Bird's eye view

This morning I went out to play with one of my Christmas presents. It's a second hand Sigma 600mm mirror lens;  I'd read a couple of excellent reviews of it, and I managed to find one in very good condition on ebay.
 
It's hard work! On the a77, it has to be used with manual focus and the DoF you have to play with is VERY shallow. Metering is also disabled, but the electronic viewfinder is a great boon; I found it pretty easy to "meter by eye", controlling exposure with shutter speed and ISO (aperture is fixed at f8). I've raved about Sony's in-camera stabilisation before and given it allows me to hand-hold with a 300mm lens at "silly" shutter speeds, I've probably got a bit blasé. With this lens, the APS-C "crop factor" makes it effectively ~900mm, and the stabilisation tries but struggles as the slightest movement is amplified accordingly; I took some shots hand-held in bright sunshine yesterday (we had that briefly here!), but for most cases it's going to be a tripod job.
 
Today I went down to the river by Caversham Bridge, where the birds congregate. I used the tripod more like I would a monopod i.e. aim and shoot by hand with extra support, rather than hands-off with a remote trigger.
 
I'm pretty pleased with the shots I got. As well as discovering you get geese with blue eyes (and this one looks slightly smug to me - probably from having got through Christmas), I took a few more which you can see here. They include this pigeon with a "Bah! Humbug" expression, another with his feathers ruffled, and this shot that shows just how limited the DoF is.

I'm enjoying this lens immensely. Like I said, it's hard work; but I really feel I'm taking the picture, rather than the camera doing it, and that feels quite liberating!

I took some shots on a locked tripod yesterday and I can see this lens is capable of very sharp pictures. I'm looking forward to getting better with it (I had a huge reject rate today), and there's one particularly quirky characteristic of a mirror lens I'm planning to try out...watch this space!