Hi all,
Recorded yesterday in awful light conditions with the leaves throwing a lot of green cast.
The young are not short of fledgeing

Mistle Thrush feeding young at nest on Vimeo

At this moment can't work out why it can't play here as I have authorised it.
In the mean time can be viewed by clicking the title at the top of the preview screen
Mick

Forget the above now solved

Not easy Mick, well done. Did you film from the ground, they often nest pretty high?
What gear do you use? Always difficult to judge things on the web but the tighter shots looks a little soft to me, was that with a 2x?
Steve

Hi Steve,
Thanks for looking
They were nesting in a fork half way up a 30 ft tree. filmed from a small bank which put me about 3 metres below them and about 15 metres away.
The tight shots are slightly soft (xlh1 notorious for difficult critical focusing) Filmed with an xlh1 and a 100-300mm f4 sigma All clips were filmed at f4 with 0 or +3 gain.

Mick

Mick,

That was lovely, even if the bit at the end always puts me off my lunch! Nicely shot, lovely tight shots of the nest, beautiful close-ups.

The fact that it was "only" a 300mm lens gives me some hope that I can get shots like that if I find the right location, though I can see a DOF adapter being added at some point so I can use nice lenses.

Thanks for the info Mick. I wonder if stopping the lens down to f5.6 would help - 2 reasons, it'd perform better stopped down a bit anyway, virtually all lenses do, and it'd give you a tiny bit more depth of field, which at these magnifications can help. Boosting contrast in post can help too, especially in our dull weather conditions and at a distance from the subject.
I have a friend who used to use the Sigma 120-300 on the XL-H1 and he was never 100% happy with it, certainly compared to the stock lens.
Steve

Thanks Mike,
The original footage does not look as soft as it appears on vimeo.
I have found with this lens you do need to film at around F8 to get real sharp footage at the long end.
Mick.

I'm sure it does look a lot better in the original, I hate make comments based on web viewing! I could have guessed that you'd get best performance around f8, but of course in the UK there's often not enough light for that, as you said even at f4 you had to use +3 gain which is I'd guess the very most you'd want on the XL-H1. This is the price to be paid for 1/3" I guess. Are you keeping an eye on Canon developments with an eye to upgrading when they bring out their XF camera with interchangeable mount? Or are you put off by CMOS, for wildlife I'd have to test i thoroughly.
Steve

Hi Steve,

You posted whilst I was replying to Mike, hopfully that post explains a bit more

Unfortunately the light was bad yesterday and I was forced to comprimise.

If all was well well I would have been filming -3 gain and with then the lens stopped a bit to give a better depth of field.

I have not long had this lens and still experimenting with it. Up to the 250mm range it is certainly on a par with the canon eos 70-200 f2.8 in the right light conditions

Regards

Mick

Hi Steve

With regard to canon developments, I will have to wait and see.

Whatever I go for will have to have overcranking. As far as cmos chips are concerned I am not sure, depends on the future development of them I suppose.

Mick

A man after my own heart! Overcranking is the number one priority in wildlife cameras, it's the reason why the BBC have stuck with the Varicam even with its 720 chips - it's more important than an extra bit of image quality.
As for the lens, I've been in similar positions before, seeing a lens that is very good until the top end of the range, but as you'll know, with wildlife it's always the long end that you need, so if it doesn't do well there then what's the point!
The 100-300 gets really good reviews and is nice and compact so it's got to be a good choice. The next step up really is the Nikon 200-400, but it's a big beast, optically it'll be step up though for sure. They've actually just released a new version of the 200-400, which is optically the same, but that means that there will be used version 1 lenses on the market (they're already appearing) and it'll drive down the price - still lucky to find a good one under £3500 though!
Steve

Mick i like your footage very much, its not easy to film in bad light. Thanks for sharing! Mistle thrush is a beautiful bird!!

Karl-David

Oops... red face. I forgot that 35mm lenses introduce a magnification of 7x, which makes 300mm actually 2100mm or something like that.

I may need to get that Letus after all!