Having another go at bird photography

The Autumn colours have finished without us getting any real opportunity to get out more as we have grand children duties and our aging dog has had two bouts of Vertigo which made her very unstable and couldn’t walk far. So we’ve put any more motorhome trips and days out on hold. So we aim to grab a few hours when we can and ventured out yesterday to Denny Wood in the New Forest.

At least we could see the birds in the trees with the leaf canopy gone, but the challenge was bringing them down to our level, so we found a few tree stumps and baited the area with seeds and waited patiently.

While we waited I took a few shots with the Infrared (IR) camera which I had previously packed away for the winter. I attended a talk earlier in the week by Paul Mitchell (www.paulmitchellphotography.co.uk) on Infrared photography who took excellent images throughout the whole year, so I thought I’d do the same. The images below definitely show off the impact with IR on the sky even though the trees are bare.

After 30 minutes the birds started to appear, initially in 1’s and 2’s then sometimes 4 or five at a time.

I was using a shutter speed between 1/1600 and 1/2500 with apertures between F5.6 and 7.1. The light level wasn’t great so the ISO setting was always quite high which resulted in noisy images which had to be recovered during post processing.

As soon as multiple birds appear the difficulty is getting them all in focus with a narrow depth of field. So I was shooting at 50 frames a second and searching for images where the birds are in a similar focal plane. I ended up keeping 120 images from about 9000 taken in the 90 minutes photo shoot.

I was surprised with the variation of species which included Chaffinch, Blue Tit, Great Tit, Coal Tit, Marsh Tit and a Nut Catcher. Robins where in the trees, but didn’t want to be photographed.

Ideally we would have liked more light, so may try again when the light improves. For the technically minded, I was using the ‘pre-capture’ facility of the OM-1 Mk2 with a pre-cap2 setting. With the shutter button half depressed the camera buffers a preset number of images but doesn’t save them to the SD card until the shutter is fully depressed. Once the shutter is fully pressed the camera saves the pre-capture frames and continues to capture until the shutter is released. This feature gives the photographer a greater chance of capturing the inflight images.