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August 09, 2008
[ EYEBALL TO EYEBALL ]
If you fancy yourself as Ernest Hemingway with a camera and you are looking for photo opportunities of the big game kind, then you could hardly do better than pop over to Tanzania and take a safari in the Ngorong Goro crater.
On the other hand, if your green conscience won’t come at the enormous carbon footprint created by taking the heavier-than-air flying machine to Africa then you might consider the Werribee Open Range zoo.
We went on Werribee safari last week and had a good time making friends with rhinos, hippos and giraffes. And taking their photos with the newest Olympus digital SLR, the E-520. (A full review is coming soon) And this little camera has some features that suit it well to wildlife photography.
The lens we used was a 70–300mm Zuiko zoom. On the Olympus, with its Four Thirds sensor, this is equivalent to 140–600mm on a film camera, and that is an impressive reach. On a camera with an APS sized sensor 600mm would mean a heavy lens. On the Olympus it is compact and light.
Still, hand holding a camera-lens combination at 600mm when standing on the back of a vibrating truck on a freezing, shivery morning, is impossible. Or so we thought until we saw how effective the Olympus in-camera vibration reduction is. Shots that should have been blurred were pin sharp. This is just about the most effective image stabilisation we have seen.
The charming thing about the Werribee zoo is that the humans are kept in the cages and the animals roam around, gawking at the intruding truck load of dangerous predators. This meant that there were times when the 70–300 was not wide enough. When Tony, the giraffe, stuck his head under the canopy to get a closer look at the visitors we needed a very quick change to a wide angle lens.
The whole experience made us reflect on the matter of depth of field. This expression, DOF, refers to the distance between the spot in focus closest to the camera to the spot in focus furthest from the camera. When an awe-inspiring rhino comes rumbling up to the truck you want to get everything, from the tip of his horn to his scaly rump, in focus. But at the same time we like to keep distracting background stuff blurred.
DOF is related to aperture diameter – the smaller the aperture the deeper the focus and the larger the aperture the shallower the focus. But aperture diameter is also related to the size of the sensor. It is difficult to achieve a shallow DOF with a compact camera because of the relative sizes of the sensor and the lens diaphragm. Conversely, with a full frame sensor (35mm film area) it can sometimes be hard to get the desired depth of field in low light.
The Four Thirds sensor, as used by Olympus, Panasonic and Leica, gives a little less DOF compared with a compact and a little more compared with other DSLRs – assuming light, focal length and exposure are equal. This little extra latitude in focussing can be a bonus.
All in all nearly as good as Ngorong Goro. Now if only they would throw in some lions with the zebras and giraffes, for the sake of safari verisimilitude…
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Posted by terry at August 9, 2008 02:36 AM
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