Grebes, House Martins and Horses

A random assembly of photos taken over the last month or two, on the rare occasions I have enough energy to get out and about. All taken with the Nikon Z 400mm f4.5.

My mission to capture the grebes doing their mating dance appears to have failed for this year as I’m pretty sure they have now packed up their dancing shoes for the season.

I did however get some nice shots of house martins in flight at Charlecote Park. My intention was to just see the deer, but when I saw these birds zipping back and forth over the lake it was too good an opportunity not to practice some bird in flight photography.

Light and Flight

This week on a post-work walk around the lake, the sun hit a window in the restaurant at the foot of the lake, so that the reflection created brilliant ripples on the water where the gulls were circling back and forth, eating flies. I took a little while to try and line up some bird in flight shots just above the golden patterns on the water’s surface.

It was definitely a bit of a challenge to consistently track the subjects, but these ones came out pretty well I think.

Birds! Birds! Birds!

This month, I have been mostly photographing birds.

Followers of my Instagram page (@luke_bennett_photos) may be aware that one of my photographic missions this spring is to capture a nice photo of grebes doing their little mating dance ritual. I had some success with this recently; just in the last few minutes of daylight I witnessed a minor courtship display. It petered out very quickly and didn’t fully develop into anything much, but I captured what looked a little bit like a bird tango, with each grebe passing the side of the other, wings-a -flutter in charming choreography.

It wasn’t exactly what I had envisioned - I’d been thinking more along the lines of the classic face-to-face mirrored head and body movements - but it was still lovely to see. The mission continues…

On the same evening, in the last moments of sunlight I also had some fun playing with the ripples and reflections on the water and lining up whatever happened to be nearby. In this instance a solitary greylag goose.

When not walking around the lake near me, I’ve enjoyed watching the garden birds outside my window, taking advantage of the bird bath and feeder.

Birds (mainly herons!) in Flight

I’ve just been looking at some bird edits from the last 12 months or so and collated what I think are my most successful bird in flight images to date. As mentioned previously on this blog, it’s something I’ve been trying to do more of and improve on.

It seems, I have a bit of a leaning towards the heron, which forms most of the images below. When I think about it, it’s obvious why - They’re big, they fly low and close, they fly slowly, and they’re not at all uncommon. Luckily for me there are at least four that like to hang around the lake near me. Even better, they omit a loud, high-pitched squawk before taking flight, as if to let you know to get your camera ready!

Bird in Flight Photography

One of my photography goals over the last 6 months has been to do more bird in flight stuff. I’ve been a bit limited in terms of my longest range until recently (that being the Fuji 50-140mm f2.8 plus 1.4x teleconverter), as well as the continuous auto focus ability of that particular combination (- let’s just say the 1.4x converter definitely doesn’t help matters…), but I’ve managed a few shots I’m really happy with regardless -

I’ve also developed a new-found fondness of the 16:9 ratio it would appear.

Over the last few weeks I’ve sold all my Fuji gear (it was a good innings, from 2016, with lots of fun along the way, we’re still friends, but I wanted to see what the competition had to offer) and have found myself with a Nikon Z 400mm f4.5. I’ve only taken it out on two walks so far and been getting used to the new system, setting the camera up to my liking, but I think it’s going to do juuuust fiiiine -