NZSM Online

Get TurboNote+ desktop sticky notes

Interclue makes your browsing smarter, faster, more informative

SciTech Daily Review

Webcentre Ltd: Web solutions, Smart software, Quality graphics

Quick Dips

Fast Photography

If photographing the family pet gives you a bit of a headache, you wouldn't want to be in the shoes of Nic Bishop. Bishop is busy as photographer and author for a book about New Zealand's river and wetland habitats.

"To get one photo of a bird, you could be talking of about 20 hours to set up and place a hide, then another 20 hours of photography. At the end of it you may get that one shot which is just right," says Bishop. The work for the book, being supported by ECNZ, is expected to take up to 4,000 hours.

Bishop's subject matter requires some specialist photographic techniques -- freezing the image of an insect's wings beating several hundred times a second during flight is no easy task. To do so, a custom-made flight tunnel has been developed, equipped with highly sensitive detectors which trip specially designed strobe flashes the instant an insect comes into focus. The likes of a blowfly will enter and leave the area of acceptable focus in just 1/500th of a second. To put this in perspective, a typical SLR camera shutter takes 1/20th of a second to open.

"One of the highlights has been photographing wrybills on the Tasman River. What's nice is getting so close you can see the expression on their faces. They're so tiny and vulnerable yet live in such a vast landscape," says Bishop.

Not everything has been easy. In one case, Bishop spent three days building a hide and baiting a particular spot with rabbit to attract a harrier he wanted to photograph. As planned, the harrier would show up for a regular feed at the baited site. However, as luck would have it, the day Bishop chose to photograph the harrier was also the day the local pest board went about their biennial rabbit shooting programme. As a result, the harrier showed for only a minute before taking off to feed on the huge selection of rabbit provided courtesy of the pest board. Bishop waited twenty hours at the hide, hoping the harrier would return, but to no avail. His suspicion is that the harrier had become sick of the sight of rabbit.

Bishop hopes that his book will help people to appreciate the country's rivers and wetlands more by "putting a face" to the animals and plants which inhabit these areas.

Iain Murray, ECNZ