Chaffinch

This was taken in early evening as the light was beginning to fail. I'd been trying to take photographs of birds in the garden on and off through out the afternoon but as the bird feeders were in shade, had decided to wait until the sun had moved round. I am beginning to find that this time of the evening is quite good for bird photography as there tend to be less of them around so you have to concentrate on the few there are, and they seem less active and more incline to stay put.

This is important for me as I am currently using a 100-400mm lens at full zoom with a doubler so this is effectively 1280mm lens given the 1.6 X magnification of the Canon EOS D7. I obviously have to use a tripod and with a geared tripod head movement is slow and focussing is absolutely critical as this only gives me a depth of field of 2.1cm. I very often check the focus using Live View at 5x magnification. So it takes a few seconds before I am ready to fire the shutter.

However, I am really pleased with some of the results I am getting. This chaffinch. for instance. has lovely feather detail and is well worth seeing LARGE. I preferred the rear end view as it gave me a catch light in the eye and also showed a greater range of feather colour than the usual full frontal that chaffinches normally get.