Monkey in The Eye

Published Photograph

It’s always nice to get some recognition when you are a photographer, especially as an amateur like myself, so it was with great pleasure that I found out that one of my pictures had been selected for the cover page of August-September edition of The Eye Magazine. The Eye is a free bi-monthly magazine published in Uganda where I have been working and is an insiders guide to touring and travel in Uganda. You can generally find free copies in all the major hotels and on the major airlines travelling there, so it has quite an extensive circulation within the country. The Eye Magazine contains directories, maps, reviews, tour and travel information and articles of interest about Uganda. In fact it is invaluable resource for any visitor travelling there as it contains an invaluable array of information on hospitals to hotels, shops to sporting events and from embassies to entertainment. If there’s anything happening or things you need to see in Uganda it’s most probably going to be in The Eye.

The picture used is that of a young Vervet monkey and above is a montage of the various colour schemes they tried before deciding on the purple in centre of the bottom row. To be honest they all look good to me, but darker border suite the picture well. I’ve yet to see the printed copy, but hopefully they will have kept a couple of issues for me. A copy of the original photo is below.

If you ever do get to Uganda (a fabulous place, especially for seeing wildlife) be sure to check your copy of The Eye Magazine in your hotel, it really is a good little magazine.

New Prototype 200-400mm f/4.0 Zoom Lens goes on Show from Canon

Equipment Announcement

“LAKE SUCCESS, N.Y., February 7, 2011 – Canon Inc. today announced the development of a new super-telephoto lens, the EF 200-400mm f/4L IS USM EXTENDER l.4x, for use with all EOS SLR cameras. A prototype of the new lens will be exhibited at the CP+ tradeshow, held in Pacifico Yokohama, from February 9 - 12, 2011.”

Much to everyone's surprise Canon announced a whole host of stuff yesterday including two new entry level DSLR’s, two new flash units, and upgrades to their wildlife long focal length specialist lenses. The latter comprise the EF 500mm f/4.0 MII and the EF 600mm f/4.0 MII, both of which are expected to be commercially available some time in March, but as you’d probably expect these are going to be very, very expensive and as such only available to serious pro’s and those blessed with wads of spare cash.

However, what really caught my eye was the announcement of a prototype EF 200-400mm f/4.0 IS USM EXTENDER 1.4x lens. That’s some title!  Nikon wildlife photographers have long since been extolling the virtues of the Nikon 200-400mm f/4 AF-S lens which also received an upgrade last year. This is a lens favoured by British wildlife photographer Andy Rouse and is generally accepted as just about the best multipurpose, wildlife zoom lenses around. It’s also a gap in the market place that Canon had failed (as yet) to match. Canon do of course have their EF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6mm IS USM lens ( one of which which I own), but this design is getting quite long in the tooth and whilst it performs admirably on sensors sizes up to 12mp, todays 21mp plus sensors highlight it’s short comings in the digital age.

If you examine the press release picture above you can’t help but notice that peculir looking bulge on the left side rear of the lens. This houses the in-built 1.4x extender, and has a lever just above to engage or disengage the extender elements. The 1.4 extender can boost the zoom range from 200-400mm to 280-560mm. On an APS-C sized sensor then this would be the equivalent of a staggering 448-896mm! However, don’t get your hopes up as Canon failed to state whether this configuration will autofocus on the semi-pro and consumer bodies. The new lens will feature Canon’s high-performance Image Stabilizer technology and advanced optics materials such as fluorite crystal to provide top notch optical performance.

You may also notice the camera has a fixed tripod collar, 3 stabilization modes and also features a Focus Pre-set button. All new stuff.

A a wildlife photographer this sounds like a dream lens and one I’d truly love to own, however it is just a prototype and still obviously at the development stage. I just hope that when it does eventually hit the market it’s not going to be priced so ridiculously that photographers like myself will never be able to afford it. Maybe I am just dreaming though!

Uganda Wildlife – Monkey Business

Latest Picture

Since I haven’t posted much the last few months I thought I’d take the easy way out and post some pictures. This was taken in Entebbe, Uganda, not far the hotel I was staying in before travelling out to Lake Albert and my work on the oil rig. There’s a few troops of Vervet monkeys that hang around the wooded areas near the hotels, especially the Botanical Gardens and the Wildlife Centre. They are habituated so you can get quite close. Being monkeys however they don’t stay still for long and most of my shots were blurred. This one of a youngster astride it’s mothers head turned out quite nice. The late afternoon light helped. The one below of the inquisitive youngster was taken a while back. Both shot with my Canon 5D Mark-II with the EF-100-400 zoom.

I hope you enjoy them!

The Eagle and the Snake

I've been lucky enough to work in Uganda over the last couple of years and this has given me the fantastic opportunity to photograph some of Uganda's amazing wildlife.

I certainly don't profess to be any sort of bird or wildlife expert, far from it in fact, and before working in Africa I could hardly tell one bird species from another. However, when it comes to birds of prey, even they generally get the attention of many a non-ornithologist.

As they generally say, the best photographs require a high degree of luck and this one was no exception. A friend and I had gone for a drive in the Kabyoya Game Reserve, a small region around Kaiso on the eastern shore of Lake Albert in Albertine Rift valley of north west Uganda. Not far from us was the Lake Albert Safari Lodge and quite a lot of the normally high savannah grass had been burnt to the ground in the annual burnings. This is a good time for eagles, as normally hidden prey is revealed and less well camouflaged against the blackish brown, scorched earth, and stubble. Prey is one the move, trying to escape the burnings. We spotted the Brown Snake Eagle in a tree top and pulled over to try and take some photos. My friend sported a Pentax with 50-500mm Sigma lens, me with my trusty Canon 5D and my EF 100-400mm, f4.5-5.6 Zoom. Contrary to most wildlife blogs we don't have time for tripods and hours of waiting, ours is a few hours to catch what we can, so everything is shot hand-held from a car window. Image stabilisation (IS) I find invaluable.

I only managed to fire off a couple of frames (being on the passenger side) before the eagle took flight. Another disappointment. We drove on, just passed the tree, when suddenly there is a faint flash of something light coloured off to the drivers side, the next thing I hear is "It's got a snake!". The eagle had swooped down the other side of the tree and caught a cobra; the flash being the underbelly of the snake as it writhed around the Eagles talons, one talon firmly fixed on the cobras head. We pulled up as close as we dare and started shooting as fast as possible. I had to shoot across the driver so there was no time for even thinking about composition, just get the photo. I managed about 18 frames during which the eagle bit off end of the snakes tail, cloaked it's prey, then it flew off back to the top of tree grasping the wriggling cobra. I keep my camera set on AV, apperture wide open, with only the centre focus point enabled. I try to focus on the eye and quickly re-frame. It usually works well.


I was pretty sure I'd got a good shot but was disappointed when I saw the frames uploaded to Lightroom later on. There was a long blade of grass bowed over and blurred in the foreground which went right across the eagle in every frame. The burnt stubble background was almost as dark as the bird and several frames weren't that sharp. None of the snake were sharp.


It was several months later however, when I took another look and my shots. Really they weren't that bad, perhaps I'd been too critical at the time, it was perhaps ok the snake wasn't that sharp. Time for a bit of Photoshop and Lightroom work. I patiently cloned out the offending blade of grass, together with a distracting leaf in the foreground, adjusted the contrast, clarity, vibrance and saturation to make the bird's colours stand out as much as I could against the brown background. To finish off I applied a gradual blur to the background to accentuate the lens bokeh, sharpened the eagle and cropped the frame; this did the trick. Now I had a decent photograph, one that I was pleased with anyway.