Monday, May 3, 2010

Is Bigger Better?

You tell me.  I've played around with my blog template to allow larger images to display. 

Little Shag

I've also been playing with my new Canon 2x extender II.  On the end of my 70-200mm 2.8 L IS lens, it gets me to 400mm, which is really the minimum focal length you need for wild birds, unless you plan to spend a lot of time stalking and sitting in hides.  I popped down to the harbour the other day and took some shots of the shags that hang out at the Sea Scout boatshed.  I used to dislike shags.  I thought they were reptilian with those snake-like necks, but now I think they're rather handsome birds.  There's no denying they're characters.

The extender is a little soft wide open, but gives nice results from f/8 to f/16.  The day I shot this was pretty dark, so I had the ISO cranked up to 1600 creating a bit of grain but I'm fairly happy and looking forward to what else I can get with my lens and extender combo.

2 comments:

  1. I like the bigger sized photos but am finding the black background makes some of the text hard to read when using a laptop on battery power. I have changed the settings but it's still the same. Can you play with the background colour to bring it down a notch or too?

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  2. Thanks for the feedback. I'm going to stick with black to keep the pictures popping, but have enlarged the font size. Hope this helps.

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