Seagull fry up. I am allowed two small pieces. Home baked so quickly stale.
I have sparrows,dunnocks,blue tits,a robin,noisy blackbirds,collared doves a few pigeons and starlings visiting.
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Finally! First Waxwing for two years, Nairn, Scotland. Really fortunate I had my 600mm lens with me, too.
Cheers,
Ian
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Great photos.. perhaps over sharpened on the feathers - but I guess you did for jpeg compression? Love the berries
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Like pigeons round these parts nowadays!
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Leaving the tree to investigate
Something was moving on the snow
No luck this time..
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Sorry, Simon, forgot to reply to this! Yes, I agree - well spotted. I’ve just relooked at the processing and I had inadvertently doubled up on the texture slider across two overlapping masks.
Reset to zero on one of them.
This retains the detail in the RAW image without over-emphasising it.
Cheers,
Ian
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using Lightroom? If so I am finding the new ‘raw details’ option is great and means I can back of the texture slider a bit
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Yes, in Lightroom. The light was really poor when I shot these, so the ISO was heavily pushed to get a decent shutter speed (these were handheld at 600mm). Because of this, I needed to apply denoise which automatically applies RAW details.
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Big crop on a small bird, so can’t expect miracles. But, I am rather chuffed with the performance of the new gear…….
363mm (so equivalent to 580mm on the APS-C camera) + crop, f.7.1, 1/1000 sec., ISO 320.
Hand held.
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Like others reported recently the garden seems to have been devoid of birds except for starlings and a couple of sparrows. I decided not to register for Birdwatch as any sample would have been very skewed from what has been normal.
Rather aghast when I got up this morning, decided I must play catchup with some chores which meant most of three hours was overlooking the garden. The rain has stopped, still quite windy and yes, there was sun! I had replenished the feeders at dusk yesterday and there were birds everywhere. Yes, there were starlings, but four instead of forty. Two crows which rarely descend into the small space decided to visit. Three types of woodpecker that normally visit at different times of day once a fortnight came and went in quick succession. Robins and blackbirds have started asserting territorial rights. At when end of three hours I had written a list of twenty, most were transitory, fly in, check the feeder and off again.
One mystery bird, tiny, like a wren but much slimmer, tail down not up, uniformly beige in colour, breast slightly paler, slim pointed beak and no markings. Flits around the edges of bushes, never still…
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It is a Golden-crowned kinglet.
It was my thought on seeing the shape and size, the total lack of markings confused me, all over, the colour of your pictures chin. I’ve tried searching for pictures of juveniles in case the first year shows no markings, but no luck.
Not a dunnock, there was a solitary one on the ground and nearly twice the size.
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Albeit rather boring for an hour, but doesn’t that rather deafeat the object?
Possibly, I felt reluctant to record nil or forty starlings as I have done in the past couple of years. When I made the decision, I did email RSPB to explain why and list the birds seen so far this year.
Kinglets are North America only.
My picture is a Goldcrest
They are nearly identical, but they are distinct species, with goldcrests found in Eurasia and golden-crowned kinglets in North America, both specializing in conifer habitats.
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