One thing I like to do the last few winters is to take a little walk on one of the local trails, this one being the Beaver Swamp Trail. It is a lovely area that leads to several swampy areas with board walks and such. There is a great little meadow where I've seen deer and where a lot of wild flowers grow that attract myriad bees and dragonflies.
But there is a lot of foot traffic with kids as well, which means people feeding the local Chickadee population. These birds have become very tame and will often land right on your hand. I like taking some fairly big hardware in there and setting up near a pile of seeds to try to catch the birds right as they land. They only lite for a second or two, so you have to be quick to capture them in a nice pose. I have tried several different lenses, and this time I brought out the 300mm with a teleconverter lenses making for an effective focal length of 510mm. After crop, this is a 730mm lense, approximately.
I used a flash to add a catch light and to fill the shadows, but the levels were too low so I have to d-light these images. That added a wee bit of noise, but Neat Image handled that just fine. The first image was shot against the sun, so his color is a bit muted. Nice lighting on top of the head, but d-lighting of the body does not add enough punch. Still, a nice enough image.
This woodpecker was quite a long way off, so this is a pretty severe crop. And considering that the D2Hs starts with 4.1mp, this image has no right to have any detail in it. But I consider the feather detail to be quite acceptable.
I got really close for this one. He landed a few feet away, just at the edge of the lense's ability to focus. The detail is terrific.
This pair happened to land a bit further away and was well lit by the sun. One of my favorites.
As I was leaving, I saw that someone had hung a couple of small bird houses. This one was probably made by a child. Very sweet.
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