RDS Gulls

[fmoore]

Gulls are pretty easy to shoot withouta red dot sight (rds) but I needed some practice with arecently purchased Daisy Electronic Point Site #7809. Here are 4 of the better results with the FZ5 and Ricoh tc-200m 1.5x tele at the Delaware River in NE Philly. Resized only.









Setup info at http://www.stevesforums.com/forums/v...mp;forum_id=23

[tiger98]

Nice job on all four pictures Fred ! Good detail and exposure. I haven't tried my red dot on birds yet but will soon. Jim

[squirl033]

nice work, Fred... what settings were you using? the sky looks pretty dark, did you have to use manual exposure to keep the shutter speed up?

[bejoweth]

Wow, Fred, these are beauties and I especially like the first one. Very nice shots!

[Telecorder]

Great sequence, Fred! First one looks like a staged landing pattern coming into an airport or a set of parachutists coming in to a drop zone...

Looks like you had some so-so light but these turned out very good!

Thanks for posting them. I'm now going to have to wrap up my office catch ups on the Saturday and head outside for some photo opps because of you!

[Ivan Karamasov]

Did I get this right, and you were using some kind of improvised optical view finder to get these? Very impressive, Fred. We want more
IMO the images look even better with a little level correction. What do you think?
Thanks
Ivan

[fmoore]

Thanks for the comments.

what settings were you using? the sky looks pretty dark, did you have to use manual exposure to keep the shutter speed up?

Squirl - Only autoexposure on the fz5. These were in P mode which chose f5.6 for all. The shutter speed was 1/800s, 1/400s, 1/500s, and 1/800s, in that order. It was an overcast day with some sunshine. The sky to the west (#1 and #3) was dark.

Did I get this right, and you were using some kind of improvised optical view finder to get these? IMO the images look even better with a little level correction. What do you think?

Ivan - Yes, its an optical viewfinder. The red dot sightagun sight. A beam of red light (not a lazer beam) is projectedfrom the rear of the sight to a two-way mirror with cross hairs (+) embedded with acircle in the middle. You can see the target through the mirror and the reflection of the red beam dotback fromthe mirror. Put the red dot and the target in the circle and take the shot. Of course, the muzzle of the gun (orcamera in this case) needs to be lined up with the sight with adjustment screws. The Daisy sight isof light weight inexpensive plastic and works fine for photography. It's made for bb guns and such. More expensive sights are sold that can withstand the recoil of a high powered rifle. That isn't necessary for a camera.

Yourlevels correction works pretty well. Post processing isn't my forte. I have enough to be dissatisfied with as it is. If you or anyone else wouldlike to fool around it some more, the original is at http://www.ishots.net/rds/P1160353.JPG

For more info on ther sight set-up, see http://www.stevesforums.com/forums/view_topic.php?id=80023&forum_id=23