Wednesday 2 December 2009

Finally some shots of my favourite tits - and a Goldcrest!!

Today found me up in Macclesfield Forest, where I came across a group of Long-Tailed Tits - my favourite kind (apart from Bearded Tits, but I've only been lucky enough to see these once)!

How cute is this?!



Like a candy-striped bauble with a crazy-long tail :)  I remember the first time I saw Long-Tailed Tits - I'd just recently gotten into birding, and had never knowingly seen them before.  I spotted a flock of them (they generally hang out in groups) in a tree whilst out on a walk, and was stunned - I thought they must be something really rare!  Turns out they're not rare at all, and are quite common garden visitors - but I still love seeing them.

Here are a couple more shots:





Seeing these beauties at such close range would have been good enough, but I also managed to capture a Goldcrest - the UK's smallest bird, and therefore pretty hard to spot!  It's a fast mover as well, so pretty hard to capture.

I managed to grab a couple of shots of it before it flew away:



As you can see, I wasn't able to get as close to this one! 

I liked this shot though - not great quality, but shows off the striking yellow mohawk from where it gets its name:



So, another good day's birding for me :)

Must remember to show these shots to my brother, who maintains that "all small birds look like sparrows"...

7 comments:

  1. I was just reading about long-tailed tits... if you don't already, anything on nature by Simon Barnes in the Times is worth checking out...

    http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/simon_barnes/

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  2. thanks james! i'll check it out. did you decide on a camera in the end?

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  3. I got a secondhand D70 which I'm really having fun with. Taken LOTS of bad photos but one or two alright ones. Also found a 1980 50mm lens (manual focus) - using that with no metering seems like a good way of becoming a bit more comfortable with aperture, shutter speed etc. Takes really nice shots on the odd occasion I get the focus right!

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  4. excellent! and you're right, that should really help you get familiar with everything. digital's amazing but i'm really glad i learned photography back in the days of manual SLRs. have to say though, autofocus is a godsend, most of the time :)

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  5. Now just trying to decide on settings... using JPEG rather than RAW at the moment and aperture priority. But I change my mind every time I read a different opinion!

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  6. join the club! i think it really depends what you want to do with the shots. you lose a lot of quality if you shoot jpegs as opposed to raw, but if you're not planning to print the photos, or at least not planning to print them really big, or to use them professionally etc, then jpegs are fine - and take up a lot less space!
    i would say that for most widlife photography though, then shutter priority would be favourable to aperture priority. depending on how fast your wildlife is moving of course!
    there's always the manual setting as well.. :)

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  7. Good point! I did a few shots in RAW with the old 50mm lens on a walk in the woods the other day. On the shots where I bungled the exposure, the results of rectifying it in iPhoto were so much better than when I was shooting JPEG so I think I'm going to stick with RAW for a while (until my hard drive starts pleading for mercy, anyway!).

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