{"id":1663,"date":"2010-06-29T00:06:45","date_gmt":"2010-06-28T23:06:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/archives\/1663"},"modified":"2013-11-10T19:17:35","modified_gmt":"2013-11-10T19:17:35","slug":"larks-dragons-and-some-garden-mammals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/larks-dragons-and-some-garden-mammals\/","title":{"rendered":"Larks, Dragons, and some garden mammals…"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n

A few pictures from today, first of some of the smaller birds…
<\/span> Skylark, this morning<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span> Skylark hovering over a field (the distant blobs are sheep)<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span> A pair of skylarks hovering just above their landing site<\/span><\/p>\n

And a couple of shots that I finally managed to snare today…
<\/span> A male broad bodied chaser on the wing (just!)<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span> An emperor dragonfly on the wing (more than 'just')<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span> Swallow swooping over a pond<\/span><\/p>\n

I used the EF 400mm f\/5.6L USM prime lens for all the above. What it lacks in flexibility compared with the 100-400 zoom it makes up in general sharpness and (essential for these shots) the ease of manually adjusting the focus. Good as autofocus is, catching a small moving object against a complex background is as near impossible as it gets. A slight movement and the focus is lost. The prime lens has a huge<\/i> focusing ring and once I was roughly in range I'd follow the movement of the bird\/dragonfly making small adjustments. I missed a lot of the time, but not always. It helps that I've disabled focusing via the shutter release, preferring a separate focusing button on the rear of the camera. The shots aren't perfect, but are a big improvement on what I've managed in the past (especially the dragonflies).<\/p>\n

This evening I switched lenses and headed for the garden. A hedgehog was the first to make an appearance.
<\/span> Hedgehog out for a stroll<\/span><\/p>\n

And the young male cub came out to see what was going on.
<\/span> Young fox<\/span>
\"Nature<\/a><\/span>
Camera note: all daylight shots taken with the EF 400mm f\/5.6L USM lens. The hedgehog and fox were taken with the EF70-300mm 4.5-5.6 DO IS lens.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[980,77,4,282],"tags":[33,1142,299,1128,1168],"class_list":["post-1663","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-birds-2","category-dragonfly","category-foxes","category-hedgehog","tag-birds","tag-cub","tag-dragonflies","tag-fox","tag-hedgehog","entry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1663","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\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1663"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1663\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1663"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1663"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1663"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}