Bird photography day out April 2019

[Iggy]

Thanks Paul for organising the trip and for giving David & me a ride there and back in your car, which is greatly appreciated.
Thanks David and Mike for giving me the loan of your Canon telephoto lenses, also much appreciated. Also used my 70-300mm lens.
Downloaded ~1000 images and had a very quick 10 min look see.
Surprisingly how many bad images as all the birds are so quick, but a fair few good ones too.
Iggy

Image straight from the camera with no modifications at all apart from size reduction. Mike's 300mm f4 Canon lens.
The wren proceeded to sing its heart out for us. Lovely!

[Mike Farley]

Lovely shot of a wren, Iggy. They are such shy and elusive birds, which makes it all the better to see one depicted like this.

Just loading my images from the day onto the computer now. It looks like being a long job, although I suspect most will end up in the recycle bin.

[Paul Heester]

Happy to organise the trip!

Thanks to both David & Mike for the lens loans. I took around 650 shots and after a brutal cull of images (including all those empty branch shots as I was too slow!) Ive kept around 20% which I think is a respectable haul from the day, albeit with many duplicates.

For those who wanted to attend but couldnt I would recommend it. John Stanton is a very nice chap and was happy to incorporate our "props" of blossom and yellow Forsythia. Have a look at his Flickr page shows other people's images - https://www.flickr.com/groups/2994002@N25/ as well. If you have any questions then maybe we could answer them for you.

[Mike Farley]

"Gone Bird Gone~

I will not say that the Fuji X-H1 and 100-400 combo was ALWAYS slow to focus on a small subject close to the camera, but I have a number of this type of image.

[davidb]

I too had an enjoyable day, both with fellow photographers and friends and a nice, slow moving day out in the country. Not that the wilflife was slow. As Mike has shown you needed to be on your toes to catch some of the subjects.

I finished up with 503 images which I've down loaded to my computer and started the post-processing in Lightroom. When (or, perhaps more appropriately, if) I find any decent shots I'll upload them to the forum and Flickr.

[Mike Farley]

Thanks to both David & Mike for the lens loans.

For my part, I was happy to see people getting some use out of it. Last time I experimented with four lenses and overall it was the best for the purpose. In terms of image quality, it lagged behind a Leica R 80-200 f/4 mounted on a Fuji X-E2 but that lens is both too short for the smaller birds (even taking the 1.5 crop factor into account) and is manual focus. By the time I had got the lens focussed, invariably the bird was long gone. The only way to manage was to prefocus and wait for a bird to appear.

I took around 650 shots and after a brutal cull of images (including all those empty branch shots as I was too slow!) Ive kept around 20% which I think is a respectable haul from the day, albeit with many duplicates.

Er, my count was 2,168 which required 80 minutes to load into Lightroom and consumed 53.5 GB of disk space.......

Like you, I will be reclaiming a lot of my disk capacity in the edit.

[Mike Farley]

"Here's looking at you looking at me".

Here's looking at you

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Even using a Fuji 100-400 lens at its longest reach, equivalent to 600 mm on a full frame camera, this crop is around a quarter of the original image. Mounted on a 24 MP camera, that is just about enough resolution to print an image with a longest edge of 36 cm. Most likely if I were creating a mounted print, I would not produce it as large as that. The end result is an image where the size is out of proportion to the subject. I did think about attaching the 1.4 extender for its extra reach but decided against it. It was already difficult enough picking out the spots where birds had landed and I wanted to ensure that I could show some of the context if necessary.

[Mike Farley]

If no one else is going to do it, here is a shot of an ubiquitous woodpecker. Last time we were at Millers Wood, John said he would give us a refund if we did not see any. He knew his money was safe.

Woodpecker

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[Mike Farley]

This is probably the sharpest of my "leaving" shots. I used a relatively low shutter speed of 1/500 during the day which was OK most of the time but was not fast enough to freeze subject movement.

Leaving

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[Iggy]

Nice capture Mike.