We spent a great day at Whitewater Draw Saturday watching the Sandhill Cranes. And while today was a lazy day early on, now I find myself with only a brief time to post, so at least I've downloaded my 400+ images, and scanned the nearly twice as many Melinda took. Likely I'll delete at least half of mine, at least the out-of-focus and boring ones.
This time I swore I wouldn't be under-powered and have little bird images! I humped the William Optics 11cm APO the quarter mile or so to the viewing stand, along with the tripod and camera gear - a pretty good load. And ironically, the cranes were the closest I've ever seen - the nearest brave ones were only 50 yards or so away! It made for some great shots with the 770mm focal length of the WO scope, but also some unique problems - for one, if a couple birds were only a foot or two apart along the line to me, one of them would be slightly out of focus. You can see at left that I focused at the lower bird, which was right next to the other, which is slightly fuzzy with the slight distance between them...
With the manual focus of the telescope, it took some practice to get exact focus. Melinda got me an accessory hood focuser for my birthday which has helped a lot, and I fine-tuned the diopter adjust on the camera so it would be in good critical focus when focused to my eye. Another challenge was to catch them in flight, being both able to pan along and get to focus at the same time! But I was able to do it as these shots show. The shot at right is a full rez enlargement of one frame - hey, if you can see the pupil of the bird's eye from a couple hundred yards, I'm happy!
As shown on this shot, as well as the uppermost picture above, you can actually see through their nostril holes on their beak - I've never been close enough to see that before! Likely not due to the scope or the near distance, but the combination is killer! Oh, and by the way - the big 4+ inch scope made me a big hit with the ladies, if you know what I mean! I had a good number of them introducing themselves and wanting to see what it was capable of doing...
The scope is the only optics I shot through, so I left it to Melinda to catch some of the wider fields, including this one of hers showing the sunset colors full of bird silhouettes, as well as a few in the water. While there were always a good number of them near us, the huge crush of them returned just as dark arrived, almost impossible to capture photographically, but their nearly deafening calls as they arrived in near darkness is impossible to forget! I'm hoping to make some more time the next day or two to include other sights we saw Saturday...
This time I swore I wouldn't be under-powered and have little bird images! I humped the William Optics 11cm APO the quarter mile or so to the viewing stand, along with the tripod and camera gear - a pretty good load. And ironically, the cranes were the closest I've ever seen - the nearest brave ones were only 50 yards or so away! It made for some great shots with the 770mm focal length of the WO scope, but also some unique problems - for one, if a couple birds were only a foot or two apart along the line to me, one of them would be slightly out of focus. You can see at left that I focused at the lower bird, which was right next to the other, which is slightly fuzzy with the slight distance between them...
With the manual focus of the telescope, it took some practice to get exact focus. Melinda got me an accessory hood focuser for my birthday which has helped a lot, and I fine-tuned the diopter adjust on the camera so it would be in good critical focus when focused to my eye. Another challenge was to catch them in flight, being both able to pan along and get to focus at the same time! But I was able to do it as these shots show. The shot at right is a full rez enlargement of one frame - hey, if you can see the pupil of the bird's eye from a couple hundred yards, I'm happy!
As shown on this shot, as well as the uppermost picture above, you can actually see through their nostril holes on their beak - I've never been close enough to see that before! Likely not due to the scope or the near distance, but the combination is killer! Oh, and by the way - the big 4+ inch scope made me a big hit with the ladies, if you know what I mean! I had a good number of them introducing themselves and wanting to see what it was capable of doing...
The scope is the only optics I shot through, so I left it to Melinda to catch some of the wider fields, including this one of hers showing the sunset colors full of bird silhouettes, as well as a few in the water. While there were always a good number of them near us, the huge crush of them returned just as dark arrived, almost impossible to capture photographically, but their nearly deafening calls as they arrived in near darkness is impossible to forget! I'm hoping to make some more time the next day or two to include other sights we saw Saturday...
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