Capture The Moment

Bad light stops play

A pretty disappointing day today…

I’d intended to shoot waders at St Mary’s, but things didn’t go quite to plan.

Before hitting St Mary’s, I had a brief stroll around the cemetery – some good birds have been reported recently. Not today though – awful light, and usual suspects abounded: and of those, the only thing I got within range of was this (rather dapper, I thought) male House Sparrow:

House Sparrow

I didn’t notice it as I was shooting, but I wish the hedge hadn’t just been chopped!

A bit more fruitless wandering about, then across the road to St Mary’s.

It could have been really good: the weather forecast was very encouraging (yes, I should have learned by now!) and I was there at the bottom of a low tide, just right for it coming back in – exactly what you want for wader photographs, where the trick is to read how the birds are behaving, settle down in a spot ahead of the approaching tide, and let the birds come to you.

Yep, that’s the trick, but it was obvious very quickly that today was going to be a day when the birds were just not going to settle. Ironic, given that the place was mercifully free of idiots with dogs – unlike last Sunday…

Last Sunday I came very close to punching a big fat fuckwit who thought that letting his dog hoon up and down the beach after waders for at least the twenty minutes I was on the beach was a great laugh, and who – when I pulled him about it – reckoned that because it wasn’t actually illegal to let his dog do this, it was just fine: not cruel, not cretinous, not a twat’s trick. No, this – a pet dog harassing tired, long-distance migrant waders – was “natural behaviour”, apparently, and I had no right to object, especially as I only cared because I “...wanted to take pictures of them…”

He knows better now…

Anyway, I digress.

As I say, the waders were very nervous – presumably because of the Sparrowhawk that was overhead on a regular basis – and apart from one distant Dunlin I got diddly from the beach.

A stroll up Dogshit Alley (the footpath along the western edge of the wetland, which was living up to its nickname) turned nothing up except a small live eel, which I think had been dropped by a gull.

The top willows had quite a few LBJs – Wrens and Dunnocks – and surprisingly (for there), a Great Spotted Woodpecker, but the only bird to pose was this female Stonechat:

Stonechat

I quite like this – the background colours are interestingly odd.

A closer crop:

Stonechat

As light was becoming more and more of a premium I had a quick wander back to the car park next to the wetland viewing wall, and finished off with this obliging Turnstone:

Turnstone

Green enough for you? I was flat on my stomach for this, and possibly got too much OOF foreground as a result. But all of the blur and OOFness is real – nothing done in PP to add to it.

Turnstone

Turnstone

You can see from the difference in the look of these last images that the Sun broke out briefly between frames, but it was still dull and far from conducive to attractive images, so with that I gave up: sometimes it’s smart to recognise that you’re beaten!

These images do serve a useful purpose. They’re not really as sharp as I usually see from the 100-400mm, which I think clearly demonstrates the idea that it’s a lens that likes light: poor light means low contrast, and that means images that look a little softer than they might do otherwise…

They do look better bigger/at higher resolution though.