September breezed into focus with some puppy portraits kicking off a very animal heavy month. Again the trusty X100V was on hand to capture it all, with its insanely rich and deep colour tones. I used my favorite film simulation classic negative for all images taken on the camera now as it seems to be a real sweet spot for quality and overall aesthetic.

After a relatively quiet start to the month, September kicked into gear mid month with a little family vacation to the land of centre Parcs, Longleat. I of course took basically every form of camera I own to get some images of the family and anything else that might come up while away.

After noticing a cat on the terrace had three adorable kittens living in the bushes outside the lodge, we immediately began to feed the things like they were going to starve to death at any second. From humble beginnings with a little soy milk, they ended up dining better than us, with sausages and cooked prawns on the menu by the end of the week. It wasn’t until the last day when I noticed the mum walking past the window with a slice of ham in her mouth from another lodge she was also showing off her kittens to that I realised we were being played. There were no starving kittens, just one very clever mum.

Towards the end of my stay, I managed a very brief drone flight over the woodland that surrounded our lodge for the week. There wasn’t a great deal to get excited about, but the water slides at the aqua park did make for some interesting shapes when viewed from above.

We of course paid a visit to Longleat safari park where I eagerly awaited the opportunity to use the Sigma 150-600mm F5-6.3 DG OS HSM Contemporary Lens as we drove through the park. I immediately found getting a sharp image a real struggle, with most of the images taken not good enough to warrant even attempting post processing. The images going through the lion enclosure were so poor I couldn’t even bear to look at them when I got home they were that poor.

This image of the Rhino taking a shit really summed up how I felt about the images I had taken throughout the day.

After the disappointing experience photographing from the car, it was back in more familiar territory with the smaller inhabitants of Longleat in the main zoo. This yielded a few decent/useable images, but still far too many misses than hits. I was beginning to think I was doing something wrong. I had had great light, I was shooting at over 1000th of a second, and my ISO was always low. Things should have been coming out a lot sharper than they were and I couldn’t understand why.

In the end I substituted the longer lens for the Fujifilm X100V, which allowed me to get some nice shots of the animals closer to me.

Even out on the boat ride, the Sigma 150-600mm F5-6.3 DG OS HSM Contemporary Lens and the 7DMKII were struggling, missing shots constantly which was infuriating me.

After the disappointing results I was getting from my time with the Sigma 150-600mm F5-6.3 DG OS HSM Contemporary Lens in Longleat, I got back out to test it further down at the local beauty spot with again more underwhelming and poor results.

Even when paired with a full tripod, I was finding the images coming out to be less sharp than I was expecting even at lower ISO levels. A second poor showing from this lens and camera body pairing made me wonder if it was the body and lens combination that was not quite working as it should in the real world. I switched the lens out for the Canon 400mm F/5.6 instead to test this theory out with immediate results.

The image of the yellow wagtail (below) using the 7DMKII body and the Canon 400mm F/5.6 lens was sharper with way more contrast making a much cleaner image.

To further test this hypothesis I travelled to Slimbridge where I was able to pair the canon 5DMKIII and 7DMKII with both long lenses to work out which combination worked best. The results were surprising, and has made me rethink how I go about my wildlife photography going forward.

I almost immediately took my favourite image so far this year with the pairing of the 7DMKII and the 400mm F/5.6 (below) of a flamingo image, so clearly this combination works well. The other images at Slimbridge were taken with the 5DMKIII and the Sigma 150-600mm F5-6.3 DG OS HSM Contemporary Lens which also produced some great images. clearly the issue seems to be specifically with the 7DMKII and the Sigma 150-600mm F5-6.3 DG OS HSM Contemporary lens as a pairing. The additional reach the cropped sensor gives you plus the sigma lens does seem to degrade the image enough to make this pairing unusable. This is a shame as the whole idea of getting the Sigma lens was to use the 600mm focal distance plus the 1.6 crop factor to create a lens that has over 900mm in reach. Back to the drawing board on this one for now I think.

I love photographing the flamingos so after a significant time with them it was onto the rest of the reserve.

Finally a massive congratulations to this guy who clearly enjoyed his wedding day with some classic tie headband, dancing his way into the night. I can’t imagine the actual photographer for his wedding got a better representation of the night than this.

FIN