Take-Off!

Herons look so gawky and laborious when they're on the ground but those big wings soon have that pterodactyl-like frame up in just a few easy beats, as in this shot from Blashford Lakes.

My fourth shoot down there, near Ringwood, Hants, saw by far the fewest birds and indeed, twitchers. Those few just muttered 'quiet, dead, nothing' as they scowled about with mega lenses that were as long as their faces.

True, (not that I would know) there wasn't some mutt-faced mallard with green freckles from Greenland but I'm after a good picture, or two and my birdwatching naivety would have your seasoned twitcher thinking 'what a ****!' I don't care, my "Big Sig" (Sigma 150-500mm Apo OS) attached to a monopod and along with the DX cropping of the Nikon D7000, I had 750mm at hand (that's 15x magnification!, unheard of for the enthusiast just ten years ago).

Previous times down there, I'd been lucky with shots of great white egret (one again this time, SO commonplace, they hardly warrant a second look, for the 'expert'), a couple of herons scrapping, a tern trying to swallow a whole fish, with the tail stuck out its beak.

This time, and competing for top shot, here, was a cormorant also taking off, but side on, looking very graceful, but with less impact than this heron one plus a number of frame-filling shots of domestic tits and such at feeders. Rubbish for the twitcher but great for good bird shots as there's always something feeding, often several at once. The low light there (in dark woodland where the sun doesn't reach and from a hide that has darkened windows that you can't open) mean't 1/125 sec, lens wide open at iso 3200, but which allowed for shots of sharp heads and bodies but beautifully blurred wings. One of those almost knocked this one out of contention.

This heron shot has been cropped by 60%, a duck just below and right of the heron's feet had to be cloned out and I lightened the areas around the wings to make the shape stand out better. An amount of unsharp mask (it was perfectly in focus and sharp, but cropping counteracted that). I also boosted the colour of just the bird's main head and body, as well as a fair bit of shadow extraction there, too.

So, the couple who had come down from Bedfordshire specially probably still think I'm a '****' and they may have got their shot of the mutt-faced gooblything, but for a free site, with five hides, all wheelchair accessible and which were open gravel extraction sites just twenty years ago, I'm more than happy to spend 3 hours there - and to get a decent picture as well, as fellow photographers, you'll know exactly what and how that feels. Priceless.