Comparisons Nikon V1 with 30-110, 70-300 VR and 70-200 VR with TC-17E

Posted on 2013/02/17 by birds n' bugs

This morning was bright, cold and windy. On my morning walk, I passed the palm snag and noticed the Red-Bellied Woodpecker trying to stay warm on the sunny side of the snag and out of the wind. I figured he would be there for a while so I took my Nikon 1 V2 with it’s 30-110mm VR zoom out to take a few pictures. This is the basic shot I could get as a lightly processed raw file.’
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It appeared that the little guy was going to be staying there so I decided to compare a couple of my other lenses on the V1 using the FT-1 adapter. This comparison is not scientific but is a practical exercise in using the lenses. I used a monopod with the larger lenses but the 30-110mm was handheld. I cropped all them to approximately the same view of the bird as most of us would do that before display. So, here are the images.
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The one on the left is the 30-110mm cropped.  The one on the right is the 70-200mm VR with the TC-17E II yielding 340mm.

The next two are the 70-300mm VR.  The one on the left is the full 300mm and the one on the right is at 240mm.

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I have long felt that the 70-300mm is not at it’s best at 300mm and often zoom back to 270 or 240mm before taking a shot.  Here is another shot taken with the D90 and 70-300mm VR at 300mm.

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If you click on any of these pictures you will see them at a larger size but, all have been cropped and resized to 1024×768 before uploading to the wordpress image storage.

Posted in animal behavior, Bird, Camera Gear | Tagged , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

A couple more from the Palm Snag

Posted on 2013/02/16 by birds n' bugs

In the last post, I included a shot of an Osprey using a nearby palm snag as a lookout post and snack bar. That same snag houses a pair of Red-Bellied Woodpeckers in their new nest and a pair of Starlings in an abandoned woodpecker nest.

This morning, I got a couple of shots of both birds.
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Posted in animal behavior, Bird | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Snags are home too.

Posted on 2013/02/14 by birds n' bugs

A snag is a dead tree that is still standing or has recently fallen. They may be dead as trees but can support an abundance of life. Plenty of insects to feed the hungry birds but they are also nesting places and perches where birds can feel secure with a good, clear view of their surroundings. Here are a few shots of snags supporting birds.

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The Osprey uses the snag as a place to look down into the canal for fish.  While the Red-bellied Woodpecker uses this pine as it’s home.  Here are a few more birds feeling right at home on snags.

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Posted in animal behavior, Bird, Wordpress Photo Challenge | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

It’s the season for baby birds

Posted on 2013/02/13 by birds n' bugs

The Great Horned Owls are coming along at the History Park and I discovered a Sandhill Crane nest in a gas station retention pond.  Here you can see the baby owls.

Great Horned Owls
The Sandhills haven’t hatched yet so there is always one parent on the nest while the other forages. If you are lucky, you can see the change. One returns and walks around in the reeds for a bit and then goes and stands by the nest. The one on the nest gets up and starts walking around while the new arrival tidies up a bit before sitting on the eggs again. It’s not in a position where I can actually see the eggs but, I’m sure we will see the young when they hatch and as they develop.

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Having them there also gave me a shot at a nice portrait of one of the adults.

In the same pond, we have several Common Moorhens.  I’m pretty sure they have also nested in the reeds but haven’t seen the nest yet.

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We also have Anhinga feeding in the pond but I believe they are nesting elsewhere.

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Things will be getting busier soon as the young are born and become active.

 

Posted in animal behavior, Bird | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

A few birds with the Nikon 1 V1

Posted on 2013/02/03 by birds n' bugs

The Nikon 1 V1 isn’t the best camera for catching birds in flight but for general birding and behavioral shots it works very well. I use it with it’s own Nikkor 1 30-110mm telephoto zoom and the Nikkor 70-200mm f2.8 VR on the FT-1 adapter. Because the CX format has a 2.7x crop factor, the 30-110mm is the equivalent of an 80-300mm on a 35mm camera. The 70-200mm becomes a superzoom covering the 35mm equivalent of 190-540mm and still remains an f2.8. Here are a few shots with both lenses. The Great Horned Owls (Bubo virginianus) are nesting in a disused Eagles Nest next to the Punta Gorda History Park. You can see it here in this wide view.
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Look closely and you will see one of the baby owlets perched on the nest in the fork of the tree.  Because of this distance, I prefer to use the Nikkor 70-200mm f2.8 on the FT-1 adapter for the added reach.  Even then, it takes a bit of cropping.  Here are a couple of examples.

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At the same distance, I managed to find one of the adults in a much less conspicuous position.  In fact, I could only see half of it on the lower branch.  This shot was taken with the Nikkor 1 30-110mm zoom.

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While it isn’t the best at this range, it is still very useful in other circumstances.  Here are a couple of shots of some Monk Parakeets (Myiopsitta monachus) which make their home in Gilchrist Park in front of the Bayfront Center.  While I could get closer, these guys were busy building nests deep in  the palm center where there wasn’t a lot of light.

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That meant I had to bump the ISO up and got some noise but they are stil acceptable behaviour shots.

In better light, I got this nice portrait of a Ring Billed Gull (Larus delawarensis) also found in Gilchrist Park.

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Posted in animal behavior, Bird, Camera Gear, Park, Photography | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

A closeup experiment with the Nikon V1

Posted on 2013/01/28 by birds n' bugs

After trying the Nikon 1 V1 with the Nikkor 1 30-110mm VR and the Raynox M-150 I decided it was a keeper for bugs. So, I decided to try an experiment on closest focus with the Raynox 150 and 250 apochromat lenses. All I wanted to see was field of view at closest focus. It was a pretty simple experiment. I simply put the lenscap up on a desklamp and took the closest shot I could get with the lens at 110mm. The first shot here is just an overview to show you the size of the Nikon 1 40.5mm lenscap compared to a quarter. The next shot is the M-150 and the third the M-250. All are handheld and the images include the exif if anyone is interested.

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As you can see, the M-250 gets you a lot closer.  This would be good for small detail on a watch or something but, would be really tough to find good focus on an insect in the wild.

 

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OK, back to bugs

Posted on 2013/01/26 by birds n' bugs

The Nikon 1 V1 came on sale before christmas. This was a camera I found interesting but expensive. The pre-christmas sale made it possible to get the V1 with the 10-30mm and 30-110mm zooms for a decent price. I took advantage of the opportunity to pick up the kit with the Nikon FT-1 adapter.

I’ve been working with it to learn it’s capabilities. It certainly isn’t my D300 but the 2.7x crop factor and the FT-1 adapter for Nikkor DSLR lenses means it can also produce supertelephoto results from a rather moderate focal length lens. I’ve been playing for it for a month now and have started to feel like I’m getting acceptable results.

I’ve used the Raynox 150 to provide a macro capabilty for my Nikon P7100 you can read about that elsewhere in the blog. Just search for raynox above. Unfortunately, the Raynox adapter didn’t quite fit the 40.5mm filter size of the V1. As a result, I needed to buy a step up adapter from 40.5 to 46mm to accomodate it. It arrived today so I immediately took it out for a walk around the garden. Here are the results:
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Posted in Bug, Camera Gear, Flower, Photography, Shooting closeups | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

2012 in review

Posted on 2012/12/30 by birds n' bugs

Although, I clearly slacked off at the end of the year, it looks like I kept fairly busy.  The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

4,329 films were submitted to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This blog had 21,000 views in 2012. If each view were a film, this blog would power 5 Film Festivals

Click here to see the complete report.

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments

Weekly Photo Challenge: Green II

Posted on 2012/11/22 by birds n' bugs

One of my favorite greens in nature is the Green Heron- Butorides virescens.  It is a small heron which makes its way around the marshes.  I sometimes see them on my dock but they are most at home in the reedy marshes or fishing from submerged branches.  Their coloration allows them to blend in easily.

 

They generally seem to have a short neck, as can be seen above.  In fact, it is just carried tucked in until it it time to strike at which time you will see an impressive extension.

The are one of my favorite little birds to watch and photograph.

Posted in Bird, Wordpress Photo Challenge | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Weekly Photo Challenge: Green

Posted on 2012/11/21 by birds n' bugs

Green is pretty easy to find in nature.  Well, here on earth anyway.  Mars is another story.  This first image is a Green Metallic Bee.  It really does look like a piece of shiny green metal as it flies around.

The second is a fairly common caterpillar of the Sphinx Moth but, this one has a surprise.  It has been parasitized by a small ichneumon wasp – Cotesia congregata.  The wasp lays it’s eggs in the living caterpillar.  When the eggs hatch, they come though the skin of the caterpillar and pupate on the outside.

The idea is kind of yucky but nature is like that sometimes.

Posted in Bug, Wordpress Photo Challenge | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment