Week 4 - Chickadees in flight

This week I experimented with capturing some small backyard birds in flight. Trying to track small finches, chickadees, sparrows and other small birds with a long telephoto is amazingly tough. Larger birds like geese, eagles, and ospreys are somewhat predictable and can be tracked for a relatively long time. Little backyard birds tend to flit around and go very short distances when feeding. I noticed that chickadees would land on one of the feeder arms before proceeding to the feeder. These photos were taken by pre-focusing on the feeder arm. I did a "spray and pray" technique as I saw a bird heading to the feeder. Even at 10 frames per second there were a lot of misses.

Obviously these shots are a bit soft and noisy. It was late in the day with a heavy overcast so I had to push the ISO to 3200. I'll try this again on a brighter day so I can go with a lower ISO and an aperture setting with more depth of field.

Spencer Island, 9/7/2010

It's obviously been a while since the previous postings. I certainly have a number of photos to process and post but life just seems to get in the way. Rather than adhere to a specific chronology of photos, I'm going to process and post photos as time permits.

In addition to this blog, I've started a second one as an exercise in keeping the photographic juices flowing. It's by no means a unique idea in that I will try to post at least one new photo per week. I've seen other blogs of this type including ones in which the blogger posts one per day. I had considered that but I know that would be doomed to failure. If you're so inclined, checkout my other blog at Fifty-Two A Year.

This past weekend we visited Spencer Island which is just outside of Everett. We had set up to photograph some barn swallows not expecting much other than some much needed practice. Some swallows perched on some bare branches and nearby barbed-wire. Occassionally another swallow would swoop in and seemingly attack the perched birds. I soon realized that the "attacking" birds were actually feeding the perched ones. Barn swallows aren't very big and we were about 40-50 feet away so it was a bit of a challenge. I was able to get a few shots as the feeding went on.













Of course we have to have the obligatory duck shots. While it was good practice for getting birds in flight, they stayed to far off for my liking.





We couldn't hang around for the "golden hour" shots so settled for a few landscape type photos.

Week 3: Feeding Swallows

We took a quick trip to Spencer Island to test our tripod and lens setups. We happened upon some barn swallows perched on some bare branches. Periodically a swallow would swoop in and there would be a lot of wing flapping before one of them would fly off. Initially we thought the incoming swallows were attacking the perched birds. Eventually I realized that the "attacking" birds were actually feeding the swallows that were perched on the branches.

Additional photos of the swallows are at my other blog 10,000 Foot View