{"id":884,"date":"2007-07-09T00:07:50","date_gmt":"2007-07-08T23:07:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/archives\/884"},"modified":"2013-11-24T19:02:51","modified_gmt":"2013-11-24T19:02:51","slug":"more-birds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/more-birds\/","title":{"rendered":"More Birds!"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n

I had been going to post some more macro insect <\/a>shots, but I've decided instead to add a postscript to the previous entry.<\/p>\n

Yesterday I mentioned the frequent sightings of swifts, but didn't post any pictures. The reason is simple… I find them about the most difficult bird to capture on camera. Firstly they never<\/i> land. Well, that's not quite true. They land for breeding\/hatching, but other than that they spend the entire year on the wing. They are also extremely erratic and fast in the air so keeping them in shot is a challenge. Plus, they are more or less entirely black, which creates all kinds of problems for photographing against a bright sky. But they are quite common, and late afternoon a number of them were swooping overhead so I attached the long lens and had another go. Of about 50 shots, two survived my editing cull and are in the July Birds<\/a> album.<\/p>\n

Swift<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

The other omission from yesterday was any mention of a sparrowhawk. It's about a week since I'd seen one (the kestrel seems the most frequent overhead visitor at the moment), but while I was photographing the swifts, a lone sparrowhawk ventured into view. Now generally sparrowhawks are easier to photograph than swifts. The lighter colour helps, and they tend to glide overhead at a reasonable pace and in a straight line so keeping them in frame is reasonably straightforward. The main problem is that they have a tendency to do all this at a high altitude. It's easy enough to get one on camera, but most times the final image is tiny, even with a 300mm zoom. Today though, the sparrowhawk decided to come in relatively low. There are several shots in the July album, including this one.<\/p>\n

Sparrowhawk<\/span><\/a><\/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":[1],"tags":[33],"class_list":["post-884","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-birds","entry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t