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TITLE: Moorhen perched on top of Reedmace seed-head eating the fluffy seeds
INFO: "Early afternoon in the Ivy North Hide waiting for Bittern to show and my attention was caught by the sight of of this Moorhen which was balancing precariously right on the top of one of the Reedmace seed-heads and plucking out the fluffy seeds to eat. I'd never seen this before and thought it would make a great picture but, unfortunately, the action was right in front of the hide which meant hand-holding the camera/lens and shooting through the (hated) dark one-way glass of the non-opening front windows, something I'd not yet tried with a long lens. The light wasn't very good anyway, the sun being almost at ninety degrees to the Moorhen, making the bird almost silhouetted, and, coupled with the two-stop light loss through the dark (and not particularly clean) glass, I found I had to handhold at a not very high shutter speed (1/750th sec ISO 1800) so I quickly opted for a slower shutter speed and use VR (Vibration Reduction) to reduce camera shake, lined up my lens with a clean-ish area of the window and started getting some shots quickly before the bird either decided it had eaten enough or fell off. Here the bird is trying to swallow some of the fluffy seeds that it had plucked. As it happens the Moorhen balanced and flapped around on the seed-head for nearly four minutes! - during which time I strained to hold the heavy camera+lens steady while I tried to get as many decent shots as I could, knowing that most would likely be too blurry due to subject movement rather than camera shake. This was certainly the case and most were too blurred, but a few where the Moorhen wasn't flapping its wings about were ok-ish and good enough for web display, such as this image, cropped in for greater impact. Some loss of sharpness may also have been due to the effects of shooting through the glass, though these results aren't really conclusive enough to say. In retrospect I think I should've used a higher shutter speed (VR off) and upped the ISO, but there you go..." February 2011 (Ivy North Hide) TECH: Nikon D700, Nikkor 200-400mm f4 zoom lens at 400mm with 1.4x teleconverter, ISO 640, f8, 1/250 sec. VR on. Handheld/rested against hide window. Cropped image about 60% of frame. |
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