Up close and personal...

Earlier this week my wife was astounded that I had bothered to put out the table and chairs on the patio, warning that the forecast was threatening really cold weather this weekend. I muttered something about wanting to clear the space in the garage. However, yesterday afternoon after a session painting the utility room, I decided to have a long lunch break and as the sun was shining, I sat out on the patio.

I had noted previously that if we sat out long enough and were quiet the birds would return to the bird feeder which is only about 5 metres away from the patio. As the birds were doing this whilst I was eating my lunch I thought this would be a great way to photograph the birds so I fetched my Canon 7D and put a serious piece of glass on, a 100 - 400 mm lens with a 1.4X converter giving me an effective focal length of 896mm and placed this on a tripod right in front of my chair. After a wait of about 15 minutes. lo and behold the birds began to return to the bird feeder with a number of them stopping en route on a nearby tree. By the time I had adjusted the geared tripod head and focussed manually I found that I was getting nearly frame filling views of the birds. So I managed to take a number of shots and to have quite a bit of choice for my blip.

The only downside to this viewpoint was the fact that the sun on the whole was behind the birds so I was not getting catch lights in the eyes and had to do quite a bit of work in Lightroom to brighten up the birds and get a balanced compostion. The other con was the fact that every so often the dogss would begin to bark and we were back to square one.

Unfortunately my best shot was one that I have recently blipped, a yellow hammer though on this occasion the identification was much easier as the bird was not a juvenile and had very clear yellow markings.. My goal to is blip a cracking sharp shot of goldfinch as we have a number of these visiting the bird feeder and they have such a wonderful colourful plumage.