You never know what will turn up

While waiting to film blue tits and robins at the RSPB's bird feeding station at the Lodge, I was amazed when a sparrowhawk descended to the pool for a quick bathe. Momentarily paralysed with excitement, I quickly gathered my senses and managed to train my long lens on to the bird. To my disbelief, the bird stayed long enough for me to get several sequences. What a joy! I was also delighted that my new Manfrotto tripod and head managed to keep the shots acceptably steady. It's a pity that I couldn't reposition the camera to remove the intruding small tree trunk on the left of the frame - who says videographers are never happy!
To view the video go to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3QY4YYEA_Y

Filming wildlife: a great way to lift the grey Monday lunchtime blues

Ploughing through a week's worth of emails and dealing with queries, my first day back at work after a week's leave was heavygoing. At lunchtime, the weather outside was about as gloomy as my darkening mood, but I knew that I had to escape the desk and the office to find some green therapy or, as others may know it: nature!

Heading for the pond in the grounds where I work at the RSPB's headquarters in Bedfordshire, I felt there may be a chance of filming some wildlife: a damselfly perhaps. To be honest, any of God's creatures would have been suitable subjects - I just needed to film something - anything. At first sight, it wasn't too promising - nothing was moving. Another photographer confirmed my fears: "I've been here for ten minutes and I've not seen a thing", he said. I knew that in sunny weather the pond's lily pads would have been stacked with damselflies: where do insects go in dull weather? And why weren't they here today?

Only first recorded in the UK in 1999, the small red-eyed damselfly has
become increasingly common at some sites, including parts of Bedfordshire.

Feeling that the highlight of my lunchtime would be a canteen sandwich, I waited a few minutes, staring intently at the lily pads, willing them to produce a filmable subject. At last, a damselfly. It was only a blue-tailed damselfly, but it was within reach - just.  And then more and more: small red-eyed, red-eyed and common damselflies gracing the lily pads. I didn't manage to film frame-filling or award-winning shots - the distance and the gloom ended those hopes, but I do have some nice record footage allowing me to confirm the identification of these delicate insects and appreciate their finer features.

A wasp taking a drink completed my lunchtime cast. Again not a fantastic sequence but good enough to enable me to identify the insect, once I've waded through some identification keys. I'm finding that a nice bonus of filming wildlife is that you can spend time identifying your subjects and getting to know their habits better. Filming continues to deepen and broaden my interest in nature. Not bad for a grey, Monday lunchtime.

Slowly, slowly catchy monkey - next time maybe!

A trip to Linton Zoo - south of Cambridge - today with the family allowed me to practise my video skills with my Canon 550D DSLR. Packing my 70-300mm Tamron lens and a lightweight video tripod, I thought that it would be easy to pick off suitable subjects in a confined environment - how wrong could I be? The sleeping Lion didn't present any challenge apart from the unavoidable out of focus wire fence. I particularly enjoyed playing this clip back in HD where it's possible to see the breeze ruffling each hair of the king of the beasts' impressive mane. The gentle Hartmann's Mountain Zebra was also a relatively easy subject, even when it was plodding sedately across its paddock.

The most difficulty that I had was trying to film the antics of a troop of Cotton-top Tamarins. The image grab above is virtually the only frame where I have a shot in focus and with the subject well positioned in the frame. The rest of the footage - which extends to about a minute - consists of a jumble of limbs and out of focus foliage as I try to follow their rapid movements around their enclosure.
If I'd been shooting stills, I would have been proud of the above frame and I would have felt that 'I'd nailed it'! But I'm now shooting video where I have to find ways of following the action, while keeping everything in focus and well exposed. I'm not saying that still photography is easier, but perhaps, hour for hour, the strike rate is higher with still photography.

OK, so how do I give myself the advantage next time? Firstly, I need to create a proper magnifying finder to cover the camera's LCD panel. This would exclude glare from the screen and would enlarge the image slightly, making it much easier to focus manually. Auto focus isn't really an option with video.
Secondly, the Tamron's four times zoom range is handy, but I'm increasingly thinking that a lens with a wider zoom range for some situations would help with the three f's: focus, framing and following the subject. The Tamron's 18-270mm lens would seem ideal, although the exposure would need to be altered drastically because at the maximum zoom the lens lets in a lot less light compared with when it's used at maximum wide-angle: a potential solution with another problem attached.
I think my best footage of the day was of the owls. The Dark-breasted Barn Owl (below) posed for me beautifully - an absolute star.

An insight into a new world

What is the purpose of this fly's wing-waggling display?

I have to confess, picture-winged flies had pretty much passed me by until now. I'd never even heard of the group until I trained my video camera on this individual last week. Only measuring about six milimeters in length, it appears to be advertising its presence by using a type of insect semaphore. Is this circling, wing-waggling display designed to attract a mate or fend off a rival? Well, I don't know. To be honest, even the world wide web seems a little bit short on answers. The only thing I do know for certain is that if I hadn't shot the video, I wouldn't have noticed this interesting behaviour happening literally at the bottom of my garden. The video isn't the most steady, but I'm proud of it nonetheless. To me it shows the power of this wonderful medium to reveal the infinite variety of our natural world.
The video below is a low-res copy of the HD original.

Tamron 70-300 Tele-Macro zoom lens - an ideal insect lens

Having shot a good number of still macro photographs over the last 30 years, I knew that shooting insects and other small subjects on video was going to be a challenge. However, I'm beginning to discover it's in another league altogether. Keeping a small and fast-moving subject in focus while keeping the camera steady is extremely challenging. Unlike my stills macro set-up, I have to keep the camera on a tripod all the time. That creates difficulties when you're working with insects on flowers and shrubbery because the tripod legs can disturb the vegetation alarming the subject and causing it to flit out of reach. One technique that I'm finding successful is to use a lens that enables you to maintain a reasonable distance between the camera and the subject, and the Tamron 70-300mm macro is ideal especially for larger insects, like butterflies, damselflies and dragonflies. Shooting common blue butterflies this afternoon, I realised that my 105mm macro lens didn't allow enough distance from my subject and it spooked every time. However, using the Tamron I was able to keep my distance and obtain some decent footage before the butterfly disappeared to the next county. I have to admit that for stills the lens isn't the sharpest I've ever used, but for video it's a constant companion.
INTO THE BLUE: Filming this male common blue butterfly proved a little easier with the Tamron macro lens.

Filming wildlife - the ultimate waiting game

Anyone knows you need a lot of patience to film wildlife: after waiting a quarter of a century to be able to afford the equipment needed to obtain great footage I think I have this quality in spades.
The 1980s was an interesting decade: dodgy music and even more questionable fashion are among some of my recollections. But for me one of the greatest influences was watching the marvellous wildlife footage from the run of Sir David Attenborough natural history programmes which characterised the decade.
Truly inspired by the dramatic and breathtaking images, I was hooked and I knew that I wanted one day to film wildlife. However, I didn't know that I'd have to wait over 25 years to stand a reasonable chance of capturing anything more than distant and fuzzy shots.
The equipment necessary to film wildlife has always been expensive (it still is), but at long last the curves of increasingly affordable kit and a little more disposable income finally met for me this year with the launch of the Canon 550D. Previously, interchangeable lens video cameras were the stuff of dreams, but now - at last - I have the ability to record High Definition footage with affordable kit.
Knowing there must be other frustrated wildlife video enthusiasts in the blogosphere, I'd like to share my tips and failures with like-minded obsessives. I don't pretend to be an expert, but I don't think there are many experts yet. The invention of video-enabled digital single lens reflex (DSLR) cameras is spawning a gold rush of ideas, techniques and new ways of capturing the natural world. Sometimes I hope to strike gold, other times I know I'll be digging dirt, but I will certainly have fun - after all, I've waited long enough.

CAPTURING A NEW WORLD: A still from an HD hoverfly sequence shot in my back garden with a Canon 550D, manual-focus micro Nikkor 105mm lens, a set of extension tubes and an adaptor to allow the fitting of Nikon lenses on a Canon body.