Gallery: PAW 2005-03
Birding at Kamogawa River, Kyoto (May 5, 2004)
I've been too busy with fieldwork to post new PAWs. Some of my more recent work is on my blog instead. Yesterday, I was a bit stressed out so I took a walk along Kamogawa River, which runs through the east side of Kyoto. While Japan's rivers will perhaps never run naturally again, there have been significant efforts made to beatify them. Fish and birds have returned to their waters once again. Kamogawa is my favorite place to just sit on the banks and look at the birds. I brought my Canon 10D and new (used) EF 100-300mm f/5.6 L lens.
The 100-300mm f/5.6 L lens is one of the hidden bargains in the Canon professional lens series. You can find them for around US$300-350 used. It has excellent optical performance - if you can put up with its late-1980s ergonomics, or lack thereof.
I'm not much of a birder, so I'm not sure what these birds are called. "Damn it Jim, I'm an anthropologist, not an ornithologist..." I asked the Leica User Group for help.
Master nature photographer Doug Herr of Wildlightphoto first identified the birds as Great White Egrets or Ooshirasagi in Japanese. John Collier provided a link to a detailed species page for Ardea alba and Ken Frazier gave me this pointer to a zoo in Singapore which has behavioral notes. I must admit it was fun watching the egrets hunt for food. They were also very cautious birds, if I approached to within 50 meters, they would quickly fly off.
If you click your mouse on the image to your right, you'll get a 100% pixel enlargement. This will give you some idea of how good (or bad, depending on your standards) the EF100-300mm f/5.6 L is. Very little sharpening was done on this image.
You can also see an enlargement of the photograph below if you click on it.
On the way back, I came across this man practicing his drumming on the banks of the river. I asked for his permission to take his photograph and he kindly acquiesced.
In his right ear, you can just barely see the small headphones he has on. He's listening to a tape as he drums. He was also practicing the vocal calls at the same time.
This was taken with the 100-300mm at its shortest (100mm). It was shot almost directly pointing into the fading light. I wanted a contra jour type of lighting. Even without a shade, the 100-300mm has fairly good flare resistance, although I had to enhance the contrast slightly here.
While I like birding for fun, I have to say I enjoy taking photographs of people much more.
Equipment: Canon 10D; EF 100-300mm f/5.6 L lens.
