Morbid Eye Pictures — Wildlife In Amsterdam
July—August 2016
I had a great few weeks shooting for Marc from Morbid eye pictures over in Holland, I was concentrating on a wide range of behavioural sequences including urban foxes, parakeets, storks, grebes and coots. The coots were very active over the weeks I was there, we found a pair who were brooding their final clutch of eggs and we were lucky enough to follow the birth of their young.
This shot was taken by Bauke, my ace assistant, and you can just see the coot nest on a raft in the far back of the picture. I managed to get the camera right on the surface of the water which gave a fantastic perspective which you can see in the image below/
Shooting on the Panasonic Varicam 35 was an absolute pleasure, the image quality and look are fantastic. Its a bit on the heavy side but we never really had to walk that far! If I was lugging it long distances with the 50-1000mm on...well that would be an ordeal. Once you figure out ho to change codecs and frame rates your good to go, although I am told this process will become easier with future firmware updates.
We were lucky that this particular pair had a late clutch, this gave us a chance to get some great behaviour between the chicks and adults such as the first time the chicks are give a large prey item to deal with. This image shows the chick being given Damsel Fly and it took it a while to figure out what to do with it! Its such an amazing privilege being able to witness and capture behaviour like this in the heart of Amsterdam.
We also shot on the RED Dragon a bit too with lovey Fujinon cine glass.