more opportunities to capture different aspects of insect behaviour.  If so you'll see them here.

Why I still use a monopod

The well known photography website Peta Pixel recently ran an article looking at "The Beloved Photography Gear That Nobody Uses Anymore".  The author, Jeremy Gray, included monopods in the list.  His final paragraph summarises his arguments:

"Between lighter lenses, better camera stabilization, and improved ISO performance, the only photographers who still use monopods are people working with 400mm f/2.8 and 600mm f/4 lenses, which themselves are becoming less common in the age of super-light, compact telephoto lenses with slower apertures."

While I can accept some of his thinking I certainly dispute that monopods are almost obsolete for most photographers.  I am, to put it bluntly, no longer young.  I can no longer hold myself in awkward positions for any length of time without some bodily tremor creeping in.  Even the very effective IBIS on the EM1 Mkii can't compensate for inadvertant backward and forward movement (pitch).  And my age certainly induces pitch if I'm handholding a camera and can't brace myself.

Which is where a monopod comes in.

Our youngest daughter bought me the one shown above a few years ago to replace my aging 1990's Manfrotto monopod.  This one has the advantage of removable, foldable tripod feet.  I added a small ballhead I had hanging around and was ready to go.  It's quite light but easily strong enough to support my Olympus gear.

My primary use is for field macro of insects and other small subjects.  The manouverability of a single column and ballhead allows me to either get into awkward spots and still have a measure of stability or set up station beside a suitable nectar plant and hold the camera steady while I wait for the best angle for a shot.  This also helps me to shoot in situations where I can manouver a suitable backdrop behind the subject while shooting one handed.  If I'm using manual focus for macro it also helps to further steady the shot as the camera and lens are slowly rocked to get the correct plane of focus.

The secondary use is for situations where using a tripod would be impractical - or even forbidden.  With the tripod foot off I'm just an old man with an adjustable walking stick.  The fact that I can steady my camera for a close up or a focus stack is just a bonus.

The tertiary use is for ground level shooting:  

With the camera mounted on the ballhead and angled to hold it level but off the ground it's easy to lay the monopod flat on the floor and hold it in position with a foot or knee.  Yes, a bean bag would work as well - but I don't routinely carry one.  

A final use is one that most older photographers encounter if they're trying the aforesaid low level shots.  Getting down for the shot is relatively easy - gravity assists.  Getting back up again as hips and knees creak and groan is rather harder.  The additional support of the monopod certainly helps.

No, the monopod is certainly not dead.  Here's one user that increasingly relies on one.