Neil Danton

OK, so that post title might be meaningless for non UK/Ireland residents, you might have to use the big G to search for Compare the Meerkats to get the connection

Always delighted to go and shoot the new residents at Fota Wildlife Park. The only problem with the location of their home is that it’s only possible to shoot them through either perspex or a chain-link fence. I chose the fence. All things considered then, I’m not too unhappy with the results.

It’s fascinating to watch meerkats for a good period of time. It was quite a time too. Ideally I wanted two of them together to relate to the story, but they don’t stay in one spot for very long, apart from the one on guard-duty. It stays in one spot on the look-out for predators, while the others get on with their business.

I was there just before Valentine’s Day. On that basis the rest of this post will de-generate somewhat.

“I’m expecting a card. Where’s the postman?”:

“He’ll be along any minute now. Is that him?”:

“Maybe he’s delivering to the tradesmen’s entrance. That’s over there isn’t it?:

“What about airmail. D’ya think it might be arriving by airmail?”:

“You keep an eye out that way, and I’ll look…”:

“Here he comes, HERE HE COMES, this is definitely him”:

“Wayhay! I got a card”:

“Aww, thanks for my card, you’re the best”:

TTFN

Yes yes I know you’ve only recently had an animal pic, but this one is just soooo cute.

Obviously he’s not really a Teddy Bear, he’s a Red Panda, born two months ago to mother Binthy and father Bamboo:

Father Bamboo is believed to be one of the oldest Red Pandas to breed in captivity. Mother Binthy was unable to produce enough milk for the baby and so he has been taken into care at the incubation centre at Fota Wildlife Park:

Visitors can see him at the Park, together with his new best friend, a toy polar bear:

TTFN

That’s windows as in glass and stuff, not Windows as in an operating system that barely works, even after multiple variants.

This is a slightly unusual one as, if you are one of those people who have so little else to do you read the blog regularly, you’ll know that most of the time I shoot people, and some of them deserve it.

This was a shoot for a window company that had replaced all the glazing in a large building, and wanted images of the 13/14 different styles of window that had been used:

The thing about buildings is the problem you get with (usually) converging verticals. This happens when you point a camera upwards to include the whole building, and the vertical lines in the structure move toward the centre. The human brain & eyes have a little get-together and automatically correct this so we don’t see it, but a lens is norman-no-mates so can’t do the colluding and we get weird looking structures. I also said (usually) because if you manage to be higher than a building and shoot down, you get diverging verticals where the top of the building appears to be wider than the base. All this and you need no alcohol to make it happen.

However, a thing two things three things are available to help you reduce or rectify the problem.

1. Get back as far as you can. The problem is exacerbated (that’s a big word I just fell over and used instead of “made worse”) when using a wide-angle lens. The wider the lens, the closer in you get, the worse the problem becomes. An ideal lens would be 50mm or longer as a 50mm lens is approximately the view that the human eye sees. It’s actually 57mm if you want be be pedantic.

Now when I say 50mm, that’s 50mm as it relates to a 35mm film camera or full-frame digital camera. It’s a weird thing with some digital cameras as they use a smaller sensor compared to the equivalent film camera, which has the effect of making the lens focal length longer. It’s a very complicated subject that I could explain thoroughly with a few diagrams and degrees in Physics and Mechanical Engineering, none of which I have.

So in principle then, get back further and use a longer lens. For the image above I couldn’t get everything into the frame using a 50mm, so it was a 28-70mm at 39mm.

2. Sometimes of course it’s just not possible to get back far enough, and that’s when you can use a brilliant but expensive solution in a special lens called a tilt-shift. Actually, pausing for a mo’, that’s what Canon call them as that’s the brand of gear I shoot with. I’m sure that Nikon and others have some similar sort of solution. Anyway enough of the saddos Nikon users. Here’s one of the 4 different ones that Canon makes:

These are specially designed for architectural work and allow the horizontals and verticals as seen in the camera to be aligned perfectly. More diagrams and at least a PhD needed to explain that fully but I still don’t have any so you’ll have to trust me – it works.

3. You can actually correct the verticals in post-production with your preferred image-tweaking software. I’ve done it in Photoshop before but don’t use that anymore, but for Aperture there’s a plug-in called.. called…. Lines or Bends or Curves or something. Anyway it works, and most of the time I find further back, longer lens and post-production works OK. When it’s really very very tight, I know someone I can borrow a tilt-shift lens from

Finally (not much more now) the whole point of this post is that most of the different styles of window were on the ground floor, so shooting them individually wasn’t a problem. There was one unique one though and if you look back to the original image it’s half way along the right-hand side on the top floor. I would have highlighted it with a red circle, but I don’t have a red circle to hand.

A couple of things that made it slightly awkward. We weren’t allowed access to the inside of the building and no cherry-picker or crane to get up to the correct level. That’s where the unusual lens comes in. One of these:

It’s a 400mm lens, or mummy-bear as I call it (daddy-bear is the 600mm that I also have). With that I could get way back on some waste ground and shoot the window full-frame with only the slightest problem of converging verticals.

Fortunate that I have a 400mm lens then.

TTFN

Fota Wildlife Park to be exact.

I’ve a busy day with four shoots and the last one will be to cover the Cheetah Run, a 4 mile road-race through the park, so here’s a couple of images from last year’s event.

Now any dope can photograph a mass-start, or a race finish, but it takes a special kind of dope to think up something different. Fortunate then that I was available:

Or as one of the newspapers that used this image titled it:

Caution: zebra crossing

TTFN

…well it’s like being on safari, except it’s only a few miles away from home.

Was recently at the Wildlife Park to get some images for a client’s press release of a new arrival – a baby Siamang Gibbon. Not the easiest thing to photograph, a near-black object in high-contrast sunshine/shade.

Baby on it’s own:

and baby with mum:

I guess some people just don’t like having their picture taken!

TTFN