Month: September 2020

In early July, 2015 together with David Tipling I went on a 5 day trip to the Catalonia region of Spain where we were guided by Photo Logistics.  We made our own travel arrangements flying into Barcelona where we picked up a hire car and had a 3 hour drive to Montgai where we were met by Roger one of the directors of Photo Logistics.  This was a fairly new experience for me as in all the years that I have been photographing wildlife I have only once used a commercial/paying hide, this was almost 10 years ago in Finland for Golden Eagle when sadly we were not successful!  So why now with Photo Logistics, two reasons, firstly David T knew both of the directors of Photo Logistics, Roger and Carles and had a very positive previous experience using their hides.  Secondly two of the many species they had on offer were Black-bellied and Pin-tailed Sandgrouse, two birds that I had seen before but not well and would love to photograph.  I knew that without assistance my chances of photographing either species well was highly unlikely.

Black-bellied & Pin-tailed Sandgrouse at water hole, Spain

Roger had arranged our accommodation close to where we were to photograph the Sandgrouse which was very comfortable and only 25 euros a night.  Up at 0500 hours we were met and driven to the hide by Roger which was spacious and comfortably seated 3 photographers.  At this point I will mention that like many other commercial hides you are shooting through one way glass!… Read more

Until recently I had never used the micro adjustment facility that has been available on all of my more recent Canon DSLR cameras as I have always felt that all my camera/lens combinations produced sharp results. However that changed when I purchased the Canon 7D MkII which with a number of lenses in particular my Canon EF 300mm f2.8L USM IS II both with and without extenders and my EF 400mm f5.6L produced unacceptably soft images. My first thought was to return my camera as never having had this problem before I thought the camera was faulty! On discussing my problem with friends and looking on the internet I quickly discovered that quite a few owners of the 7D MkII and for that matter other cameras were also finding they were getting soft images from lenses they knew were sharp and in many cases were able to correct this with lens calibration using the cameras micro adjustment! As a result I carried out a number of tests using the micro adjustment and manually adjusted it to get acceptably sharp results with both of these lenses and extender combinations.

Some time later I was discussing the problem with Anthony Sinfield, a colleague in the photographic industry, and told him I felt I needed to make further adjustments as I felt my images weren’t quite as sharp as they should be. Anthony suggested that I let him calibrate my lenses as he had the pro version FoCal which would take any guess work out of calibrating my lenses.… Read more