Onegav

I waited ages for a seagull to fly past that little gap in the cloud cover! It paid off eventually, with one gliding past me, whilst I willed it to go right a bit, a touch higher, bit more, bit more………

He made it, bang on in the middle of the only gap in what was prety dense cloud cover and a low slung sun. It was only 20 mins before sunset, so time was running out fast, and I’m really please I got the shot.

Its a touch noisey, but at ISO2000 I would expect that from my camera. I was actually back at “Parrot Park” practicing photographing the birds again, so my settings were 300mm – F/11 (due to the lens being sharpest there) 1/2000 shutter and Auto ISO. I also set AI Servo focus, single point light metering and continuous shooting, all to try and capture the birds as cleanly as possible with my long lens “nemesis”.

I got some pretty interesting shots, and also saw the Parrots again which was nice. There are at least 5, I saw them all flying in a group today for the first time, and oh my goodness they are way faster than I was expecting when flying in open air, I was amazed!

Still, it was interesting to see them flying in a flock, and also I can see they still frequent the same few trees. Normally they get scared off by magpies and crows, other than that they’re pretty relaxed and sit high in their favourite trees.

I got this interesting shot of a parrot having a stretch (above) and another shouting his head off (below). The light was good while it lasted, but it didn’t last long at all, so once the cloud took over and the sky cast a heavy mood, I turned my attention to captuing a moody sky scene. You can’t fight the weather, I’ve learnt that this year, you have to go with it.

Quite an eclectic set of photographs today, I hope you’ve enjoyed them as much as I enjoyed capturing them!

Anyway, we’re off out now for a meal, so I best get my skates on.

Learnings – it was actually pretty nice to just go out with my long lens, no tripod, and be fairly set on what I was going to capture. When the weather changed, opening the focal length on my long lens as wide as it would go (100mm) I could still capture the sky scapes fairly well. Of course if I’d have had my wider lens in it would have been cleaner, but for a spur of the moment thing I think the images are good enough.