Bull Elk At Long Range-The Panasonic GH4 and Canon 500mm f 4.5

It doesn't seem possible, but it has been over a month since the last activity on this blog.  There were so many things I wanted to write about, but what with being preoccupied with photographing the whitetail rut and other things I have let things slide. I intended to write an article or a review long before this about how the new parking and viewing areas worked out on Dewey Road in Pennsylvania Elk Country  but that has not happened as of yet. Hopefully I will get to this soon.

To prepare for the article, I spent two weekend evenings there during the peak of the rut, documenting how humans and elk adapted to the new situation. While doing this on Friday evening, September 25th, I noticed a large 7x7 or 7x8 bull come into the food plot near the log cabin on the hill.  ( I  give these details as many if not most blog readers will know exactly where I mean) At that point I was behind the stone wall at the upper end of the upper Gilbert Farm meadow and took a photo with the full frame Canon 5D MK III and the 24-105mm F4 lens at 105mm. I have never been certain how far this is as my Bushnell range finder will not read that far.  I can usually get accurate readings with it in ideal conditions to somewhere between 300 to 400 yards so I would assume it is further than this and perhaps quite a bit further.  We can safely say as the old mountain men did that the bull was, "a right fur piece away".

Elk are barely visible on hillside in front of campers and cabin with 105mm on full frame camera

Since this was the most impressive bull I had yet seen here this year I broke out my tool of choice for extreme long range filming, which is a Panasonic GH4 fitted with an old Canon 500mm f4.5 FD lens and I walked to the edge of the new parking lot near the entrance from Dewey Road and set the rig up and filmed several clips of the action.



For me the main attractions of the GH4 are that it films in 4K mode and also features an ETC mode, which basically reads a 1080P or Full HD frame from the center of the sensor so that it has a crop factor of 5.2. This gives the 500mm a 35mm full frame equivalent of  2,600mm. There is some controversy about this figure and it varies with the source, but suffice it to say that it is powerful enough to be an extremely effective long range tool.  Many ask why one wants to shoot in 4K when 4K displays are not yet the standard or even commonly available.  The long and short is that it enables one to crop extensively in post-production and still have a high resolution image.  Is it better to use the ETC mode or is it better to crop to an equivalent size? I don't know for sure, but I often prefer to shoot in ETC as it gives a dramatic up and close image in the finder.
 I only use this rig in certain specialized situations as in many cases it is too powerful to easily find the subject.  While it is very good for filming small birds, it is difficult to locate them in the finder  unless they are perched conspicuously on a branch in the open..  The same is true of flying birds such as waterfowl, eagles, etc., so for general purpose, medium to long range use, I much prefer to use the old model Canon 100-400mm L lens.  With it one can quickly zoom wide to locate the subject and then slam the zoom back to the composition that you want to film.  Since I use an external monitor and manual focus with these lenses, I can begin focusing as soon as I stop zooming, while with the new model 100-400 you must shift your grip from the zoom ring to the focus ring.

Cheap adapters are available to mount the Canon EOS lenses to Micro 4/3 cameras, but they do not control the aperture so they are of very limited use for video. I use either a Metabones Smart Adapter or Metabones Speed Booster to attach the EOS lenses to the camera These adapters allow the Panasonic cameras to control the aperture, utilize  the image stabilization of the Canon lenses ,and permit auto-focus. I do not use the auto-focus: however, as it does not perform  acceptably well--at least with my rig.

With the Smart Adapter the focal length retains the full crop factor of the Micro 4/3 sensor of the GH4, and f stop value remains the same as the lens on a Canon body which is f4.5--f5.6 with a 100-400mm.  With the Speed Booster the crop factor is reduced, but one gains low light performance with the lens becoming a f3.2--f4.0 and it has the same equivalent focal length as when it is mounted on a Canon APS-C crop sensor camera such as the 7D MKII.

The Canon FD lenses were made back in manual focus and manual exposure days and they have aperture rings to select the f stop.  This makes them naturals for adapting to a wide variety of modern cameras for special purpose use, without having to invest in a complicated electronic controlled adapter.  In the case of the GH4 and the 500mm I use a Fotodiox Lens Mount Adapter, which is available from Amazon.com for a bit over $20.00. While the Canon FD lenses have not been manufactured for many years, most of the reputable internet dealers such as Adorama, B&H, and Keh usually have a good selection of these lenses in their used department. Although these are usually the smaller fixed power and zoom lenses, 500mm and 600mm lenses are available from time to time.

If you already have an EOS telephoto, it may be best to  buy the Metabones adapters as the current 500mm and 600mm lenses are f 4.0 vs the f 4.5 of the FD, and you are able to gain this long range ability with only the cost of the adapter,  but if you are solely a Panasonic user and own no EOS lenses, the FD lenses may be worth considering as both the adapter and the FD lenses will be much cheaper than buying the new EOS lenses and Metabones adapters.  I bought my 500mm FD because the Metabones adapters were not yet on the market and the adapter I was using with my EOS lenses left a lot to be desired. Would I buy it today if I had it to do over again?  Probably not since I already have the EOS lenses and the Metabones  adapters, but I have never been sorry that I got the lens and I continue to use it regularly for long range filming.

Originally published at Pennsylvania Wildlife Photographer by Willard Hill.

Images From The Whitetail Rut

Mature Whitetail Buck

The area where I do most of my wildlife photography is home to a substantial herd of whitetail deer, but it is not usually good summer range for the bachelor groups of mature bucks. Most of the deer are the does and fawns and the yearling and occasional two year old bucks that are still traveling with the family groups.

In many years buck sighting pick up in early October and the full-blown  rut gets underway during the last week.  But this year things were very slow and I became impatient as it seemed the rut would never start. That changed in the middle of last week and I have been able to photograph several bucks since then and will share some images  of this activity today.

Photos of bucks lip-curling as they search for does in heat often make dramatic photographs. The buck in the photo below tried to breed a doe shortly after the photo was taken, but she ran from him.

Lip-curl

Scenting For Does

Whitetail bucks do have serious fights from time to time, but what I usually capture are only desultory sparring matches, which are not violent, but still make for good photo opportunities.

Sparring Match

Other favorite photo opportunities are to capture them making scrapes, checking their scrape lines, and chasing does.

Checking A Scrape

6 Point Erupts From Woods After Doe

Chasing Does

Although the rut will soon peak if it has not all ready, good activity should continue for the next two weeks before it comes to a crashing end because of rifle deer season.

Cameras used were the 5D MK III and the Canon 7D Mark II.  while the lenses were the Canon 300mm f2.8 and the Canon 600mm F4.

Originally published at Pennsylvania Wildlife Photographer by Willard Hill.

Coyote Attack

It was nearing 5:30 on a mid-August evening and I was watching a meadow where a herd of whitetail does and fawns were feeding along with two spike bucks. Suddenly a large coyote came into the meadow.  The Panasonic GH4 was sitting on the tripod nearby with the Canon 100-400mm IS L lens attached by means of the Metabones Speed Booster. I carefully moved into position behind it and began filming.  As I filmed I alternated between filming in 4K and the special ETC mode which this camera features.  With it a 1080P frame is read from the central portion of the sensor, which results in greatly increased ability to shoot at long ranges and still get frame filling  footage.

This was a large animal with wolf-like features. Some , including many  PGC officials, consider the coyotes in our area to actually be Eastern Brush Wolves as they bear more of a resemblance to small wolves than they do to the western coyotes.

The coyote showed no inclination to attack the large extended family group of deer as it slowly stalked through the meadow , but as it neared the tree line at the far edge of the meadow it sniffed the air and picked up the scent of a small spike buck that was feeding out of sight over a rise in the meadow.  The coyote trotted toward the spike and as it came over the rise it launched an attack on the deer, but then aborted it at the last moment before contact.  I can only speculate that it began the incident with the intention of driving home the attack if it was a fawn, but after getting close, realized there was no chance of successfully killing a deer that large and broke off the attack.

I am perhaps my own worst critic and I was extremely disgusted that I bobbled the camera at the crucial moment of the attack, but it was easy to fall into the pitfall which caused the problem.  As it was I was filming in the ETC mode because the coyote was far enough away that he did not look impressive on the monitor screen, so at the moment of the attack I had too much magnification and too narrow of a field of view to follow the action and smoothly film the happening.  As soon as the coyote broke off the attack I shifted to 4K in case he followed up on the attack, but instead he went into the woods.  In retrospect I would have been better off had I filmed the entire segment in 4K and then cropped the footage in post production, or once I was committed to ETC mode I should not have changed the camera to 4K after the attack as had things continued I would have missed a lot of the action as it takes awhile for the camera to be ready to shoot after making this change (because of the external monitor). This is only a few seconds , but that can cover a lot when things are moving quickly.  It would have been better to have stayed in ETC and simply zoomed out a bit, but that is the mistakes one makes.

Regardless of the mistakes and less than perfect filming, I still got some decent footage, and the memory of the event is one that I will treasure for a lifetime. At the end of the day that is really what it is all about anyway.

Originally published at Pennsylvania Wildlife Photographer by Willard Hill.

Mid-October At Middle Creek WMA

Sunrise at Middle Creel Lake

Most  recent posts have been devoted to Pennsylvania elk, with the  issues concerning the new viewing areas on Winslow Hill  and documentation of  elk rut activity during a two week trip in late September being the main subjects..

With the end of that trip my attention shifted to wildlife closer to home, which mostly involved keeping a close eye on the local deer herd,  but I took a break from this for several days when I visited Middle Creek Wildlife Management Area from the afternoon of Saturday, October 10 until late morning on the 14th. for several days of filming and photographing the waterfowl and other wildlife that may be found there.

A favorite way  to start a day at Middle Creek is  to photograph the sunrise from the area where Hopeland Road passes close to the lake.  The sunrise was especially fiery and vivid on the last day of the trip, which is the one featured at the beginning of the post, while the one on Monday was not as vivid due to a heavy fog, but was just as dramatic in its' own way, if not more so.

Foggy Morning Sunrise

I saw several species of ducks such as Mallards,Coot,  Pintails, Grebes, Black ducks, and Ring-necked ducks, but they were there in limited numbers and mostly far enough away that I did not photograph them, but filmed them with the video camera instead as it gives more satisfactory results at long range.  The most commonly seen species by far was the Canada Geese.

A modest flock of them could be seen most mornings and evenings where Hopeland Road passes along the lake.

Morning At Middle Creek

Great Blue Herons were seen in this area, as well as a few Great Egrets.

Great Blue Heron Watching For Fish

The pothole across Hopeland Road from the lake is also an excellent spot and it was here that I got a few photos of the Great Egrets and of Canada Geese landing.

Great Egret

Canada Goose Landing

Great Egret Looking For Fish

Although this trip  lacked the intensity of the spring migration with the vast numbers of Snow Geese that make such spectacular sights, it was nonetheless a very rewarding experience.

Originally published at Pennsylvania Wildlife Photographer by Willard Hill.