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February 16, 2011
Postcards From Nowhere: Morrison, CO
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It's really stunning how much my images are improving with this Canon EF 600mm f/4.0L IS USM Supertelephoto lens. I'm shooting the same birds that I always have, only now, when I'm looking at the images, I can see that these animals are in a desperate brutal fight for survival. They all look so nice and pretty with the 400mm lens. But man, you point that 600mm at them and suddenly I'm like...wow...I had no idea. No clue.
Also, today I ran into a cool fellow named Rodgers Naylor down in Morrison painting on the side of the road. Now, this is not unusual to see in the Carmel valley in CA or in the Star Valley in Idaho. Or even on the mountain passes around Breckenridge and Aspen. But I don't see it much around here, so I stopped to talk to this would-be-artist and he was quite nice of course, and a brilliant painter.
We talked at some length about the color of the sky. What color the eye sees and what color the brain remembers and what people are willing to accept as believable when they see it on canvas.
Brilliant conversation, of course. And the weather is just stunning. The snow is melting and motorcycles are out. It was probably in the 60's today, if I'm not mistaken. Not a bad day, all things considered.
I've really been juggling the frames around on the lenses this week. Trying to figure out what frame I like on each lens. It's not as simple as you might think. I get the new Canon EOS 7D tomorrow, but I'm not sure if that will make things better or worse. There is such a thing as the Paradox of Choice, after all.
The images were all captured on one of the following frames:
- Canon EOS 7D
- Canon EOS 50D
- Canon EOS 40D
- Canon EOS 20D
and one of the following lenses:
- Canon L-series image-stabilized, ultra-sonic supertelescopic 600mm prime lens (EF 600mm f/4.0L IS USM) with ET-160 hood.
- Canon L-series image-stabilized, ultra-sonic telescopic zoom lens (EF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS USM) with ET-83C hood.
- Canon image-stabilized, ultra-sonic telescopic zoom lens (EF-S 17-85mm f/4.0-5.6 IS USM).
The images are compiled into a 7 Meg (2:00 Adobe Flash slideshow(painter.swf) that you should be able to open and view with any browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, etc.). To view the slideshow, just click on the photo above. If you want to view the slideshow as a Windows executable, you can play this version (painter.exe), and it allows you to play, pause, skip forward, backwards, etc.
Image post-processing was done in Adobe Photoshop CS5 Extended. The slideshow was created using Imagematics Stillmotion Pro.
The soundtrack is 'Everyday' by Carly Comando. I chose this song because I heard it on a television show back in November and it was driving me insane trying to remember it.
I don't normally go for all of the cheesy Ken Burns Effect pans and scans. But I did throw a few zooms in on this slideshow just to try to convey how radically the 600mm lens has improved the detail I'm pulling out of these birds.
Always, of course, the help of Whatbird.com is greatly appreciated.
Click here to view the other slideshows.
Posted by Rob Kiser on February 16, 2011 at 10:12 PM
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