Pigeons

[Rod]

Still and moving pics. work for me - VirginMedia, Windows XP, Mozilla and IE both work. Sorry if you have wasted your time - I did check before posting - and again just now.

[John Rumm]

Problem with many of the converters is loss of light... if you are already losing a few stops through a long lens.

Slightly less flexible since IIUC they are usually fixed aperture.

The other question is can you stick an extension tube between the lens and the camera?

[tony sayer]

Same here!, they "know" if its an air rifle or not!..

[Andy Hall]

Have you found any good local sites?

Pamber Forest and Harpsden woods are two food places near(ish) to here.

Have you tried multiple flash with reflectors etc. to avoid the harshness of direct light? I've used an off-camera bounced flash with white cards to good effect.

Otherwise, what kind of lighting are you thinking about? The problem is always going to be weight of batteries.

[PeterMcC]

Rod wrote in

There was the pigeon that got hit by the kayak on top of the car - it wasn't found for over a week when it was finally decided that it really was time to get the kayak off the roof rack.

By that time it had stood in a week's worth of 40+ degrees mid-day temperatures (Lavington, NSW), steadily cooking.

Not nice.

[Andy Hall]

Ah, they've appeared now.

[Andy Hall]

Sometimes that can be compensated by increasing the ISO setting. On mine I can wind it up to 800 without noticing noise and to 1600 on most subjects.

So shutter priority and tweak ISO, although I don't think Huge will have been doing the latter.

You can, but again there's loss of light and with extension tubes you have to move physically closer to the subject, added to which there may be difficulty in focusing to infinity

[Mike.....]

Following up to John Rumm

the Sigma 500mm f4.5 would be nice, not as big as the f4s, if its not too much money

[Huge]

I thought so. Some people don't like the fixed aperture and the annular "bokke" (is that what it's called? I forget. The out of focus bits behind the in-focus part of the picture.) I found the reduction in size and weight more than compensated for the disadvantages. Of all the lenses I sold when I switched from film to digital (and from Olympus to Nikon), that's the only one I miss.

Cameras are like hi-fi. There's a huge amount of bollcoks spouted and much following of fashion.

W-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-ll. Dunno.

[Andy Hall]

That one's in the £2500 region, which is admittedly half the price of the Nikon 500 f4. Like a lot of 3rd party lenses, it does lose a bit at the ends, I'm told, so practically, it is probably only good to f5.6 That could be a problem wih lower light levels and/or higher shutter speeds

[The Natural Philosopher]

Neither would you be if you speant all day bashing your head against trees..

[John Rumm]

Obviously its not a fit and forget solution. Handy for closeup work, but not so good for wildlife since might get spooked as you get closer.

I have a 135mm zoom on my film camera that has quite a good macro facility - it works at the full telephoto end of the lens, so you can stand 6 to 8 feet away from the subject and frame something about the same height as a brick side on.

[The Natural Philosopher]

The nice thing about my 200DX, is it takes every single manual focus lens that fits my FE2's

If you want macro, simply get a dirt cheap AIS 105mm macro off ebay or somewhere. But in fact I use my Angenieux sooms..pretty good at macro work even for small insects.

Still the best zooms optically ever made for Nikon.

[Andy Hall]

The real question is whether you think you might want to go for a full frame format in the future. Usually putting a DX format lens on a full frame body is likely to cause vignetting for obvious reasons. However, in Nikon products, the D3 switches to DX size and I believe the new D700 does as well.

I only have one DX format lens - the ubiquitous 18-200. This is a functionally useful lens, but at a price point of about £400 and 11:1 zoom ratio has its limitations. It's OK for typical walking around applications as long as I stay away from the ends. For more serious work, I'm using a 14-24 wide angle for that end, and a 70-200 for the mid/high end. Both of those are full frame lenses.

In the end, I decided on the full frame capable strategy and if I were to sell the D300 and go for a D700, the 18-200 DX could go with that - it's a popular combination.

I keep reminding myself that glass lasts a very long time whereas bodies come and go.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Well I was driving some years back towards silverstone for the grand prix practice, at some fairly illegal speeds..when I suddenly felt an urge to at least drop below 70..and as soon as i had done so a pigeon burst from cover and destroyed itself on the windscreen.

[John Rumm]

If you have a camera with a built in flash, one handy trick I have found for this sort of work is to stick a bit of unexposed but developed slide film (i.e. black) over the built in flash. That will stop most of the direct illumination, but still allow sufficient IR to bleed through to trigger any optical slaves.

A ring flash is one way to go for closeup stuff.

[The Natural Philosopher]

All good stuff. I have 400mm sigma f5.6 APO and that is as far as I care to go..the pressman lenses like te 600mm 2.8 start gettng silly money.

Just get closer to the bird...

In any case. you find that at that sort of magnification, haze and dust amd shutter shake will mar the image more than going to 1600 ASA will. Practically speaking anything much more that 60meters way won't look great no matter how big the lens is.

[Mike.....]

Following up to Andy Hall

yes, i wouldnt use many lens at fully open, but the 4.5 is a lot smaller than the f4s. I'm very pleased to have the Pentax auto mode where ISO is the variable in a body that goes to 6400. So you can go f8 at 1/1000 if its sunnyish. (I just have the 170-500, cant afford the 500 prime)

[The Natural Philosopher]

Its pretty good. Chromatic is well controlled with the APO, but its not overall as sharp as my 210mm zoom.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Opps. I was talking about the 400/5.6..not the 500/4.5..old age..

4.5 outside credit card limits :-)

Still if I ever see an old but good 500/600mm F4 and a bit Nikon, AIS or later, I will probably find a way..