Cheap(ish) Chinese Blinds and an Amazing time with the local Swamp Harriers
Friday was a non-starter for work due to lines work on the electricity network, which was annoying after a couple of months of no work to finally have some income was a relief. But it did give me a chance to get out and test my new Temu purchase of a 1 way see through hunting blind that I picked up.
I had been looking at these blinds for some time, and was umming and ahhing about if I should spend the money to buy one or not.
The weather was almost perfect for this test, with a light breeze and some sunshine. I figured out how to “pop” it up, not difficult to be honest, you just have to pull hard on the first main tag and then one by one the other side tags and you end up with a camo pill box with one opening in a corner.
I was more concerned with “popping” it all back down to size so it fits back in the carrying bag, but I didn’t need to be concerned.
Within 10 minutes of setting it all up, adding some camo nettings to break things up a bit and putting down some butcher off cuts to attract the Swamp Harriers I had not one, but two birds land and start to fight, fly off and re-land again. At one point I became aware of a third Harrier so all three were filmed interacting, fighting and flying. It was incredibly special and the footage I got was awesome. The blind is awesome and very roomy. I can. move freely inside but I wish it had another opening lower down so you can get more ground level footage etc. I contemplated hiring a seamstress to make an opening and secure it with tapes but while researching this it dawned on me that I could just spin the hide round and use the zipper opening at the back, almost zipped up and just add some netting, we’ll see I may still get something done professionally.
The brand name was Lenotos and I checked out their website, it looks like a Chinese brand as the way the blurb was written didn’t seem quite right, they actually had a hide with openings lower down but it was “sold out”, which often seems to be the way with these Chinese brands if something is not flying.
The hide is a little colder than my other one, basically because it’s a mesh and not solid walls and I want to adapt it a bit inside to make it more useable, such as a thick canvas groundsheet and some burlap that hangs down around the openings to hide me more.
One of the issues is that by the very nature of tripods your actual focal plane is set way back inside the hide unless you angle the tripod downwards and counter this with the camera pointing more upwards, this can present problems with instability, but that’s the same with all hides I think unless they have a dedicated opening for one of the tripod legs to poke through, which kind of defeats the object I guess.
Overall I love the hide and I think it’s going to be a real winner for me personally.
The film above was shot during this test and I’m very happy with it, there are a couple of dodgy grades in there because I hit a snag I hadn’t come across previously when adding the 1.4 teleconverter to my rig, things seemed to fog up. I can’t be sure if this was atmospheric due to the temperature inside and outside the hide, but I lost a few really great shots as a result of this. They were still useable but I had to grade them heavily and to me and I’m sure to many of my ex-colleagues, this will stand out.
Which brings me to a less positive aspect I guess.
It would be easy to judge the following statement as something a petulant child would say while throwing it’s toys out the stroller (metaphorically speaking) and I have no idea if this is just society, or a New Zealand thing. I know that people in NZ often talk about “Tall poppy syndrome” and at times it really feels like that, but when you go to so much effort to film, edit and present something on YouTube and you get almost no responses, or subscribers it feels like you’re speaking into the void. This website is the same in many ways, I have no idea if anyone actually reads this stuff or follows me on here, but I quite like writing and this is a bit of a record for me to keep rather than collect “likes” and followers.
Anyhow, depressing, whinging comments aside, I had a really good time filming these incredible birds and I love this hide, so regardless if someone reads this or not, my verdict is this was a great purchase and if you do read this stuff I write and do happen to be in the market for a hide, I highly recommend one of these hides.
Peace
