Purple Martins

[Anita Rakestraw]

Put up a martin house a week or so ago and within 2 hours, the first pair was inspecting it! How do they locate people's offerings so fast anyway?? We now have 3, maybe 4 pairs of martins (& 1 pair sparrows) in the house.

Out in the yard one evening just taking pictures of whatever was around and it was really too dark to get a decent martin image without flash. This had too much noise in it to stand on its own (not to mention the house being there) so I played with it and ended up with this. What do you think?

6/03/08 8:30pm
1DMkIII, 1-400 mm IS @ 400, handheld
f/9, 1/200, ISO 1000, EC way + if I recall correctly

P.S. Someone somewhere said that the Mk III EXIF does not record exp. comp. if you're shooting in manual mode, and it's true that mine always reads 0. Any way to get it to record it?

[Fabs Forns]

Hi Anita, there is not such a thing as exp comp in manual mode, that is why it doesn't record it. You set the exposure manually, so technically, there is nothing to compensate.
You can use the voice recording feature in the camara I guess, rather than taking notes.

I think you did pretty good, although you can run some more noise reduction on this before applying the effects for a cleaner look.
You should be having fun photographing them, specially the mother of all frustrations: doing them in flight!

[Alfred Forns]

Would love seeing this in a large print !!! Just perfect !!!

Congrats on having birds showing up so fast !!! ........ btw they usually find them through the yellow pages !!!! :):):cool:

[Anita Rakestraw]

Thanks, you two! Yes, Fabs, I should have done a little more noise reduction before adding effects....and Al, I'll just put ads in the yellow pages from now on! :D