Black redstart

In the days when I made worthwhile money from selling pictures I was always up to date with my editing and processing. Today the bulk of my income is from selling wildlife photography equipment and I find it harder to find the time to sort images. It is certainly less important when I get paid pennies for published pictures rather than pounds.

Today however was forecast to be wet and miserable and I left the day free to do nothing but process the backlog of images. Here is a recent Black redstart that was very obliging. It is the first time I have done a smart looking male on a digital camera.

Both images taken with the Canon 800mm and the EOS 7D Mk2. I am enjoying using the 7D Mk2. It is the first digital Canon camera I have owned that is not in the pro range. Noise wise it is about one stop more grainy than the 1Dx, but I am appreciating the quiet mode at 3 fps and the 1.6 crop.  If I take the same subject on both cameras I can see a difference, but it is hard to define and describe. The 1Dx files have a silky smoothness to them, but it needs side by side comparison and is hard to see. It is certainly not a problem and I can see me using the &d more frequently than the 1Dx.

Bullfinch two

The Bullfinch are not coming to the berries as often as I would like. In a 4 hour session today I had only 4 visits and the female no longer hovers, just perches. There only appears to be a single male visiting and although he hovers he usually has his back to me. Only once did he hover to the side of the berries, but the picture is not sharp enough.

I have always said with action photography like this you need repeated behaviour. One second of hovering once a hour on average is not enough. I need more opportunity.

I was happy with the best shot of the female as she pulled up a sprig of 3 berries and for once you could clearly see the eye.

The male in flight is not as sharp as I would like. I have had to sharpen it a long way and run Neat Image on it to reduce the noise.

Bullfinch

Not all Bullfinches come to feeders and take sunflower seeds. At my main feeding station they come to the hedgerow at the back, but rarely come forward to the food I supply. At other sites they can be become regular feeders.

The solution is to provide red berries in the hedgerow. These they can’t help but see and certainly not resist. I had to wait a couple of hours for the first visit, but after that both males and females took turns to grab a feast. The best opportunity was when they hovered and took a berry on the wing, but I failed to get that, either because the light was too dull at the time or they had their backs to me. I shall keep trying.

There are still plenty of berries left on one tree on a nearby trading estate. A feisty Mistle thrush is trying to keep them all to itself and the remaining ones are a bit high, but I can still just about reach them with my cutters and take off a sprig.

The berries are suspended to an alloy pole, but the hedge is too close in the background and very untidy so the backdrop is an 8 x 4 feet plywood board painted green and brown.

All pictures with the Canon EOS 1dx and an 800mm f5.6 lens.