More tests and an unexpected visitor

The extremely mild November continues and it seems that not very many birds are visiting the garden. This isn't a major issue right now as the testing still continues but it would be nice to see more of the expected species making an appearance.

The latest set of tests were focused on physical laser stability over several hours. The original setup using lightweight tripods showed that there were issues with the laser being knocked out of alignment. It looks like this was probably due to the pigeon using the handle as a convenient perch but I've not got any footage to prove it. This weekend the flimsy tripod was replaced with a Bosch Laser Level Tripod and the alignment issues disappeared.

Another change to the setup was replacing the Sony tripod as a perch with a mossy log. The mossy log is only very slightly more convincing than the Sony tripod, but again, this is still in the technical testing phase and realistic settings will hopefully not be far off.

By far the most frequent visitor at the moment is a wood pigeon. It decided to show up just as the light was hitting the perch today, helping to isolate it from the unattractive background.

Another visitor that has shown up in a few sets is a robin. The image quality is still very poor, due to the extremely high ISO required to maintain the 1/1600 shutter speed I was going for. The settings for the robin are 1/1600, f/4.0, ISO 5000. I'm using a MK1 7D for these tests and it isn't really a high ISO performer, so please forgive the image quality.

A complete surprise was a goldcrest being caught on camera. I've never even seen one of these in the garden so seeing one during review was a double take moment. The image quality again is a real disappointment, but I've now got evidence of a new species in my garden. This result shows the power of the rig isn't just about taking action bird shots, but also the potential for doing wildlife research.

Lighting is definitely the next focus area now that the rig is usable.

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CameraTrigger

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