I got home from Norfolk with the new 600 & unpacked it in the kitchen. After marvelling at the size & weight (& the size & weight of its dedicated case!) I got the monopod & swapped the head over to the new Manfrotto 393 (gimbal) head & attached the lens.

I then went & stood in the garden & waited to see what would appear at the feeding stations.

The second shot isn’t the best composition with the fat feeder encroaching but I liked the shot because the bird is twittering & has its mouth open.

All shots taken on the monopod with Image Stabilisation switched on.

I’m impressed with the sharpness & quality of the shots & the speed of focusing is pretty damned good too.

I went & did it this week.

On Monday I drove about 90 miles to collect a new lens. This really is the dream lens for me. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to purchase a real top quality lens in the form of the Canon 600mm F4 L.

This is one hell of a beast. It weighs more than a small child, well, five & a half kilograms. This means that it really isn’t hand-holdable.

I tried it in the garden when I got back & got some nice images of some of the birds on the feeders. I used a tripod for this. I bought a Manfrotto 393 head which is a balanced gimbal affair. Once the lens is mounted & balanced you can more or less point it in whatever angle & direction you want & the lens will stay there. Early results with it are pretty favourable, you can literally move & operate the camera with one hand. It seems to work really well on the monopod.

The cost of this lens is pretty prohibitable. If it wasn’t for a recent ‘windfall’ I’d never be able to afford one.

Canon, Nikon & some of the other major manufacturers are putting their prices up. Apparently this is due to the current weakness of the pound.

I’ve been keeping an eye on the price of the beast for several weeks, if not months. Warehouse Express were offering it for about £5,400 two or three weeks ago. This crept up to £5,999 up to about a week or so ago. A day or two before I purchased mine, they put the price up to £6,499. I just checked before writing this entry & they have it on their site for an eye-watering £7,129.

Fortunately I didn’t buy it from W.E. and so got it for a much more reasonable price!

More info & pics to come…

I had a delivery a couple of days ago. Some new gear arrived as I update & upgrade.

I got hold of the Canon 1.4 & 2x converters which will be a useful addition for some extra reach to my zooms & telephotos. They don’t fit all lenses; you need to be careful you make sure the lens you’re going to stick them on will take it as the front element of the converter protrudes into the lens and a lot of lens’s rear element will bash against it.

I can use them on the 100-400L but it loses autofocus. It is fully compatible with the 70-200 f2.8 L IS, which is just as well since this was also in the package! You also lose a stop or two of light when fitted.

Topping it off was a Canon EX 580 MkII flashgun. I currently have the Sigma 500 DG Super, but now I have some better gear, I’m moving over to Canon. I’ve put in an order for another which should arrive next week.

I also got hold of a Gary Fong Lightsphere. I’ve seen a few videos of these and the results look pretty good. They are basically a professional version of my DIY Flash Diffuser.

I’m nearly there with the new gear; I have a couple of lenses coming this week, a wide angle which will replace my Sigma 10-20mm as that lens doesn’t work too well on full-frame cameras, and a macro. Then, I’m looking for a decent prime telephoto to help kickstart some wildlife & sports photography.

I’ve had the chance to take a few shots with the new 5D MkII. I’ve not really done any proper comparative testing yet but I’ve been impressed with the results so far; things are looking quite promising.

Take the following shots. I took these the day before we bought a new car. As I had the cash, we decided to have a bit of photography fun with it and use it as a prop in some shots.

When I loaded the shots into Lightroom, I was immediately struck by the detail. They are instantly much sharper than the 20D’s RAW files. Canon has always had a bit of a reputation for soft photos which need to be sharpened up in software. The 5D MkII’s files are so much sharper.

Take a look at the following shots. The first shot on each line is the full frame. They have not been processed in any way other than saving as a TIF & adding a border; no sharpening has been added. The second on each line is a 100% crop from the original which shows the level of unprocessed detail available.

Pretty impressive, eh? (well it is if you’re used to the results of a 20D!)

Three years & two months after getting my first DSLR (Canon 20D) I have now gotten myself a brand new camera.

The Canon 5D MkII came out in December & has been in short supply ever since. I’ve spent the last 3 or 4 weeks checking out the websites to see what the price was doing, who was doing it cheapest & who actually had it in stock.

It seems that many companies only had enough stock to fulfill pre-orders & many of those couldn’t even fulfill their current orders let alone any new purchases. Most of the photography supplier websites don’t have it & can’t tell you when they will get new stocks from Canon.

Play.com had the lowest prices I’ve seen for the 5D MkII. They were offering the body only at £1899 & the 24-105L f4 IS for £2499, about £550 off the RRP which many suppliers are advertising at full price.

So I checked Play.com every day up until the time I knew the required money to fund it would be in the bank account. A couple of days before they suddenly showed the kit out of stock, but they did have body only, right up until 6 hours before the cash came into my bank account. As soon as it did, I checked Play.com and it was no longer in stock.

Pretty well-founded rumours are suggesting the major manufacturers are hiking their prices some time in January due to the low value of the pound, already we’re seeing prices start to rise. The Canon 1000D we bought for £299 4 weeks before Christmas rose to £314 2 weeks later & is now being sold at £342.54 at the same site we bought it from.

I managed to find Park Cameras with the 5D MkII in stock. It was £1,999 one day and £2,099 the next. The dilemma was, do I go for it now in case the price rises or wait in the hope it will come down for who knows how many weeks.

I couldn’t resist, last Wednesday I ordered one over the phone. I wanted the 24-70L f2.8 rather than the kit 24-105 but they didn’t have that lens in stock so I ordered the body only, by the end of the phone call I’d changed my mind & got the 24-105 for £2,499. Despite being told it wouldn’t arrive until Friday as I’d missed the last despatch time, it arrived the next day.

I can’t find anyone with any stock of batteries & the battery grips seem to be in even shorter supply than the cameras themselves, but I did find Jacobs have them in stock and hopefully, one will be arriving tomorrow.

It’s a lovely camera. I’ve only used it twice so far but I’m loving it. The first thing that strikes you is the feel; it’s pretty solid & weighty & feels like a decent bit of kit. The sound of the shutter is sooo much better than the 20D & the 3″ screen on the back is amazing. Mind you, with the minuscule screen of the 20D, anything bigger has got to be a major improvement.

More to come….

I came out of the shed the other morning at 2.30 in the morning only to find the garden covered in snow. Because I went to bed so late I had little expectation it would still be around by the time I got up, but it was.

I went for a walk over to Norton Common which is only 10 minutes walk from the house. I took the standard Sigma 18-50mm & the wide angle 10-20mm.

If you look carefully in the third shot, just to the right of the tree with the greenery on it, you will see a deer. It’s quite normal to see them out at night but not so during the day. As luck would have it I had the 10-20mm lens on the camera when it made its appearance; not the best lens for wildlife photography. I watched it for a good 10 minutes as it stood there just preening itself.

I spent about an hour on the common. I must go down there again with one of the telephotos lenses, In one section of the common, in some woods I found a flock of maybe 30 Long Tailed Tits & spent a good five minutes watching a little Firecrest flitting around in a tree no more than 6 feet from me.

The playground is right outside the open air swimming pool, which is depicted here.

I’ve taken quite a few photos of the moon over the past few years but this has always been at night.

During the afternoon on my way back from town a few days ago I noticed the moon in the blue sky, so decided to try a few shots. I set up the tripod in the back garden & put the Sigma 50-500mm on the camera with a Sigma 1.4x converter. This gives you a maximum focal length of 700mm but you do lose a stop of light. You also lose auto-focus, but I’ve found auto-focus on moon shots can be problematic so usually manually focus anyway.

Also, the extra reach on the lens magnifies any movement. Once you have the moon focused it’s important to take your hands off the camera completely (& tripod & camera strap) & let the movement settle down before pressing the remote shutter release.

Back in September 2008, I posted an entry called Tribute to Tom, which showed some of the reporoduction photos I’d done from the collection of my recently deceased father-in-law, Tom Sharp.

I wanted to make something of a lasting tribute so I turned Tom’s memoirs into  a published book. There are lots of places where you can  make photobooks, such as Photobox – where I previously created a photobook – but I decided to go to Blurb.com as they cater for text-type manuscripts as well as specific photobooks.

Tom had written his memoir down in 1996. It forms about 20 pages of A4 typed manuscript, so not too unwieldy.

The process to create your book is pretty similar whichever publisher you go with. You generally download the software, create your boom on your own computer & then upload it back to the publisher’s website. Some days or weeks later your book pops through the letterbox, all neat & professional looking.

I had chosen & processed the photos to go in the book and the manuscript was already written so it was just a case of laying everything out & splitting the text up into chapters. Uploading the book was a little more problematic in that it kept failing. I resorted to checking out the Blurb support forums where someone suggested that uploading from a laptop over a wireless connection could cause problems, so I transferred the file to one of the desktop PCs and it uploaded fine.

Once the book was uploaded & paid for, it was a case of sitting back & waiting for it to arrive. I wasn’t disappointed. I’d opted for a hardback with dustjacket & premium paper & am really pleased with the product. Sitting on the bookshelf with my (large) book collection, you’d be hard pressed to tell it wasn’t a normal published book like all the others on the shelf.

The book cost about £18 although the postage pushed it up to about £30, which isn’t for a self-published book of this quality. But then the book did come from the USA.

The book was a present for my wife. I’ll possibly get softback versions for the kids as once the book is created on the Blurb website, you can order copies of it whenever you want.

A good end to 2008 when the February issue of DSLR User Magazine dropped through my door on New Year’s Eve; I was featured in the User Profile section of the magazine!

This is a small, regular section of the mag which spotlights two of the regular magazine website users. It basically gives some info about the member & gets them to select one of their favourite photos which is published with the article. I chose one of the shots taken in Cambridge a couple of years ago of the four phoneboxes in the market square.

It’s a shame they managed to spell my name two different ways within two lines though.

So that’s the third time in 2008 I’ve been published in that particular magazine. Not bad, eh? Maybe I should make my New Year’s Resolution something to do with getting some shots published in some of the other mags too.