Great Tits

[Gerontophile]

Great Tits

Is it "Swoop Season" there, yet?

[Sits]

Great Tits

Well and truly, yes. This was posted recently from a cyclist's headcam:

[Gerontophile]

Great Tits

Hitchcock would be proud!

[Amor de Cosmos]

Great Tits

I'd forgotten about this thread. I don't really have the kit for it, but I've been farting about with birds for the past week or so. Here's one of our local Peeps trying to keep warm and find breakfast on the beach this morning



I'm thinking about investing in a proper lens to do this with. Leaning towards a 70–300mm zoom* for my Nikon D610. It's relatively inexpensive and would seem to be ideal for the job. Any advice from those with more experience would be appreciated.

* I'd prefer a 300mm prime, but for reasons I'm not clear on prime lenses are four times more expensive than zooms. Unless my memory's even worse than I realise, It used to be the other way around.

[Third rate Leszno]

Great Tits

Sanderling? I've got some relatively urban bird shots from Florida last summer that I must dig out and post here.

300mm lens ought to be good enough for some decent shots, Amor - I'd like a 400mm because I'm not patient enough to sit still and wait for birds to come close, but a 300mm and (if necessary) some cropping would give good results if you're not trying to win competitions.

[Amor de Cosmos]

Great Tits

Well spotted, yes a Sanderling. Along with Killdeer and Oystercatchers the most common shoreline inhabitant on our particular stretch of beach. My goal is to freeze one in flight but they're super-fast little buggers

Thanks. I'm leaning to the zoom, I just can't justify US$2000 for the 300mm prime. If I was going to throw myself into wildlife photography in a big way it might be different. I just want something long enough I can use locally on my full-frame camera.

[Amor de Cosmos]

Great Tits

Oystercatcher enjoying a clam breakfast.

[Heatwaving Not Drowning]

Great Tits

L1060419 by Stevie, on Flickr

[Sits]

Great Tits

Wow. Is that a sparrow hawk?

[Third rate Leszno]

Great Tits

Nice pics, chaps.

These are mostly Royal terns, with a few smaller Common terns and a couple of gull and sanderling interlopers.

[Various Artist]

Great Tits

That reminds me of this, a photo I took it in South Africa 16 months ago, at the Langebaan lagoon where there were at least four species of tern: common, swift, little and Caspian. Thought I'd post it since, well, one good tern deserves another. (Sorry.)



Most in this shot are common tern, but there's a truly surreal size difference between the tiny little tern in the middle and the giant Caspian tern behind. It's like they've done some bizarre experiment with drugs that's gone wrong.

[Amor de Cosmos]

Great Tits

That does look very bizarre The smaller tern in the foreground (a third species?) adds to the effect. At first glance I thought it was a PS montage.

[Gerontophile]

Great Tits

Is that oystercatcher, one of those that slams the seafood against a rock to open it?

[Amor de Cosmos]

Great Tits

They seem to pry the shells open rather than break them. Their beaks are actually flattish — which you can't see in that photo — it enables them to grab the clam from within, a bit like inserting a screwdriver and twisting. The bird in the picture is about half-way through the operation. Most of the time the clam is on the ground, or slightly under water, when they do it.

[Amor de Cosmos]

Great Tits

Nothing especially exciting about a Song Sparrow or a Blackbird showing off his new plumage, but I'm thrilled by the bokeh this lens has. In other pictures I've done here the marsh grasses in the background distract, but here they're softened beautifully.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Great Tits

Request from Mrs Tubby.

Can anybody recommend a camera? £300 or under, for taking pictures of birds, dogs and churches.

Thanks in advance.

[Amor de Cosmos]

Great Tits

That's a very difficult question to answer, so excuse the wordiness of my reply.

To begin with photographically that's a wide range of subject. Birds are small and move really quickly, Churches are large and static, dogs are somewhere in between. A camera that would accomplish everything superbly is a rare, and therefore expensive, beast.

The best place to start is probably determining what kind of camera she's comfortable with. If she's been using a phone, for example, she'll be used to holding the camera away from her face and looking at an electronic viewfinder (EVF). The best bet then is to look at a 4/3 (don't worry about what that means for now) cameras by Fuji, Lumix, Sony, or Olympus. They're small and should be within her price range (I'm not familiar with UK prices) also the lens system is interchangeable between companies which is a big plus. I'm not sure how successful they'd be a shooting bird-life in motion, where critical framing is crucial, but it should be fine in every other way.

Personally, being seriously old-school, I can't get on with EVFs and need something I can hold up to my face. That means a rangefinder or through-the-lens viewfinder. The latter is the better way to go for most needs and Nikon and Canon have the widest available ranges. They offer faster, more critical focusing than EVFs, but the cameras are bigger and heavier.

The thing to do is think about how she's going to use it. Will it be carried in her handbag on a regular basis, or taken on infrequent outings? Then go to a camera store, hold a few different cameras and get a broad sense of what feels comfortable. Go away and look on-line for independent reviews, examples of what the camera can do, and what it can't. Then come to a decision.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Great Tits

Thank you. Her Indoors is digesting your reply, and says thank you too.

[Sits]

Great Tits

Those last two are beautiful AdC, even though I've no idea what bokeh is.

Is that really a blackbird? A bit like the first time I saw an American robin.

Meanwhile, my daughter is in the UK at present and yesterday walked on the Rhoselli cliffs (sp.) in South Wales. There was a "sightings" chalkboard on which, along with common porpoise and grey seal, were a wide assortment of avifauna.

Most jealousy in yours truly was generated by the chough and the merlin. Wow.

[Amor de Cosmos]

Great Tits

I know the Eagle pics are becoming boring, but this year saw record numbers locally and they're so easy to photograph. There were probably thousands overwintering south of the Fraser delta. Driven down here, apparently, because high-river flows up the coast had reduced the salmon runs. They've begun to drift back now but I suspect a few will linger and join the, much smaller, permanent nesting population.

[Amor de Cosmos]

Great Tits

Sits wrote: Those last two are beautiful AdC, even though I've no idea what bokeh is.

Is that really a blackbird? A bit like the first time I saw an American robin.

Yes it's a male Redwing Blackbird. There are other kinds but this is by far the most common locally. They're really strutting their stuff at this time of year. Their call is also the most common hereabouts. The females are, as you'd expect, dull brown.

'Bokeh' is Japanese, it broadly translates as 'blur' or 'haze.' In photography it refers to the areas of the picture that are out of focus. Depending on the lens these can more, or less, detract from the subject. A well constructed lens will create soft, reasonably regular shapes out of these areas, rather than erratic ones. The way you usually judge bokeh is with a lens "wide-open,' with no depth of field so that only the critical point of focus — eg: the two birds in the photos above — are sharp. With a poor lens the the grasses and reeds in the background would be much more distracting, varying in density and shape.

Probably more than you want, or need, to know about it here

[Various Artist]

Great Tits

I love that blackbird on the reeds, and indeed some great bokeh there AdC. The eagle is terrific as well.

Various Artist wrote: That reminds me of this, a photo I took it in South Africa 16 months ago, at the Langebaan lagoon where there were at least four species of tern: common, swift, little and Caspian. Thought I'd post it since, well, one good tern deserves another. (Sorry.)

Most in this shot are common tern, but there's a truly surreal size difference between the tiny little tern in the middle and the giant Caspian tern behind. It's like they've done some bizarre experiment with drugs that's gone wrong.

Amor de Cosmos wrote: That does look very bizarre. The smaller tern in the foreground (a third species?) adds to the effect.

Yes, apologies for the unclear wording of my comment – despite doing my damndest to avert this as I knew it could be ambiguous: by "tiny little tern" I wasn't merely describing the birds generically, I meant that "tiny Little Tern" in the middle foreground. It's so much smaller than the ('standard'-sized) Common Terns strung across the picture, this comparison alone would be quite striking – but the Caspian Tern behind is so much huger than any of them, whilst being in every other respect just like the others, it does indeed look like a Photoshop effect! They really did look like that in real life though, I promise.

[Amor de Cosmos]

Great Tits

My fault for skim reading VA, but thanks for the clarification.

[Sits]

Great Tits

And it really is quite a shot. The birds couldn't have positioned themselves better.

[Heatwaving Not Drowning]

Great Tits

Two more commoners .

L1060460 by Stevie, on Flickr

L1060485 by Stevie, on Flickr

And this,dont think it liked me..........

L1060302 by Stevie, on Flickr

L1060284 by Stevie, on Flickr