Ducks & Woods

I am using this Mallard pair of ducks as a part of my testing of new camera gear That I just acquired, So far I am quite pleased, the way this equipment is performing. On this very dreary day, I am using my electronic flash with a flash extender mounted on the flash head to photograph these ducks at close to 100ft away from me with a long lens. I realize that a good high-power electronic flash can reach out this far , however I can now stop down my aperture up to 3 stops for more depth of field at this distance using a ISO of 100. If you expand the photo, you can see the catch light in their eyes. I also am using a 1.4 tele-extender on my 70/200 L lens, so if you do the math with a 1.6 crop digital body, the lens on the long end is now a 450mm lens. Of course, expect to loose a stop on the lens, in my case with a fast 2.8 aperture, it becomes a 4 aperture with the 1.4 tele-extender. Keep in mind the auto-focus is somewhat slower as well. I should mention you need a fixed aperture lens or you will lose the auto-focus capability of the lens. Still, it gives me a long lens for a fraction of the cost of the equivalent in a comparable fixed long lens. I will be displaying some of the results shortly.

In the lower photo, things must have got boring waiting for a interesting target to fly by this setup used in the above photo. With the camera on a tripod and a pointed at this Woodpecker cavity in this tree, I set-up my camera to take a 2 second exposure. I then proceeded to shoot the photo while zooming from the long end of the my zoom lens to the short end of the zoom lens. My camera was programed to fire the flash at the end of the exposure. Now where did that Heron go?