Beasts of the Jungle

[davidc]

I spent yesterday in some of the last remaining primary rainforest in Singapore (not to mention the entire S. Asia region) yesterday and although the walk through the jungle wouldn't be difficult by UK standards, in the heat & humidity it was more challenging than expected. Still, I spent the whole day with my 6D, 150-600 telephoto, 100mm macro and a 24-70 general purpose zoom and found it to be extremely manageable. Having said that, next time I think I'd limit the kit and choice of lenses, probably to just the macro & the telephoto.

One unexpected issue was that taking the camera kit out of an air conditioned apartment into 34 degree heat and 80% humidity the lenses steamed up instantly and took a good hour to acclimatise and produce useable shots. Something to bear in mind for the future and I'm also looking into a "dry cupboard" for the camera kit when when move into our own condo at the end of the month.

Anyway - this is a small subset of some of the beasts we saw in our first trip into the jungle.


Crab Eating Macaque by cedarsphoto, on Flickr


Thumb Sucking Macaque by cedarsphoto, on Flickr

Given sufficient time I'd try cloning out the vertical branch but it was rather late when I got round to processing the photos


Greater Racket-Tailed Drongo by cedarsphoto, on Flickr

For the latter, I was unsure about the inclusion of so much negative space on the left side of the frame but with the angle of the bird's head I wondered if giving it space to look into helped? The tree on the right was deliberately cropped to "stop" the frame on that side. It's also been cropped already and if I cropped too tightly on the bird then I think the resulting image quality would be lower. No clear "correct" solution with this one given the distance the bird was from me.

And finally, a kingfisher taken at the edge of useability of my 150-600, then cropped as much as I dare. I was thrilled to see a kingfisher, I'd never seen one in person before and had spent many days out in the UK looking so to see one on the first day we go exploring was a good sign.


Kingfisher by cedarsphoto, on Flickr

None of these are intended to be competition/exhibition level shots but any critique is still welcomed. exif wise they were all taken on my 6D using the 150-600 lens @ f8, iso set to auto (typically 6000-8000) on aperture priority.

[Mike Farley]

Hi Dave

It's great to see some more pictures of your new locality and very impressive that you were able to photograph these creatures in the wild. Were you on your own or did you have a guide?

Even with a long lens, getting images of smaller birds is not easy. If you had still been using a crop sensor, the long end of your zoom would have been the equivalent of around the 1,000 mm mark, which seems to be the minimum for this type of subject. Perhaps you need not worry too much about cropping, though, as I recently went to a talk by Dr Tony Kaye, a retired imaging scientist. He reckoned that between 8 - 10 megapixels is all you need for an A3 print and backed this up with two examples of an image taken on a Nikon D800. One was full resolution and the other had 8.65 MP. If I was being picky, just possibly the full resolution print had the slight edge, but it was not really possible to see a discernible difference. Of course, if preparing a photo for projection fewer MP still are needed as most of the pixels will be binned when the image is reduced.

I know that we have discussed negative space before, but I suspect that the shot of the Greater Racket-Tailed Drongo (marvellous name, BTW ) would be better if the bird were larger in the picture.

PS When my computer is returned to full working order (any day now, I hope), I am planning to show the uncropped version of my recent Fleet shot to demonstrate how I think it is improved without so much sky.

[Mike Farley]

As an addendum to my earlier post, I was not entirely certain what a dry cabinet is until I Googled it, but I can fully see why one might be necessary in regions with high humidity. I assume that your condo will have air conditioning, so I was wondering if the cabinet would be absolutely essential?

[davidc]

r.e. the cabinet & air-conditioning, I have a feeling it will be necessary. The problem is the air-con just cools the air and doesn't remove the humidity - I learned this on the second day when, after preparing my work clothes the night before and laying them out, I woke up to find them very damp indeed and bordering on wet! We then learned the apartment has a portable dehumidifier. Turning that on, it fills a 20 litre water container with just moisture from the air in anywhere between 1hr to 4hrs depending on how humid it is! The continuing problem with aircon is that it cools the camera equipment to whatever the room is too, usually 24-26 degrees, so the second I take the kit outdoors it fogs up in the 34 deg heat! I think the solution is probably two fold - the dry cabinet will store the equipment in 40% humidity (a dry day in the UK for comparison) and I will store it in a room where we don't have aircon turned on. That way the temperature differential is less so it will acclimate quicker and the dry cabinet means that I'm far less likely to get fungal growth inside my precious kit while I'm storing it. A 40 litre capacity dry cabinet is approximately 100GBP (they don't have the pound symbol on these silly keyboards!) so compared to other kit it's a relative bargain!

As for the bird, if I could have I would have cropped it, however that's already a reasonable crop as it is and doing it further really highlights the limits of the shot - it was actually in a ton of shade so I had to process a fair bit to bring out detail. Still, I'm sure over time I'll get a bird that sits in the open long enough for a nicely composed photo!

[davidc]

Also, we were on our own without a guide. The nature reserve is the local equivalent of a national park and we saw far more locals exercising by walking up & down the path to the summit of the highest point in Singapore (163m, by comparison the Natwest Tower 42 in the city is 183m - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_42, so we're not talking a lofty ascent here ) than we did people enjoying the walk or looking for wildlife.

Still, if you choose to walk one of the trails it goes from being a paved path to a mud track and although it's easy to follow it was easy to take a wrong turn and go for a longer walk than you planned! Having said that, our unexpected detour proved to be the most fruitful in terms of wildlife spotting so it wasn't all bad

[davidc]

What happened to your computer by the way?

[Mike Farley]

Also, we were on our own without a guide. The nature reserve is the local equivalent of a national park and we saw far more locals exercising by walking up & down the path to the summit of the highest point in Singapore (163m, by comparison the Natwest Tower 42 in the city is 183m - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_42, so we're not talking a lofty ascent here ) than we did people enjoying the walk or looking for wildlife.

Singapore - the Asian equivalent of the Netherlands.

[Mike Farley]

r.e. the cabinet & air-conditioning, I have a feeling it will be necessary. The problem is the air-con just cools the air and doesn't remove the humidity - I learned this on the second day when, after preparing my work clothes the night before and laying them out, I woke up to find them very damp indeed and bordering on wet! We then learned the apartment has a portable dehumidifier. Turning that on, it fills a 20 litre water container with just moisture from the air in anywhere between 1hr to 4hrs depending on how humid it is! The continuing problem with aircon is that it cools the camera equipment to whatever the room is too, usually 24-26 degrees, so the second I take the kit outdoors it fogs up in the 34 deg heat! I think the solution is probably two fold - the dry cabinet will store the equipment in 40% humidity (a dry day in the UK for comparison) and I will store it in a room where we don't have aircon turned on. That way the temperature differential is less so it will acclimate quicker and the dry cabinet means that I'm far less likely to get fungal growth inside my precious kit while I'm storing it. A 40 litre capacity dry cabinet is approximately 100GBP (they don't have the pound symbol on these silly keyboards!) so compared to other kit it's a relative bargain!

I can certainly see the need for a dry cabinet. As you say, the last thing that you want is fungus anywhere near your equipment.

A friend of mine has a Leica-R 80 mm f/1.4 lens which he picked up quite cheaply from LCE as there was fungus on the front element. Some of the Leica-R lenses have quite a reputation and this is one of them, which is reflected in the secondhand value. In a way my friend got a bargain, but the salesman at LCE invited him to make an offer. My mate thought that he pitched low, but the offer was immediately accepted, and he was taking on the risk that the fungus could not be removed without causing irrepairable damage.

[Mike Farley]

What happened to your computer by the way?

It's a long story. I boot from a SSD and have my data on a RAID 1 disk, i.e. two disks which look like a single drive to which the system writes simultaneously. Should one of the disks fail, I will still have a disk which contains all my data.

At the beginning of last week, the SSD decided it wanted its ball back and the PC would not boot. It turns out that there was a bug in the firmware which might have caused this* and after applying an update I got the SSD going again. The PC still would not boot, so I tried the Windows Repair utility, which didn't. My only option was a fresh install of Windows.

At this point, I decided that my 64 GB SSD was a bit on the small side. Windows seems to dump a lot of rubbish on the drive and although I regularly clear it out**, there has never been that much free space. I want to upgrade the PC's RAM to 16 GB, but always had a concern that the SSD would not be able to accommodate the increased size of the paging file which would result. As I can now get a 256 GB SSD for the same price as I paid for 64 GB a couple of years ago, I decided to take the opportunity to get a larger disk.

Installing Windows on the new SSD, towards the end I got one of those lovely Microsoft messages to the effect of "Windows cannot complete the installation. OK." No it ******* isn't OK.

I got the same message when I retried, so it was a hard error. Google became my friend and the cause turned out to be that the driver software on my Windows 7 disk is not compatible with the newer SSD. WTF? The install had been happily been writing to the disk, so why not just issue a warning rather than fail disgracefully? Nice one, Microsoft. The issue is fixed on W7 installation disks with SP1, but I did not have one and I could not see Microsoft allowing me to download it. I got around this by changing the disk configuration in the BIOS, but this meant I lost my RAID*** setup and the second disk is currently reporting that it has no data.

It is unclear what will happen when I restore the RAID. In theory I should not lose anything and everything will go back to the way it was, but I am not prepared to take that chance and I have been making backups for the past few days. With any luck, I'll have time to undertake the next step this morning. Fingers crossed.

Actually, there is one good thing to come out of this. I have an old laptop running Windows XP which Microsoft no longer supports. It is not worth updating to a newer version of Windows, so I have thought about making it a dual boot machine with Ubuntu Linux as the second OS. I experimented using the old SSD and ended up with a situation where I could only boot into Ubuntu. Yes, I could fix it, but a dual boot is not exactly difficult to implement. If Ubuntu cannot get that right, then in my view it is best avoided. I might try again some other time with a different flavour of Linux.

* CHKDSK reported errors on the disk and fixed them, so it is possible that a corruption was actually the cause. Ironic that the SSD which should have been more reliable has failed before the conventional drives with all those moving parts.

** Windows has a utility to remove obsolete files, but this leaves a lot of guff behind. The job has to be completed manually, which is tiresome.

*** RAID 1 is sometimes referred to as mirrored disks. I have broken that mirror.