Warming in the Sun

Pearly white teeth and a creamy-yellow tongue. Nice teeth!

My (relatively) new Canon 1D Mark III is in the shop getting a new focus mirror installed. You can read a lot about the problem on Rob Galbraith's page although it hasn't affected me as much as others. In addition, my Canon 70-300mm DO lense is getting a clean and recalibration, so I'm feeling orphaned and alone at the moment. Many of my photographs are of very small creatures usually shot at 300mm (x1.3=420mm for the 1D Mark III) and even at f16, the Depth of Field is extremely shallow, typically around 1/8". Manual focus is absolutely necessary to fine-tune the auto-focus and if the lense is not spot on, I return home with many non-ideal photos. 1/8" DoF means that I have to be very aware of my body movements while shooting because the slightest motion forward or backward will put the photo out of focus. The lense clean/recalibration will be very expensive but if you want great photographs, you cannot avoid these occasional expenses.

Before I handed the camera in, I had the opportunity to get these photographs. This young fellow was walking around just outside our yard, and once again, the pollution-filtered sunlight shining down from the South was fantastic.

Many of the photos I came back with were out of focus. I learned something important this day. Never try to take photos with your lense at the minimum limits of its focus range because the focus may very well be less than ideal (1.4m in this case). One day, I might experiment with an Extension Tube to get closer to the subject. I'd like to get the 400mm/4.0 DO lense but that will have to wait a while longer while I save a few more pennies ;-) That said, the less expensive 400mm/f5.6L might be the more ideal option for me because most of my telephoto photos require an aperture of f16 or smaller anyway. I'll think about it for a while.

Note. You really need to look at the larger version of the photo to fully appreciate it. Some of my photos look their best when printed to A3.

This is my favourite photo from the set.

For a larger version, click here. For a different photo, click here.