April 10, 2014
Clark's Grebe in the Tonto National Forest, Arizona, and using an Angle Finder for Wildlife

Nothing too exciting about this Clark's Grebe swimming along, but it's one of the first wildlife images I've made using an angle finder to get a lower perspective. I prefer to make wildlife images from roughly the subject's eye level, and this is usually a real challenge for waterfowl and other small animals on the ground. In the past, I've just used my tripod with all legs collapsed and the legs slightly splayed. This is a pretty good solution because it gets the camera about 2 ft (60 cm) above the ground and I can sit comfortably behind the camera to wait for subjects to approach and/or demonstrate interesting behavior. The angle of view is fairly shallow when using a long lens (500mm or 600mm with a 1.4x or 2x tele-extender attached), but the camera is still considerably above most small animals like this Clark's Grebe. One way to get the camera lower is to splay the tripod legs completely and then lie on the ground. This is probably OK for a short time, but craning my neck to look through the viewfinder like that for an hour or more doesn't sound like fun. For the last two days, I've been using my angle finder so that I can put the tripod down at ground level with all of the legs fully splayed and then sitting on the ground behind the camera and looking down through the angle finder to shoot. I'm still working on my hand/eye coordination to get quickly get the subject in the viewfinder, but it's much more comfortable to be able to sit up behind the camera, and I'm liking the lower perspective. You can see a similar image in the previous blog entry that was taken with the tripod up at my usual height and the subject at roughly the same distance as the image in this blog entry.