Breakfast at the Feeder Station

I went for a (reasonably!) early morning walk and popped in to Gosforth Nature Reserve with my new camera. I wanted to try out its rapid fire function to see if I could capture some shots of the birds in flight.

I had great fun and in 20 minutes I reckoned I had enough to choose a blip, but got a bit of a shock when I realised I'd actually taken 932 photos! (it has a very rapid fire function). The vast majority have, of course, gone straight in the bin but I chose 14 to process.

The light wasn't as good as I'd hoped so I had to use a high ISO (2500) in order to achieve a fast shutter speed even at f4. And as I was in the hide and couldn't move any closer I had to do some cropping (A longer tele lens is now on the shopping list!). So the quality has suffered a bit as they're quite noisy and the depth of focus was small. I think I need some more practice but I've blipped one of the results. The others are on flickr here; you can see on one of the shots that they're quite messy eaters, dropping as many seeds as they eat!