The Dinosaur's Eye

Today's blip makes me very happy indeed. I haven't been quite this close to a lorikeet in ages - and never with my telephoto. I was walking to work this morning and heard a great kerfuffle from a grevillea across the road. Looking over, I spied the bright colours that could only mean a lorikeet, fluttering wildly in the direction of a larger grey bird (it looked wattlebird-sized, but seemed plain grey; then again, I didn't get much of a look at it) which backed hurriedly away, stopped, and then in the face of more determined lorikeet seeing-off behaviour, it was seen off. I crossed the road, with camera at the ready, telephoto fully extended, and snapped away. I got fixed by its beady eye a few times, but generally it just carried on with breakfast.

I am absolutely over the moon with the photos I got (others to be found in my Birds set on Flickr). This one is probably my favourite, though it was a near and hard-fought thing.

Larger is worth a look - you can see the feathers rather well, and the dinosaur's eye is very clear.

I used Photogene to process this, though I only did two things. The first was to make it square for Square September; the second was to move the 'clarity' slider ever so slightly to the right. OMG that's a beautiful thing. I mean, I was perfectly happy with these photos SOOC, but with that clarity voodoo hoodoo black magic awesomesauce ... amazing.

Oh, and thank you to many people on behalf of the funny little ball of angry cute I photographed yesterday. I didn't expect all those stars, and I'm sure if it could understand, the chick'd be pleased too. ;-)