So Friday night, our one dog kept going to the back door and making a fuss. He was acting like he was seeing something outside, but we just couldn't see anything. Finally I grabbed my night vision binoculars and scanned the yard. I saw a shape on the ground and so I snuck outside without the dogs and discovered that there was a pheasant hanging out in the yard.

So I decided to see how the camera would perform with the flash at night. At first I thought I would need my Better Beamer to increase/direct the flash since I was working at a bit of a distance; however, that simply made a very strong vignette to the shots. So in the end, I went with just the flash itself (and even set to flash compensation of -1 stop).

I took a few shots from behind the fence and then finally decided I wanted to see if I could get a better angle of the bird. He was being fairly calm, so I went around the house and approached him slowly from the front. I was staying low and almost crawling on the ground - I managed to get fairly close until he popped up and I got this shot. I then tried to rotate the camera to get a vertical orientation and that must have been too much for him because he took off running....

Technical Data: Canon EOS 7D, Canon EF 100mm f/2.8L Macro IS USM, 1/60 sec at f/4. Canon Speedlight 580EX II flash in auto mode with -1 EC. Image Stabilization on. ISO 1250. RAW processing and cropped in Adobe Camera Raw.

Fun stuff. I might have to take a nocturnal wander around the property some bright moonlit night and see what I run into...

- Bill