Squirrels, Grackles, and Doves

[cooltouch]

When it gets really hot here, I don't typically feel like going out and spending a lot of time in the heat. But I did feel like exercising my photographic chops today, so instead I just hung around in my front yard for a while. I figured if I just sort of stayed still for a while, the wildlife would get over my presence and come back to hang out. Why? Because just a few meters away was food and water. My dog's food and water, that is. But it don't matter. Squirrels, grackles, and doves like dog food as it turns out.

I was using my Canon FD 400mm f/4.5 with an EOS-FD converter on my EOS XS (1000D). I had the corrective element in for this shoot, but as it turns out, I could have left it out with the distances I was shooting at. Because my 400 focuses well past infinity, it will work with no element out to about 20 meters. Oh well, next time. All photos were shot with the FD 400mm f/4.5 wide open at f/4.5. Plus, all photos are fairly tight crops of the originals. So if you see noise, blame it on ISO 800 and the crop.

The squirrels are the most skittish. In deep shade, I had to bump my camera's ISO up to 800. I also had to use a monopod -- a tripod would have been better, but a lot more clumsy. The result was only one useable shot of a squirrel out of about eight tries.


Grackles are rather aggressive and noisy birds. They have a variety of calls, one of which sounds like a blend of a stick being cracked in two and a shriek. You gotta hear it to believe it. They make for decent photo subjects, though.



Doves often hang out on the ground when I'm not around. Because I was, they were hanging around in the trees, waiting for me to leave so they could snatch some more food from my dog's bowl.







I was rather impressed with the metering job my camera did. I had it set to "Partial," which is a metering pattern I've preferred for years. Most of the dove shots were rather strongly back lit, but as you can see the doves were not silhouettes. I used PS's raw converter to add some fill light to a few of the images, but most of them looked good straight out of the camera. Yes, there are numerous places where the image is blown out to pure white, but that's pretty much what it looked like in the viewfinder too. So I still say it was very close to correct.

I've owned this FD 400mm f/4.5 for a couple of months now -- haven't used it as much as I would have liked, but most of the shots I've taken with it have been with the aperture wide open at f/4.5. It's because I haven't had much of a chance to use it that I'm doing this. I'm testing its sharpness and contrast in a variety of settings to give me a best idea of its performance capabilities at the wide-open setting, where I can achieve the most dramatic shots in terms of a sharp foreground and an out of focus background. Well, a 400/2.8 it isn't, but it delivers reasonably decent bokeh. The first dove pic shows that pretty well, I think. My conclusion is that the lens is somewhat soft wide open, but the sharpness is certainly acceptable. And a bit of usm in pp doesn't hurt things either

[Jesito]

Nice takes. I'm behind a squirrel family since months and have never been able of catching them with the cam!.

Regards.
Jes.