Well obviously, on one of the first warm spring days of April, you spend the afternoon closeted in your bathroom.

Ok, so that is closeted in the bathroom with the camera mounted on the windowsill peering out into the garden watching the nesting blue tits come and go to the the nest box attached to tall scots pine opposite our bathroom window.  

My excuse was that I wasn’t really in the mood for any trips today and there were a bunch of little jobs to do plus I’d been looking for an opportunity to tune a particular camera setup.  Specifically, I wanted to check-out using the long 200-500mm lens with a teleconverter attached.  Despite previously spending a good amount of time adjusting it using the ‘fine-tune’ focus calibration tools I didn’t feel it was very crisp so I wanted to try it out in a proper but controlled situation.  Hence the sitting on the laundry basket session.  

After a couple of hundred photos of blue tits perched on the nest box and in the surrounding branches and playing with the fine tune and checking out the results (periodically on the monitor in the study - not the back of the camera) I finally convinced myself it was all working ok.  

I also used the time to remind myself how to use fill flash on the camera.  Despite it being a sunny day, it’s still under a light canopy and needs flash (or high ISO) to get a decent exposure.  

A few sample images of our common-a-garden birds. Blue tits plus a great tit (that is using a second nearby nest box).  

I think it’s this last one that really proved to me that the this lens with a TC really is capable of high quality.  This is taken later in the afternoon with a dab of fill flash to compensate for the side lighting from the right.  Here I used f/10, just enough to give a bit more depth of field while not running out of flash power because of the distance to subject.  I’m very happy with this mixed lighting.

So, to help with the maths, these are all taken on the long end of the 200-500mm f/5.6 with the TC-14e iii converter at ISO400 and 1/250 second with flash (using a Nikon SB600 flash in iTTL mode).  They are taken at a range of about 7-8m so the combined magnification is giving the equivalent of 1050mm (that’s 500 x 1.4 x 1.5 for the teleconverter and crop sensor of the D500) using a gimbal head clamped firmly to the windowsill.  These birds are surprisingly small.  That’s pretty close with a very long lens and I still had to crop by about 25% to get these images.  Sometimes you just need a stupidly long lens…

The problem with testing at these close ranges with a small subject is that the depth of field is really very small.  But, for me, it is pretty realistic of how and when I’d be using such a long lens.  Sometimes it’s about ‘small not far away’.  (At this point, for the definitive lesson on perspective, you really need to be looking on youtube for ‘Father Ted and small, far away’.)