Photographs by Frank

13 July 2015

Saturday Birds

Filed under: Birds,Monadnock Region,Summer — Tags: — Frank @ 6:00 PM

Warning… photo geek talk ahead!!!

Saturday (11 July) afternoon I set out to experiment with adding extension tubes to Big Bertha (my 600 mm f/4 lens). Extension tubes which are mounted between the camera and the lens, shorten the minimum distance at which one can focus a lens… this, of course, means the subject can be larger in the frame. However, there one never gets something for nothing. The “downside” is that one loses the ability to focus on distant objects when using an extension tube.

I added a 20 mm extension tube to Big Bertha and set up to photograph the humming birds near the feeder. Big Bertha’s minimum focus distance is about 18 feet. With the extension tube, I could focus on the humming bird perch which was about 14 feet from the the camera. I did not do any formal testing so I do not know what the actual minimum focus distance with the extension tube is but from the bit of “playing around” I did I got the impression that it might be between 12 and 13 feet. The suet feeders were about 24 feet from the camera and I could still focus on them with the extension tube mounted.

All of the photos shown below were made with the extension tube mounted.

The humming bird photos shown here (at a relatively small size on the web) may not look very different from those I made back in June (see this post). However the older photos are more heavily cropped (they are about one-third of the full frame) than the current photos (about one-half of the full frame). This difference is not critical for posting small files on the blog but it important when one wants to make prints.

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2 Comments

  1. Love the “scaly” feathers on the male hummingbird shot.

    K

    Comment by Kevin — 13 July 2015 @ 9:18 PM

  2. Frank, except for the very first one all of the others are tack sharp through and through. Even #1 has a very detailed head and neck.

    I’d say, “Mission Accomplished” with those extension tubes!

    Comment by Joe Kennedy — 14 July 2015 @ 4:22 PM

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