Emerging from the shadows - photography

I'm afraid that I still haven't got to grips with manual settings on my camera and rarely stray from the automatic setting.

Even if I could get my head round which settings to choose there are times when I need to take a photo very quickly and, if I had to fiddle with settings, the moment would be lost. 

One example was when a robin was singing high in a tree . The late afternoon sun was shining and the bird was just a silhouette. No point even trying to take a photo with my lack of expertise? Digital photography means there is never anything to lose by just pointing the camera and pressing the shutter.

The resulting image was this ...

Rubbish isn't it? The camera, however has captured far more than it first appears and all is not lost.

We have a piece of software called Adobe Lightroom which often compensates for my lack of expertise in setting up the camera correctly. Using this I can apply settings after the image has been taken. 

Cheating I hear some of you muttering but my aim is to produce a pleasing image and why is it cheating to tweak settings after the photo was taken rather than before. If the initial photo is really rubbish then the software won't magically turn it into a perfect photo. The information has to be incorporated when taking the image in order for the software to bring it out.

I've chosen this extreme example to show what is possible. The photo above was actually what I saw with the naked eye. 

I'm not going into tutorial mode - the idea is just to give a flavour of how something half decent can be produced from what initially appears to be a completely failed photo.

I imported the original image into Lightroom.

Let's look closer at part of the panel on the right.

This area allows you to correct the exposure and alter various other light settings. All I needed to do to this photo was to decrease the amount of shadow. I reduced it to the maximum capacity as you can see from the slider above.

I ended up with this ...

The details of the robin were magically revealed. The camera had caught all this bit the shadowing masked it.

The image was taken with my Lumix FZ1000 at the full extent of the optical zoom. The actual photo size was 5472px x 3648px (or to make it simpler 772mm x 515mm or 30" x 20") I know incredible isn't it. 

The huge size of the image means that I can select and crop a much smaller part of the image so that the robin becomes more dominant.

Back to Lightroom and more tools.

I clicked on the aspect ration control tool to open the padlock as I wanted my photo to be a different shape to the original Then I clicked the crop tool.

I set the crop box around the part of the image that I wanted to keep.

Let's look closer.

If you look closely you can see that the highlighted selection has some guidelines displayed. I have this set up in thirds, like a noughts and crossed template. I'm not going into any detail about the rule of thirds here other than to say that the guides help with composition. The selection can be moved around until you are happy with the composition. I wanted the viewer to be drawn to the robin's eye and so this was placed at the point where a horizontal and vertical line cross.

Once satisfied I clicked the crop tool again to'cut' out the selected area. So here we see the before and after. Both are cropped for a direct comparison.

It's not as sharp as it could be but considering how it set off I don't think it is bad. It was good enough to use as the design for my 2016 Christmas cards. 

Copyright: Original post from Our Plot at Green Lane Allotments http://glallotments.blogspot.co.uk/ author S Garrett

Bird count results

We carried out the Garden Bird Count on Saturday and despite the dull conditions were off to a promising start with six individual blackbirds visible at the same time. At times we have counted more. 

I always used to think that the territorial nature of blackbirds meant that there would only ever be one pair in our garden but once we started watching the birds we realised that this was far from the truth. On a morning, often our blackbirds sit watching doors and windows for signs that food is coming out. As soon as the door opens it is a race to be the first bird at the bird table. Often it is a case of which bird dares to station themselves nearest the table ready to dive in as soon as Martyn's back is turned. They then seem to patiently take turns until everyone has manged a mouthful. After the initial round of grabbing a snack, blackbird wars break out with lots of open beaked threats and dive bombing.

So our count results were as follows.

Below is a chart comparing the results over the last few years.

The total tally is up over the previous year but some species have surprised us. Usually when long tailed tits visit the garden they come in a group. We rarely see a lone bird but on this occasion we saw just a single bird.

One bird that we miss is the goldfinch. A large flock of goldfinches used to be regular visitors. There was rarely a time that we looked out of the window without there being a couple on the sunflower hearts feeder and several picking up crumbs beneath it. In 2013 this species topped our chart and even then the number spotted wasn't as high as on many occasions when we counted 15 or more birds. Now they are only very occasional visitors.

Below are our results displayed a different way.

Other than a blip in 2013 the house sparrow has been our most numerous species. They are quite difficult to count as they rend to move around a lot and also hide in the trees so there may have been even more than we managed to spot as we have to focus on just one area of the garden.

Although we counted a few starlings we didn't have as many as usual. They usually move in after the first bout of blackbird dining and draw our attention by way of their squabbling. The window by one of the bird table bears testimony to their messy eating habits.

Blue tit and great tit numbers visible at any one time are never high as they tend to quickly grab a morsel from a feeder or table and quickly make off with it to eat in the relative safety of a bush. For this reason I would guess that we actually had more individual visitors than the count suggests.

Once I had submitted my results the Bird Count site created a chart showing the proportions of the various species counted to make up my top 10 birds.

The chart above only shows our top ten and, despite us counting the same numbers as the blue tit, collared dove and goldfinch, the magpie and long tailed tit were missing so the chart doesn't provide fair picture.

The top 10 nationwide at the time that I submitted my results were.

Generally it seems that the bird species visiting our garden roughly correlates to the national picture. The chaffinch was missing from our count although we do see them fairly frequently in our garden. 

The dunnock didn't, at that point, feature in the national top 10 but I think it is like the wren an easy bird to overlook except when in full song. Also it is often mistaken for a sparrow.

We didn't see any of our less frequent visitors but it is against all odds for them to appear during the count.

I guess the RSPB are satisfied that the organisation of the count provides them with the information that they need, but it is really frustrating to be limited to a single hour. We find different species are more likely to be spotted a different times during the day so the time chosen will skew the results.

Also for the last few weeks for some reason out feeders have been slow to empty. This happens at certain times throughout the year. At others times we are hard pressed to keep then filled.

A further variable is the prevailing weather, for instance if it is frosty lots of birds will visit the thawed bird baths. I wonder whether this is taken into account?

Copyright: Original post from Our Plot at Green Lane Allotments http://glallotments.blogspot.co.uk/ author S Garrett

A few snaps during bird count

Copyright: Original post from Our Plot at Green Lane Allotments http://glallotments.blogspot.co.uk/ author S Garrett