14.08.20 Back to Grebe lake.

~~

I was fully armed for my short ride to the lake. The Sirui gimbal on the Manfrotto 055 tripod. The Kowa '884 spotting scope, the Lumix G9 with the Leica 50-200 with the TC14 extender fitted. I had both camera adapters but decided to use the Lumix 20mm f1.7 pancake lens with the DA10 and Kowa 25-50 zoom eyepiece. [Image right at about 100 yards. Cropped from 5184 to 1200 pixels.]

The three member, Grebe family was present when it wasn't submerged. Only one adult and two young. Trying to capture all three was frustrating. Because they regularly separated while on the surface.

The diving adult could reappear literally, almost anywhere on the lake. Whereupon the young would instantly home in on their parent. If there really were two parents I was unable to recognise any obvious differences. They certainly never surfaced at the same time. The young only occasionally dived and usually only for a few seconds. The adult seemed to disappear for minutes underwater. It had a four inch fish in its beak on one resurfacing and gave it to one of its young.

The camera was easily removed from the Kowa eyepiece thanks to the DA10 adapter. Then the eyeball view through the Kowa, both with and without the 1.6x extender, was crystal clear. I watched the fine surface detail on a sleeping Mallard duck's eyelid as it flickered open and shut at 145 yards using 96x!

Every power I tried was amazingly bright and sharp. Every hair and feather detail as crisp as one could possibly hope for. Sadly, my skill at capturing this incredible detail is developing much too slowly for my taste. 

I switched over to the Leica 50-200 lens with the TC14 [1.4x] tele-converter on the G9. To snap away at the now retreating grebes and distant ducks. The scale was less than half the reach at 581mm [35mm equivalent] to the Kowa telescope's minimum of 1200mm [at 25x zoom] when digiscoping.

The sharpness of the Leica lens was still very satisfying and readily allowed heavy cropping and downsizing.[Image left for comparison. 5184 pixels cropped to 1200.]

The Leica 100-400 would provide more than 25% more scale with 800mm [at 35mm FF] reach but I consider it too expensive for such a specialised lens. I can't imaging taking it with me for my everyday walks unless the marsh pond became a regular habit. Birds of prey are slightly too rare to be worth carrying the extra weight. So the bigger lens would not earn its keep like the much more flexible 50-200 + 1.4x extender. [50-280mm combined.]

Ideally the sunlight on the lake should have been behind me. The sun is on my left and beyond the lake. Which causes shadows and burnt out highlights on pale plumage. Though I really have no choice in my position for photography at this small, privately owned lake. There is only one accessible spot where the public can reach the water. Fortunately this area lies under mature trees. So provides excellent shelter from the summer sun and the shadows hide me from the wildlife to some degree. I still haven't taken any camouflage material with me.

I only extend the upper leg sections of the tripod and sit on my comfortable stool behind the camera and telescope. When used alone I held the camera freehand rather than use the tripod with the Leica lens at full zoom. Its reach is 280mm in Micro 4/3 but 581mm at 35mm equivalent. There is no sign of camera shake in any of my images at 1/640s.

The digiscoping images were much slower exposures of between 1/125-1/250s on the tripod. They ought to have been 1/1200 as a reciprocal of equivalent focal length! Getting such exposures is difficult at f/12 unless I boost the ISO. I foolishly left it on ISO200. Probably because I forgot about it in the excitement of seeing the Grebes out in the middle of the lake. Instead of their hugging the far shore at well over 130 yards away.

I really must better organise all the lens covers into a small sandwich box. There are far too many of them! I usually just drop them into the camera pouch. Then have to retrieve them all individually from the depths when I pack up for the ride home.

~~