Taken at RSPB Bempton, near Flamborough head in East Yorkshire. This is a wonderful reserve, with viewing platforms built right at the cliff edge, hundreds of feet above the water below. As a result, you see birds head on-or even from above, which is rare for bird photographers who do not own a plane.
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Prek Toal is a magnificent wildlife reserve, off the Tonlé Sap lake in central Cambodia. These photographs were taken just after dawn, from a small boat in one of the many tributaries. I used an Olympus E-Mi Mk ii with the Leica 100-400mm lens, which gave an equivalent ff length of 200-800. The Olympus was pretty essential as traveling with a bigger full-frame camera and lenses is more or less impossible, given the weight restrictions on local flights (6kg on Bangkok air for example). The Olympus was running at 1000-1250 ISO, which is pushing it for these cameras, but using DxO prime noise reduction, I was able to reduce noise to FF levels.
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A series of shots taken in 2015 after I had taken delivery of my Russian army surplus gas mask. I felt that my brother-in-law’s marvellous Honda N600 would be a suitable accompaniment. Five years later, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic they seem more relevant.
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Based on the Traumflieger Fotographics database of 37 ball heads tested objectively since 2009, the RRS BH-40 ranks 17th overall and performs particularly poorly in droop tests, showing 8mm of sag under a 4kg load — for 340 euros. The top performer in the same test is the Tiltall BH-07 at 99 euros and 284g, which outperforms the RRS in almost every category and weighs half as much.
