It was late at night, and I could hear something scrabbling at the high window at the top of the room. Full story at my naturehead blog…
I decided to take a look outside. I took a camera with quite a long lens, and hoped the pop-up flash would be sufficient because I didn’t want to spend extra time putting on a flashgun.
When I got into the garden I could make out that it was quite a small bird. There it was, still focussed on the task of getting through the window. I took a few shots and zoomed in on the big screen on the back of the Canon 40d to see if I had a good enough picture for identification. Even at about 8 metres away in the dark the autofocus had worked and the flash result was OK. [click photo to enlarge]
So here was the Canon 40d with just an integral flash, which did its special pre-shot firing to enable the autofocus and metering system to see something. The lens was a Canon ef 70-200mm f2.8 L is usm with a Canon ef x2 extender. (Have you tried the Sigma 70-200mm alternative? Let me know.)
Looking at the photos again on a computer screen, I could be more sure of the best image. There was a lot of leeway for brightening and sharpening, because we had enough light to start with – but not too much. Shame about the strong reflection in the Skylark’s eye.
Anyhow, I didn’t bother adjusting the image with a fancy software. Without much ado I have simply cropped out the bird and afterwards used Easy Thumbnails by Fookes Software to prepare this image rapidly for the web. The settings were to make it 900 pixels wide, at ‘100%’ quality in conversion, and I raised contrast and sharpening by about 2 points each. You can even select the data conversion process, and I chose Lanczos3 for good quality. Damn good Freeware.
© Jason Ball
