Canon EF 400mm f/5.6L USM

Al - Appreciate you taking out time to provide these tips and info. And nice pics in your flickr profile. EDIT: I'm guessing the ones at 700mm were taken with a 500 f/4 + 1.4TC?

I do use a Benro 2691 Travel Angel with B1 ballhead. Being the hobby photog that I am, I find it difficult to justify expenditure on more gear without fully knowing how actually spending enough time to learn to make the best use of what I already have. To begin with, my observations were more in the context of flash usage along with the better beamer; would you say all the points you made are relevant to that context?

Here's my contribution to this photo archive thread, lest I end up hijacking it with a flash discussion :

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A couple more of these Mockingbirds...

Ron and Joe - nice shots.

Whew, I went back to page 90 and looked at every page. Some amazing shots in this thread! Well done guys. I think this lens is my next purchase soon. Forget the 70-200 II + 2x III combo. My only concern is being without IS but I'll just have to practice and invest in a monopod.

Nikmar -

My issue with flash photography and birds was that I was using the flash too much. I was doing what you were doing: 0 - +2 EV. The results are that you get the bird, but it looks like it was photographed in an exhibit at a zoo:

IMAGE LINK: http://www.flickr.com …/67031861@N08/6​183769066/

IMAGE LINK: http://www.flickr.com …/67031861@N08/6​183248917/

Jon - thanks for the pointers. I "think" I get what you are saying, time to put these and a few Al mentioned earlier in practice. Just haven't got time sinc my last outing. By the way, do you also use the better beamer? As I am using one, my case may be partly because I'm yet to go over the learning curve of the beamer.

I just received mine a week or two ago and haven't had a chance to try it yet. My shots above were with a 580EXII @ 105mm

I see. As the speedlite thingie is new to me too, I am yet to figure out clearly in my head the meaning of setting zoom to 50mm or whatever other number. I have a 430EX II. Any thoughts or pointers on this topic?

nikmar08 wrote in post #13162323
I see. As the speedlite thingie is new to me too, I am yet to figure out clearly in my head the meaning of setting zoom to 50mm or whatever other number. I have a 430EX II. Any thoughts or pointers on this topic?

Sure - its easy once you understand. The focal length of a lens covers a certain degree of field of view, right? So what the flash heads do is zoom internally to change the projection of light and its field of view. A 50mm lens can't see what a 24mm lens can in terms of field of view, so there's no use projecting light into the scene when it can't be picked up by the lens. So, in standard settings, the flash will zoom in accordance to the lens being used so if you have a zoom lens you can watch the zoom head in the flash move as you move the lens and meter. Since the better beamer is a given distance from the flash head, 50mm is the "zoom" on the flash head need to hit the lens on the better beamer. The more concentrated the light beam (aka 105mm) the brighter it is. So, someone (the designer) worked out that 50mm works best as it hits the full surface of the better beamer without spilling around the better beamer while also not being too narrow as well.

With your explanation for the 50mm setting being a desirable value with the beamer, I am able to connect the dots. When I had the zoom set to auto with the 400 lens, the flash would have been setting it to 105mm and throwing off a much more concentrated and powerful beam of light, which the beamer would have been concentrating it further.

Here's a pic from earlier yesterday without the beamer or flash. I metered a part of the tree where I was expecting the bird to be without the bird in Av mode at f/5.6 and got SS as 1/500 with ISO400 for a correct exposure. Then I set these values in M mode and ISO at 640. Surprisingly, this turned out with quite a lot of noise, purely to be attributed to underexposure. Wonder how that happened. Finally, had to do some NR which made this softer than what I would have liked. Shooting birds in tree shades/foliage is really freaking me out as of now.

^^^^

http://www.naturephoto​graphers.net/tdg0502-1.html

I primarily only use 50mm with the 580EX ii + Better Beamer and have tried 24mm.

If your shooting subjects out past 15ft. use 50mm, ETTL, AV mode, f5.6, SS1/500 and go -1 on FEC to start with. Just practice in the shade & shadows on a limb or any stationary object. The variable existing ambient light will always vary so you will just have to adjust the flash compensation using the BB. If your within say 8 to 12ft. of your subject you can use 50mm, ETTL, MF, f5.6, and go as high as 1/2000 SS with the BB. Using AV will provide fill flash and using MF on your body the exposure will be corrected automatically in ETTL mode. Remember inside of an 11 ft. distance to subject will require the use of a 20mm extension tube on the 400/f5.6 lens to obtain AF.

The below 2 pics was using AV mode fill flash at around 20 & 30 ft. distances:

Smart move doing this with your 400, Paul. I made the mistake of shooting an ostrich with my 17-50 and he pecked at it and broke my polarizer! Nice image!