{"id":1291,"date":"2009-01-19T23:01:03","date_gmt":"2009-01-19T23:01:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/archives\/1291"},"modified":"2013-11-17T18:42:00","modified_gmt":"2013-11-17T18:42:00","slug":"redwings-and-a-minor-piece-of-fox-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/redwings-and-a-minor-piece-of-fox-news\/","title":{"rendered":"Redwings, and a minor piece of fox news"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n

It rained for much of today, but there was a brief respite at about 1.30pm, just enough for me to wander over to the nearby woodland fringe. Conditions were poor, but I'm getting used to that. Nice tight portraits of colourful birds are out. More impressionistic takes are another matter though. And the redwings were being as cooperative as they are ever likely to be. They're not easy birds to approach, but a small flock was making its way along the trees, taking to the wing and then settling again. So I cranked the ISO to 800, added lots of positive exposure compensation (ie overexpose like mad simply to get enough light on the subject), opened the aperture all the way (f\/5.6 at full zoom) and fired away. I wasted more frames than I've kept, but a couple were worth working on.
Redwings<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

The shot has had a bit of a working over in Photoshop. The levels have been adjusted to bring out the colour, some noise reduction has been applied, and the final image brightened. The three birds helpfully display most of the key characteristics of the redwing, including the reddish underwing and the brown upper wing, and the mottled breast on the lower of the three birds. The distinctive stripe above the eye is also shown. The grouping is typical. There's another shot<\/a> here.<\/p>\n

As for the fox news, well I think we have a newcomer. I glanced out of the window this evening and a fox was at the rear of the garden. It hightailed away as soon as it saw me looking through the window, but I got a good enough view as it crossed the garden to see that its brush is much less bushy than nicked-ear's. It also seemed less bulky than she is (though glanced impressions of foxes are notoriously inaccurate on issues of size). It's more than probable that some of the recent glimpses I'd assumed were nicked-ear were in fact the newcomer. More than that I can't really say, and I suspect I'll have to work hard to get a photograph as my usual tactic of staying quietly in the garden has yet to bear fruit. Some warmer evenings would help. I have my limits about staying out in a cold, damp garden for too long.
\"Nature<\/a><\/span>
Camera note: the redwings were photographed with the EF 100-400mm f\/4.5-5.6L USM IS lens.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[980],"tags":[1128,507],"class_list":["post-1291","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-birds-2","tag-fox","tag-redwings","entry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1291","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1291"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1291\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1291"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1291"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1291"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}