Low Light, a New Tripod and some great shots

I decided that I really must get a ball and socket headed tripod that I could actually carry for more than 20yards from the car.

With this in mind I headed up to Ffordes at Beauly, to the north west of Inverness where I spent over two hours (thanks guys) comparing and trying different legs, heads and combinations thereof.

Settling in the end for the Manfrotto legs I matched them to the beautifully smooth operation of a Giottos head. Although i wanted a ball head I wanted one with the ability to control the amount of movement by adjusting the resistance - the giottos head does just that but its so much smoother than the Manfrotto ones.

I toyed with Carbon fibre legs but they are SO expensive compared to aluminium ones and the weight saving is not that significant until you get to the very large ones anyway.

Of course, once the new toy was decided upon I had to go and try it out. It was heading rapidly towards three in the afternoon so I knew I wasn't going to have a lot of light left. And, boy was I right. To get anything close enough to a shutter speed to capture a wader feeding I needed to turn the ISO first to 800, then 1250, then right up to past 1600. The really good thing was that I also remembered to set the Hi-ISO Noise Reduction and I am delighted with the results of this. Using the camera's built in noise reduction has produced images better than some of the ISO800 I had from earlier in the week.

Something else to play with!

Roll on some decent light - I am not worried about summer but please can I have a little more light!?!

I got home well after dark and set about processing the RAW files into TIFFs for the library and then some into JPEGs for the website. I have uploaded the new images onto the site as of about 10 minutes ago - its now 8.30pm and I am really starting to feel the evening drawing into night. Its been a long day. But at least my back and shoulders are complaining with the new tripod.

Sometimes even just an hour is all you need to capture some pleasing images. In some ways today was more interesting and successful than the whole of last Saturday when we didn't see a thing. I think that being the only person on the point, being quiet and not moving about when it wasn't totally necessary was the reason I got to see so much.

Watch out the ice on untreated roads - several carparks today have been like icerinks!

Jan