The early days of bird photography

I was recently given this little book by my friends Viv & David.  It is Birds in the Garden: Studies with a Camera, written by Granville Sharpe and published in 1902.

Much of the book is a description of the birds and the way they live but what interested me most was the technique of taking the photos.  The camera used was "an ordinary half-plate camera" with "a good long-focus lens".  The camera was wrapped in several layers of material to reduce the noise of the focal plane shutter.  The long pneumatic shutter release went into the house through the open window where the photographer was hiding behind a blind.  The photogenic perch for the bird was fixed to the back of a chair and the food to attract the bird was placed on a box on the seat of the chair.  Because the photos were monochrome a white back ground was positioned so the bird would stand out.  All that remained was for the photographer to wait until the bird was sitting still on the perch and then to trigger the shutter.  No details are given of shutter speed but it must have been low - if the bird moved because of the sound of the shutter then the photo would be blurred.  And of course the camera could only take one picture before the photographer had to come out, unwrap the camera, and change the plate.  Here is the set up.

The birds chosen for inclusion in the book were blue tit, great tit, coal tit, marsh tit, spotted flycatcher, pied flycatcher, robin, chaffinch and willow wren (willow warbler), at least four of which certainly wouldn't be in the top nine these days. The author does concede that pied flycatchers were not common.  I suspect he chose these nine birds because they were the ones he had good photos of.  The book contains over 100 photographs and eight photogravures.  I had to look it up but Wikipedia says photogravure is an intaglio printmaking or photo-mechanical process whereby a copper plate is grained (adding a pattern to the plate) and then coated with a light-sensitive gelatin tissue which had been exposed to a film positive, and then etched, resulting in a high quality intaglio plate that can reproduce detailed continuous tones of a photograph.  The photogravures are certainly better quality illustrations.

This fascinating book offers an interesting comparison to the way we take photos of garden bird these days, with auto focus, automatic exposure control and up to 10 frames per second.  Some things, though, are much the same after more than 100 years.

FieldfareCam

Here is another new species for my trail camera.  These pictures were recorded in my mother's garden in Northamptonshire.  We had noticed a fieldfare eating fallen apples and set up a camera to get a closer look.  The camera is a Wingscapes BirdCam Pro which records HD video and can take 20MP jpg stills although these photos are frame grabs from the videos.  The quality is reasonable.

Here are a couple of videos.  Again the quality is reasonably good, perhaps better in softer light than bright sunlight. The camera has an adjustable preset focus and the depth of field seems narrow, even in good light.

Bird of the week - Goldeneye

This beautiful duck is a winter visitor from Scandinavia.  Several of them can be found on Killingworth Lake, about two miles from here.  They usually stay a bit out of reach of the camera in the middle of the water but the recent cold weather froze much of the lake and they were forced a bit closer.  These photos were taken between sleet showers so the light was pretty poor.  In good light the drake's head is a wonderful iridescent green.  Here he is black and white - with a golden eye.

As with most ducks, the female has more restrained colouring and she also has a paler eye.

Courtship begins in earnest when they get back to their breeding grounds but that didn't stop the males from displaying to the females by swimming alongside and stretching their necks

or throwing their heads back.

This female is unimpressed.

Goldeneyes are diving ducks, eating mostly insects and crustaceans.  We do see a few in Gosforth Park nature reserve, usually at the far side of the lake.  While I was watching them the goldeneyes occasionally took off and flew a couple of circuits around the lake before landing again.  They make a wonderful whistling sound as they fly.

Goldeneyes (Bucephala clangula) nest in holes in trees and will use nest boxes.  A few have been persuaded to nest in Scotland.

Most go back farther north (orange = breeding range, blue = wintering range).

commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bucephala_clangula_map.svg

Thomas Bewick made this engraving for A History of British Birds.

Archibald Thorburn painted goldeneyes with scaups and smews,

and with tufted ducks.

John James Audubon made this painting for Birds of America.

The goldeneye is not to be confused with GoldenEye, the 17th James Bond film, released in 1995 and starring Pierce Brosnan as Bond.  Operation Goldeneye was a WW2 plan to thwart possible radar surveillance of the Straits of Gibraltar by the Axis powers in collaboration with fascist Spain, and was run by Commander Ian Fleming.  Fleming later named his Jamaican estate Goldeneye and wrote the early James Bond novels there.

You can listen to the goldeneye's whistling wingbeats here.  Watch a video of the courtship display here.  And listen to Bill Oddie's BBC Radio 4 Tweet of the Day here.

In the limelight

Yesterday Alan the electrician put up new LED security lights around the house, including a very bright one outside the back door.  The foxes were wary at first, presumably because it was something new, but that didn't stop them coming for the food. There is now enough light for still photos (fairly "soft" because of settings of 1/100s, f/2.8, ISO 12,800) whereas before I had to take frame grabs from video.  Here are the results from last night.

Instagram

I am probably a bit old for this but I now have an Instagram account.  I started on 1st January after pressure from my niece Rebecca and my young friends Naomi, Alice & Lucy.  Although I enjoy the process of taking photos the main satisfaction is from sharing them and this is a great way of sharing photos with a new and younger audience.  All the photos on this blog and on Facebook and Flickr are contemporary.  Instagram gives me the opportunity of posting older photos but I shall keep them appropriate to the time of year (so no dragonflies in winter, etc).  At present I am posting one photo a day.  If you do Instagram too you can find me at trogtrogphoto.

Foxes in the snow

We had a bit of snow on Friday night but this is the first opportunity I have had to post a few photos.  I had already put out the peanuts before the snow fell but the foxes had no trouble finding them.  The first one turned up on his own.

Here is a short video.

About an hour later a pair turned up.  It was fascinating to watch them sniffing out peanuts one at a time from under the snow.

Another short video.

Bird of the week - Barn owl

I have had a wonderful time watching a pair of barn owls this week.  The pictures above and below were almost the last ones I took on the first visit.  Most of the time the owls were slightly too far away so the flight photos below are fairly heavily cropped.  Then just as the sun was setting one owl landed on a fence post near the road so I got back into the car and drove slowly towards it.  When I had got as close as I dared I climbed across to the passenger seat and took the photo through the (open) passenger window.

A few moments later the owl dived into the field in pursuit of another vole.

I wrote a Bird of the Week post on barn owls less than a year ago so I won't repeat it all.  Here are a few other photos from this week.

The bird above is darker coloured and has no ring.  The smaller lighter bird below, hunting moments before sunset, is ringed.  Females are generally a bit larger so this may be the male.

A couple of days later I went back.  This time there was only one, the lighter coloured, ringed bird.  It was mostly hunting farther along the dunes and sitting on fence post almost half a mile a way.  It did briefly settle a bit closer but still too far away.  This was the best I could do.

It was wonderful to watch them, despite the cold.  I expect I'll be back again soon.