Protective Silicon Gel camera cover

I have previously posted about using a shoulder strap to carry my camera with the 100-400mm lens fitted so that it is handy when wildlife appears. This has been successful and it has led to taking a lot more shots of things like birds in flight which I would otherwise have missed. The downside is that the camera and lens inevitably get banged against things - rocks, gates, etc. I have a neoprene lens coat on the lens which has done a pretty good job of protecting it, but the camera body has picked up some scratches - particularly on the corners. So I decided to try a Silicone Gel cover to provide a bit of protection to the camera body. After a bit of research, I bought one from Amazon designed specifically for my camera body.

Here it is on the camera:

and here it is in carrying position on the shoulder strap:

It is not particularly pretty, but it fits the body pretty well and certainly does the job of protecting the corners from bumps and scratches. The controls are all accessible and I haven't found it gets in the way of using the camera. So far, I would consider it a success.

Focus stack of Common Darter taken in the field

Yesterday afternoon was very hot and it got to 34C in my Peterborough garden. At this time of year there are lots of dragonflies visiting the garden, especially Sympetrum striolatum (Common Darter) and Aeshna mixta (Migrant Hawker). The Sympetrum like to sit on the tips of the bamboo canes supporting the runner beans (and also along the washing line!) and there were at least a dozen around (plus a S. sanguineum (Ruddy Darter), which proved to be rather shy and inapproachable!). These make good subjects for experimentation and it is of course possible to position a few extra canes so they are at a more convenient height and better situated with respect to the light and the background.

My setup was Canon 80D with the 100mm F2.8L macro lens on a monopod (Manfroto MPMXPROC4). One problem I have found with this is that the lens hood for this lens (Canon ET-73) is very deep (80mm) and, given that the distance from the front of the lens to the subject at 1:1 is only about 90mm, you end up almost touching the subject with it. In full sunshine like yesterday, a lens hood is fairly important, so I bought a VHBW-tec copy of the ET-73 from eBay (since the Canon branded item is ridiculously expensive!) and cut it down to 40mm. I find this modified hood is still sufficient to avoid flare, but provides a more comfortable working distance.

Even when it is this warm, so that they are very active and alert, Sympetrum are reasonably approachable. The knack is to move slowly and steadily and avoid any sudden movements, especially when raising your hand to the shutter release button - since this is a movement made rather close to the dragonfly. One of the things I like to do is to try and get some real close ups, usually of the head. I wanted a high shutter speed and a small aperture to get the necessary depth of field, so I set it to manual mode, dialled in F11 and 1/400s and set the ISO to auto. With plenty of patience, I managed a number of shots like this:

Sympetrum striolatum, Canon 80D, 100mm F2,8L Macro, F11, 1/400s, ISO 1250

I quite like this one because the wing venation is sufficiently out of focus and the body mostly shadowed so that attention is focused very much on the head - and the depth of field is sufficient for the whole head to be in focus. It also shows the striped legs rather nicely - this is where the name "striolatum" comes from!

The other thing I wanted to experiment with was trying to get sufficient depth of field to get the whole insect in focus. Now S. striolatum averages around 40mm long with a wing length of around 28mm. My 80D has an APS-C sensor which measures 22.3 x 14.9mm. So, to fill the frame with a side view of the insect, I will need a reproduction ratio somewhere in the range of  half life size (1:2) or a little less - which will require me to be about 30cm away from it. Looking at the depth of field tables, even at its minimum aperture of F32, the 100mm macro will deliver a depth of field of a bit under 10mm at these settings. So I am not going to be able to get even the nearer wing tip in focus as well as the body.

The obvious way around this is to take a sequence of images at different focal points and stack them. There are two ways to do this: either change the focus between shots or keep the focus fixed and move the camera relative to the subject.

Manually changing the focus in controlled steps is difficult. It is possible to automate it using the lens focus motor, for example, using Magic Lantern addon firmware for Canon cameras. Unfortunately, there isn't currently a version of Magic Lantern for the 80D. It seems that porting it to the Digic6 processor has proved difficult and the problems have not yet been ironed out. I have successfully used Magic Lantern with my 60D and I have used this method to capture stacks of fungi - so perhaps I will do another post about that.

Moving the camera backwards and forwards is more straightforward, so I decided to try a simple way of doing this - which is rocking backwards and forward whilst taking burst of pictures using the camera's high speed shutter mode. The maximum burst rate for the 80D is 7fps. Clearly, since the camera is going to be moving, this requires a high shutter speed to avoid movement blur, so I set it to 1/1000s. Since the depth of field is going to be handled by stacking, you can afford to open up the aperture to get the ISO down. I found that F5.6 would give me an ISO of around 1250-1600. The 80D's high ISO performance is very good so I was quite happy with this, but the depth of field of each individual shot would be a bit under 2mm. One thing I should have done was to switch to capturing JPEG images (rather than raw CR2). It takes much longer to store raw images and the camera's buffer fills up at 24 shots, after which the frame rate drops precipitously. This doesn't occur if you capture only JPEGs. The processor can keep up and you can keep shooting until your SD card fills up! Anyway, I found that sequences of 24 shots were sufficient for this purpose.

Sympetrum striolatum from a stack of 16 images, Canon 80D, 100mm F2.8L, F5.6, 1/1000s, ISO 1600, stacked using Zerene Stacker 1.04

This images is produced from 16 shots stacked using Zerene Stacker. I didn't start quite far enough back and the wind tip is not quite fully covered and there is possibly a bit of movement in the wings. I also stopped just too soon and the bristle along the far, rear leg are not quite sharp. However, these are living beasts and they don't keep still - even if they appear to sit still for quite long periods. In particular, they are constantly moving their heads and track every movement you make - like rocking back and forwards near them! Here is an animation of another stack in which the wretched beast decided to clean its eyes with its front legs just as I pressed the shutter button! It is animated at 4fps so, since it was shot at 7fps, it is roughly half real speed.

It is interesting to note how much the subject moves around in the frame. Since I have the camera on a monopod and am moving towards it, the fact that it rises up across the frame is not unexpected due to the pivoting motion of the monpod. But the forward and backward swaying shows I didn't get my forward movement very smooth! The degree to which Zerene managed to correct for these shifts and accurately align the images in the above stack (which suffered similar subject movement!) is quite impressive.

More trail camera examples

Here are a couple more examples captured last night and this morning in a different part of the garden using my Browning Spec Ops Advantage. Ignore the time stamps on the videos, I forgot to reset the time and date when I put the freshly charged battereies back in to the camera!

Here are a couple of the cubs, about 10pm last night (24th August). They are now pretty nearly full grown and as big as an adult, if not quite as heavily built yet. They are eating windfall pears.

And here is one captured this morning of a Grey Squirrel - just to show that quite small animals do trigger the camera successfully:

It either got very warm in our garden last night, or the camera is rather over-estimating the temperature!

Browning Spec Ops trail camera review

I have had this trail camera since March 2019, so getting on for 6 months at the time of writing. Whilst I had been vaguely thinking about getting one for a while, what actually triggered it was the appearance of a burrow dug under the floor of our garden shed last winter. We thought this was likely to be a Fox and wanted to investigate. It did indeed turn out to be a vixen and she proceeded to raise her family in the garden - followed in detail using the trail camera which has been operating most nights and has recorded about 3,800 files - mainly video. So I feel it has been well tried out!

So, it is a Browning Spec Ops Advantage purchased from NHBS.

It is advertised as capturing 20Mpixel images, but this is the usual hype. Like pretty much all such cameras, it basically captures about 4M and interpolates. It will take full HD video with audio at 30 or 60fps and I have found the quality is quite good. See the examples below.

Night vision is provided by "invisible" infra-red LEDs. Trail cameras are usually equipped with "low-glow" LEDs which have a peak output about 840nm which is just visible to humans and most mammals as a dull red glow. Alternatively, they can be equipped with "no glow" LEDs with peak output above 900nm which are beyond the visible range of us and most other mammal species (hence referred to as "invisible" or "black-light" in the advertising). The advantage of "no-glow" LEDs is that they are less likely to disturb the wildlife or be spotted (and stolen!) by other humans. The disadvantage is that, because they are harder for the sensor to detect they produce less bright images or have to be run at a greater intensity and hence, consume more battery power. I have found that the night-time images are fine for my garden. The claimed range is 80 feet, but I haven't had occasion to use it at anything like that range.

Speaking of power, it uses 8 x AA batteries which fit in a metal tray.

The manual insists that alkaline batteries are necessary and advises the use of extremely expensive and environmentally unfriendly Lithium batteries. If you look at Browning's web-site it says it should not be used with rechargeable batteries. This is rubbish! It works fine with NiMh rechargeable batteries - which is what I have been using (Panasonic Eneloop Pro 2500 mAh). It won't run for so long though on rechargeables and, when a freshly charged set are inserted, only about 76% battery capacity is reported. The web-site gives various tables on how long you can leave it out - which, of course, depends very much on how often it is triggered, whether you are taking photos or videos and the length of videos it is set to record- the greatest drain being use of the LEDs to record videos at night. I have just recharged my batteries for the second time. So it has run for something like 2.5 months on a charge, sometimes recording several hundred, 10s videos in a night and rarely less than 30-40.

I had one early, bad experience. I set the camera up in a position that put it in full sunshine in the middle of the day with the sun shining directly on the metal back plate of the camera. It got too hot to touch and cooked a set of batteries! They were ruined and wouldn't hold a charge thereafter. So be careful how you site you camera.

Another important feature, when choosing a trail camera, is the trigger time and recovery time. Trigger time is the interval between the camera detecting movement and the shutter being fired. This is setable between 0.4 and 0.7s on this model. 0.4s is at the low end, though there are camera offering down to 0.2s.I find it has been good enough for my use. There are times when something has run or flown through the field of view where you only get a fleeting glimpse of it disappearing off the edge of the frame, but these are rare. The recovery time, it the interval before it can be triggered again and is 0.8s on this model - although you can set it longer. If there is a lot of activity, it may be good to set a longer pause between triggers or you may be overwhelmed (and run the batteries flat very quickly)!

Setting up is fairly straightforward. There is a door on the front of the lower portion of the camera body, which is secured by a pretty formidable clip - so little chance of it coming undone accidentally.

Behind the door, you can see the 2 inch, colour LCD screen which allows you to view what the camera is seeing when positioning it and also to check what it has recorded. The former use is invaluable, I can't imagine how you would set the camera up without being able to see what it is seeing, but I wouldn't like to have to actually view my recordings on this tiny screen. Like most LCDs, it is pretty difficult to see in bright conditions. Beside it is the on/off switch and a mode button which switches between the main modes of the menu system. Below that is the menu navigation set of switches with "E" for enter in the middle and up-down and left-right selector switches arranged around it. Finally, the battery tray eject button is at the lower-right. This is a pretty stiff catch and the getting the battery tray in or out usually is a bit of a struggle - it does not slip in or out easily! On the side, you can see the slot for the SD card. A fairly high spec SD card is recommended, mine is a 32GB cat 10. The files for a 10s HD 30 fps video are typically around 13-18Mb.

The menu system is explained fairly well in the manual, but you will certainly need the manual handy if you want to change settings. The most basic operations are initially setting the time and date and selecting the main parameters of still or video, resolution and, if you are capturing video, the fps (30 or 60) and duration. One useful setting allows you to keep recording video as long as movement is detected up to a max of 5 minutes, providing there is enough light so as not to require illumination with the IR LEDs. I have it set to take 10s video clips with this feature enabled - and have occasionally got 5 minute videos during daylight, but I frequently get videos up to 20s or so at night when an animal stays in view. I think the suppression when the LEDs are used is not complete.

Browning is an American company (although the camera says "Made in China" on it) and somethings about it are resolutely American. Pictures and videos have an (optional) strip along the bottom on which the time, date, temperature and other details are shown. You can set the temperature to Celsius, thank goodness, but you cannot set the date to European format - you are stuck with "mm/dd/yyyy" - which I do find rather annoying! It would seem reasonable to allow the date format to be set as well as the temperature units.

The camera comes with a strap for fixing it to a tree. The strap goes through slots cut in a metal plate fixed to the back of the camera and there is a closed-cell foam pad that fits over this - going between the back of the camera and the tree or post. The strap is about 5 feet long, so will go round a pretty big tree.

The manual suggest you position it at about chest height, ideally where the target animals will cross in front of it (rather than coming directly towards or away from the camera). If you strap it to a tree, it is quite tricky to angle it correctly. It often needs a wedge shaped bit of wood behind it to angle it down a bit. The camera has a standard tripod bush at the bottom so I have found that duct taping a ball and socket mount to a post or whatever works better.

Various mounting devices, security locks and secure mounting boxes are available as accessories - although they are pretty pricey! Clearly, if you leave it out in the woods somewhere, there is always a chance that somebody else will find it and pinch it! Whilst padlocking it to a tree may help deter the casual thief, if somebody spots it out in the wilds and really wants it, you are not going to stop them easily.

Trail cameras are triggered by a Passive Infra-Red (PIR) detector of the type commonly used in burglar alarms. What this looks for is a moving object that is significantly warmer than its background. So mammals and birds work fine. I find that, in my garden, pigeons, Blackbirds, squirrels and even Robins trigger it. So I think it would work fine to detect something like Hedgehogs in your garden and is ideal for Fox, Badger, deer and the neighbour's cat and children. However, you do get plenty of false positives: on a bright, sunny, day vegetation warmed by the sun and waving in the wind, especially if its background is in shadow will trigger it and in very windy weather when vegetation is thrashing about wildly, it can get triggered almost continuously - so you can end up with dozens or even hundreds of useless videos to delete!

Results

In our resident fox family, mom has an injured front leg and limps very noticeable. We think it is an old injury that has healed. When cubs jump on her, she shows no sign of pain or avoidance. She seems to cope extremely well with her disability. She had 4 cubs initially. Here is the first time we saw a cub above ground - taken at 2am on 1st April as you can see from the strip added to the bottom photo. This is lit by the IR LEDs so you can see the darkening towards the corners where the illumination isn't reaching as well and eye-shine is very evident:

Here is a daylight video of mom with her four cubs taken early evening on 1st May. At this time they were very regularly out during the afternoon, especially if it was warm and sunny:

Here is a much later compilation of clips taken on 19th July. These were taken early in the morning, so there is not enough light for colour, but there is enough not to rely entirelyon the IR LEDs - so the scene is evenly lit. Down to 3 cubs at this time, and here they are having a play with mom on the lawn:

And here is a more recent compilation showing how they jump the 2m high fence between our garden and our neighbour's. The first clip is a night shot with LED illumination, the second is shot around dawn, so B&W but evenly illuminated and the final clip is in daylight. Mom can jump that fence despite her limp!