Washed ashore, North Beach, Racine, Wis. | Canon 1D Mark III and 70-200mm f/4L IS lens @ 70mm | Exposed 1/250 sec. @ f/8, ISO 400.

I am presently writing a full review of RawWorkflow’s LensAlign Pro–a product I briefly worked with in June–so I’ve been busy adjusting the autofocus performance of my cameras with several of my lenses.  While it’s nice to look at a test photo of a focus alignment ruler and see your depth-of-field falling exactly where it should, there’s no substitute for confirming that the changes are for the better than to go out and make some images!

Note that both images in this post were created at f/8, but for different reasons.  In the image of the feather and debris on the beach, I wanted to make sure that the feather, which was almost flat against the beach, as well as the taller matter, would all be rendered in sharp focus.  However, for the photograph of the Ring-billed Gull below, I was using a Canon 1.4x II teleconverter, and I always try to stop down either 2/3 or a full stop from wide open in order to eliminate the vignetting introduced by the teleconverter, and to counteract any loss of sharpness.

Ring-billed Gull stretching, North Beach, Racine, Wis. | Canon 1D Mark III and 400mm DO IS lens with 1.4x II TC | Exposed 1/1600 sec. @ f/8, ISO 400.

Content © 2010 David Kennedy | View Original Post | Comment | Filed under Updates | Tags: birds, Canon 400mm DO IS, Canon 70-200mm f/4L IS, EOS 1D Mark III, nature

Black Tern in flight alongside Hwy. 49, Horicon National Wildlife Refuge, Mayville, Wis. | Canon 7D and 400mm f/4 DO IS lens | Exposed 1/1600 sec. @ f/4, ISO 400 (neutral EV)

A Brief History of “Back-focus”

Last weekend I was at Horicon National Wildlife Refuge and experienced some focus problems with my Canon 7D heretofore non-existent, or so I thought.  Upon reviewing photographs from the 7D from the past several months, I noticed that none of them were actually as sharp as they could have been.  I attributed the softness to the lack of acutance in the files, and while I continue to believe that is an inherent property of cramming 18 megapixels into an APS-C format sensor, there was a real problem in play.

I didn’t want to believe that it could be a question of the camera “back-focusing” (or front-focusing) because I’ve grown to distrust people’s claims that their camera, and not their own inabilities, are to blame for their out-of-focus photographs.  I don’t remember these claims from the film days.  Perhaps I was just oblivious to the complaints, but I tend to believe that the instant feedback of the digital camera is partly to blame for the knee-jerk reaction that anything wrong with the pictures must be camera, not operator, error.

I will not mince words: ever since the Canon 10D and the Nikon D70, there’s been a lot of bitching and moaning in online forums about back-focused images, and I did not believe them.  At all.  Until now.

Now, I will argue that there is definitely operator error to blame in most many cases of complaints about back-focusing.  Last weekend I was convinced that I must have chosen the wrong focus point or didn’t have the AF locked by holding in the rear button–some prefer AF to only be activated by using the back button, I prefer AF to only be turned off if I hold in the back–and allowed AI Servo (Continuous AF for Nikonians) to screw up the focus.  To confirm my assumption, the next day I took test photographs in the garden around my parents house in Racine, Wis. and was shocked to discover that none of them were sharp.  Sure, the wind was to blame in a couple cases, but even when conditions were perfectly still the results were poor, so I rented a LensAlign from Lensrentals.com to investigate whether front or back-focus was to blame.

And what did I find after I unpacked and set up the LensAlign?  The 7D and the 5D Mark II both back-focused with the 400mm DO IS lens.  Well, there goes the neighborhood.  And a lot of preconceived ideas, with it.

Post continues after the jump!

Black Tern banking along Hwy. 49, Horicon National Wildlife Refuge, Mayville, Wis. | Canon 7D and 400mm f/4 DO IS lens | Exposed 1/4000 sec. @ f/4, ISO 800 (-1/3 EV)

Tools of the Trade

While the process of working with LensAlign is the subject of a future post, I will note that the setup involves establishing the proper distance from the LensAlign target based on a distance tool on the LensAlign Web site, properly aligning the camera and the target so that they are square to one another, and then taking a test photo (JPEG’s will suffice, thankfully) to load into Photoshop and, with the help of the Emboss filter, you can determine whether your camera back-focuses or front-focuses (or focuses perfectly) with a given lens.  Both Canon and Nikon introduced AF Microadjustment in their cameras within the past few years, and you can then make a series of photographs of the LensAlign test chart while incrementally adjusting the AF Microadjustment.  You then look at the test chart photos in Photoshop and pick the one that was the best, and apply that Microadjustment to your camera/lens.

While it takes about 30 minutes to get a lens/body combination set, the results are both surprising and stunning.  My 16-35mm f/2.8L II lens turns out to be far sharper, especially wide-open, than I ever gave it credit for, particularly at the wide end of its zoom range.  Suddenly, the Canon 7D and the 400mm f/4 DO IS lens seemed to talk to each other and the results were good.  But what about moving targets?

Black Tern swooping in for a fish along the Dike Road, Horicon National Wildlife Refuge, Mayville, Wis. | Canon 7D and 400mm f/4 DO IS lens | Exposed 1/2500 sec. @ f/4, ISO 500 (neutral EV)

So many settings, So little time

While the LensAlign focus calibration enabled my Canon 7D to be more accurate with my lenses, making critically-sharp action photographs involves more than proper focus alignment.  You must take a trip to the Custom Function menu to set up the camera’s autofocus properly or else it won’t be able to track a moving subject (bird, football player, bicyclist, what-have-you) to save its silicon-based life.

To be frank, the Canon 7D’s custom function menu is a mess.  This is true of Nikon and Olympus menus as well, I should note.  I am an equal-opportunity critic of poor organization and confounding terminology among all of the major brands.  Perhaps this is why I’ve found it so difficult to decide on settings for the 7D.

Ultimately, I found that making adjustments to several settings under the umbrella of the C.Fn III Autofocus/Drive menu helped to increase the frequency of in-focus flight photos of Black Terns at Horicon NWR.

• Option 1, AI Servo tracking sensitivity, should be set at slow.  This prevents the camera from jumping focus from the bird flying in the air to the branches of the trees behind it.  I have tried adjusting this all over the scale, and found that dead slow is the most reliable for my kind of work.
• Option 2, AI Servo 1st/2nd img priority, should be set to 0, the default.  You don’t want to tell the camera to prioritize the drive, because that just means that it will take pictures even when nothing is in focus.
• Option 3, AI Servo AF tracking method should be left at the default, 0.  For some reason, the alternative, “Continuous AF track priority” sounds good but behaves horribly.  Go figure.
• Option 4, Lens drive when AF impossible should mostly be set to 1: Focus search off.  This prevents the camera from “hunting” the focus (racking back and forth) to reacquire the moving target.  Instead, it just stops and you can pan the camera and start focusing again on the subject that has likely remained on the same plane of focus as before.  However, there are times when I get frustrated and turn on focus search.  Your mileage may vary.
• the remaining options within the C.Fn III menu are best determined by you, and they affect less the reliability of the AF and more how you  work the the machine

Bull Thistle along the Dike Road, Horicon National Wildlife Refuge, Mayville, Wis. | Canon 5D Mark II and 70-200mm f/4L IS lens @ 169mm | Exposed 1/125 sec. @ f/8, ISO 400 (-1/3 EV)

Conclusion

Once upon a time, I thought back-focus was a myth; how times change!  Now I know that not only was the Canon 7D affected by focus alignment problems (mostly back-focus, but on some lenses it would front-focus), but my 5D Mark II was plagued by these issues as well.  The result for my landscapes is even sharper results at larger apertures.  For the 5D II, especially, it’s like having a new camera.   I never thought much of its AF performance, but now I wonder how much of that opinion was based on poor lens focus alignment.

I will explain more about working with the LensAlign soon, but I will say now that it is an amazingly effective tool for calibrating the focus of your camera bodies and lenses.

Sunset off the Dike Road, Horicon National Wildlife Refuge, Mayville, Wis. | Canon 5D Mark II and 24-70mm f/2.8L lens @ 24mm | Exposed 1/250 sec. @ f/5.6, ISO 400 (-1/3 EV)

Addendum

Later in the fall of 2010, Michael Tapes of Michael Tapes Designs offered to send me a LensAlign Pro for a more in-depth review, and in the winter of 2010/2011 a prototype and final production version of the LensAlign MKII that you can also read on this blog!

Content © 2010 David Kennedy | View Original Post | 5 comments | Filed under Reviews | Tags: birds, EOS 5D Mark II, EOS 7D, equipment, LensAlign, nature, Reviews, wildlife

Canada Goose on Dike Road, Horicon National Wildlife Refuge, Mayville, Wis. | Canon 7D and 400mm f/4 DO IS lens | Exposed 1/320 sec. @ f/4, ISO 1250

On a Sunday outing to Horicon National Wildlife Refuge, I ran into some of my first real frustrations with the Canon 7D.  While I’ve used it with the 400mm DO lens in the past, I was having tremendous difficulty getting photographs that I thought were in crisp focus.  Now, in all fairness, I’ve never thought that the images from the 7D were as crisp as they could be, even if they were still in sharp focus.  That is that the image acutance, or the contrast between individual pixels, is just not as high as other semi-pro or professional camera bodies, such like the 5D Mark II or 1D Mark III.  I believe this to be a function of Canon’s misguided decision to cram 18 megapixels into an APS-C sensor.  I would have been happy with 10-12 megapixels for a camera like this.  But I digress.

LensAlign Pro

The problem I encountered was not a question of not enough acutance–which would be corrected by sharpening in Lightroom or Photoshop–but many of the photographs were simply not in focus.  Before sending the camera to Canon for a fix, I compared its performance to my 5D Mark II as well as another 7D body from my dad.  The difference?  Night and day.

Tweaking the camera’s autofocus microadjustment panel seems to be the obvious answer.  Today, in an attempt to correct the problem, I tinkered with the 7D’s microadjustment with the 400mm lens and it would seem that the solution likely lies in that menu, but I am ill-equipped to calibrate the lens focus.  Enter LensRentals.com and the Lens Align.  While the professional LensAlign is $180, it’s available from LensRentals for an entire week for only $15.  It should get here Wednesday, and I will have an article reviewing this product and explaining its use after I get my 7D back in order.

Content © 2010 David Kennedy | View Original Post | 3 comments | Filed under Updates | Tags: birds, EOS 7D, equipment, problems, wildlife

American Robin, Peace Park, Columbia, Mo. | Canon 7D and 300mm f/4L lens; exposed 1/200 sec. @ f/4, ISO 1600

I have owned the Canon EOS 7D for a few months now; I purchased one in November 2009.  One of the concerns I had with the 7D, at least initially, was that the files simply did not seem sharp “enough” at higher ISO’s because of the noise degrading the image quality.  And I do believe that, in the case of basketball arenas and other dark situations where, frankly, “exposing to the right” to get a good histogram (and a good exposure) means cranking up the ISO to 4000, the quality certainly does go down.  However, that’s true even of the oft-touted Nikon D3.  And I don’t necessarily give the camera its fairest chance in those situations, because I prefer to use f/4 telephotos.  Why?  They’re smaller, they’re lighter, and they cost less.  They cost less now, and they will cost me less in the future because I won’t need an artificial shoulder or knees like some of my colleagues when we all grow older.

This past Saturday, I found myself crawling around Peace Park with the 7D and the 300 in order to make this series of a Robin spitting out a berry.  One of the things that pleased me greatly was that, as the light got dimmer and I resorted to higher ISO’s, the detail was held solidly from my ISO 1600 frames.  How well?  Below is a 100% crop of the head and bill detail:

100% Pixel Detail. No noise reduction or sharpening applied.

Note that this is before processing the image with any noise reduction plugins, such as Noiseware or Noise Ninja.  Neither has this sample been sharpened!  Not bad.  Not bad at all…

For outdoors use, the 7D should prove to be a very capable camera indeed.

Content © 2010 David Kennedy | View Original Post | Comment | Filed under Reviews | Tags: birds, EOS 7D, high ISO, Reviews, wildlife

American Robin regurgitating a berry in Peace Park, Columbia, Mo. | Canon 7D and 300mm f/4L lens mounted on Walt Anderson panning ground pod; multiple exposures @ ISO 500.

I decided to take one more crack at coming up with an entertaining series on an American Robin.  On Saturday afternoon I went over to Peace Park in Columbia and set up my 7D and 300mm  on my panning ground pod from Walt Anderson, another native of Southeastern Wisconsin, and made some pictures in the fading late-afternoon light.

I do feel that it is more successful than my first attempt at a series on urban wildlife, although it probably still needs something “more.”  At the very least, the visual impact is more dramatic, and the light is much improved!

Content © 2010 David Kennedy | View Original Post | One comment | Filed under Picture Story | Tags: birds, EOS 7D, wildlife

Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, Brigham City, Utah. Canon 5D Mark II and 70-200mm f/4 L IS lens; exposed 1/100 sec. @ f/5.6, ISO 1600.

Back at the end of July, I flew out to Salt Lake City, Utah to join my girlfriend on a car-camping trip along the Mirror Lake Scenic Byway that runs through the High Uinta Wilderness Area in the Wasatch-Cache National Forest. At the end of the trip, we stayed two nights in Brigham City, the gateway to the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge. In many ways, Bear River is the “Bosque” of Utah.

I had only two days there, and the weather on the second day was somewhat uncooperative due to some storm systems that were moving through (the high winds were still blowing the next day for our flight out of Salt Lake, which made for a turbulent take-off!), but would say that the opportunities for great bird photography are there.  Artie Morris took a trip out there in 2006, so my observation comes as little surprise.  When I return, which will probably be in 2011 as the refuge is planning an extensive road paving project into the middle of next year, I would definitely try to time my visit for May or September.

The real treat for me at Bear River is the great numbers of American Avocets.  Unfortunately, by the time I found an ideal pond on the side of the refuge road where the sun angle was perfect, the quality of the light was great, and the birds were close, it was also getting dark.  Many of my pictures were made at ISO 800 on the 1D IIN, which is what I consider the limit for acceptable noise for wildlife  photography (on that camera).

An aside: I made photos with the 5D Mark II at ISO 2500 and 3200 that I would have no shame in printing large as the noise is so low, but the IIN has real issues beyond 800.  For photojournalism and sports, I don’t mind going to 1600, but 3200 is absolutely horrible.  The 1D III is a different story, but so is its autofocus!

One thing that I truly enjoyed about Bear River in early August is that it felt like I had the refuge to myself.  I passed very few other cars, but strangely saw only one other photographer.  Amazingly, the opportunities for photography are not limited to birds and wildlife.  The landscape of the refuge is stunning: the mountains in the background are reflected very clearly in the “units” of the refuge that have been flooded, essentially creating a large lake, and some of the wetland grasses and sedges make interesting, layered patterns.

More of this post after the jump!

On the last day, I was fortunate to find several Black-necked Stilts that seemed to be more than happy to pose for photographs–provided I stay inside the rental car (using it as a giant, mobile blind) with the driver’s side window rolled all the way down.  I pretty much drove like we asked our drivers to do in Kenya: creep up a few feet, and turn the engine off.  The birds would move, so fire the engine back up and move up and to the right another foot, then shut it back off.

I was using my Walt Anderson panning ground pod on the window sill.  If I were to go back and approach the refuge as my primary destination, I would also bring a bean bag to give the ground pod a more substantial platform.  The ground pod makes panning, and also turning the lens in the tripod collar, a very simple operation, and makes for sharper pictures.

Here, I wish that the sun angle on this young stilt was better (I wanted to go ahead of him and look back, but he would have none of it!), but I love the head angle and the catch light in the eye, as well as the behavior with the open bill.

I would say that if you are interested in migratory shorebirds, Bear River is a place you owe it to yourself to add to your list of places to go.

Content © 2009 David Kennedy | View Original Post | Comment | Filed under Updates | Tags: Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, birds, Brigham City, landscapes, shorebirds, Utah, wildlife

Marine Iguana against the Pacific Ocean, Fernandina Island. Canon 1D IIn and 400mm f/4 DO IS lens with 2x TC (800mm effective). Exposed 1/200 sec. @ f/8, ISO 400.

Blue-footed Booby calling, Isabela Island. Canon 1D IIn and 300mm f/4 L IS lens. Exposed 1/300 sec. @ f/4, ISO 400. Click image for larger version.

I returned from the Galápagos islands to Quito, Ecuador on Saturday and flew back into Milwaukee, Wis. yesterday around 9:30am CST.  All luggage arrived back home safely, so I spent most of the day alternating between unpacking and laying on the couch.  (I didn’t sleep on the red eye flight from Quito to Atlanta, but I did get a couple hours on the flight back to MKE).

Overall, it was a wonderful experience and the group, led by Artie Morris, was composed of many great people as well as our excellent guide to the Galápagos.

I have just begun the process of ranking and keywording my photographs from the trip.  So far, I have only worked up three images–none of which have had more than Lightroom adjustments applied to them.  I’m saving the cases that need some Photoshop magic for later!

Eventually, I will post the best photos from the trip in a gallery on my Zenfolio Web site, and many images might find their way into my wildlife and landscape portfolios on this Web site.

Blue-footed Booby preparing to display, Hood Island. Canon 1D IIn and 400mm f/4 DO IS lens. Exposed 1/1250 sec. @ f/5.6, ISO 320.

Content © 2009 David Kennedy | View Original Post | Comment | Filed under Updates | Tags: birds, Blue Footed Boobies, Blue-footed Booby, Galapagos, Iguana, Marine Iguanas, nature, travel, wildlife

Three flash units were set up on stands, combined with the late-afternoon sun, made for a four-light setup, albeit back-lit.  I was trying to get some rim-lighting, and between the sun and another strobe back and to the right, I figured I would get quite a bit.  I certainly got some, but not quite what I wanted.  My key light was backed up quite a bit, and I had a fill on the left, which is casting the nuthatch’s shadow that you can see on the suet feeder.

More after the jump…

White-breasted Nuthatch on suet feeder, Racine, Wis.

For a first attempt at multiple flash for bird photography, I think the result is OK: the moment is good, but the lighting could still be better.  Working a back-lit situation is hard to begin with, but it’s didn’t seem feasible to photograph this feeder with the sun to my back, because the background would have sucked.  Also, there are only so many “bird on a feeder” photographs that one can bear to create….having some (for stock) makes sense, but I need to be more patient and wait for them to land on the perches Dad has set up near the feeders.

I’ll definitely be trying this some more throughout the week I’m home.

One thing that did amuse me was this Black-capped Chickadee who thought that one of my strobes made for a good perch:

Content © 2009 David Kennedy | View Original Post | One comment | Filed under Updates | Tags: birds, light, lighting, lit, photography, wildlife