Blue Tits in Flight

I consciously started a new photography project from my living room earlier this year, on account of not being able to get out and about much due to some health stuff. My mission; to capture the small garden birds that come and go outside my window, IN FLIGHT...

It's definitely got a few challenges, not least of all the lack of light available when you need to go to around 1/8000 shutter speed to properly freeze the action.

Then there's the focal plane issue. Getting tiny garden birds in focus when they're moving really fast is difficult, as only a tiny slither of 3D space can be in focus at once.

Luckily they're creatures of habit, so you quickly learn from observation that they tend to choose the same branches and trajectories a lot of the time during their routines. That way you can choose a focus point in advance of them (hopefully) being there!

Even then though, I’ve found only around 1 in 50 shots, if that, is useable and requires an awful lot of rescuing in the edit due to all the noise. What I need is a massive light. But I think my neighbours would hate that.

Long-tailed Tits in the Frost

These were taken during the spells of early morning frost we had at the start of January. Bitingly cold, but beautiful conditions for photography.

These long-tailed tits were busy hopping from branch to branch, picking off any little bugs and mites they found along the way.

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.