Preparing for take off

Photography can be a most frustrating exercise at times as you always are having to make compromises. I decided that I wanted to take pictures of birds on the wing near the bird feeder which regularly attracts a range of birds but primarily goldfinches and chaffinches at this time of year.

I have usually done this using a telezoom lens, either my 70-200mm with a 1.4 X extender or my 100-400mm but both of these lenses tend to give you a very limited depth of field which is OK for birds on the feeder but no good for birds in flight. So this time I decided to use a smaller lens with a better depth of field and to place my camera on tripod near the bird table, minimally camouflaged by a rain hood ( which was useful as there was a snow shower a little later ). I have a remote trigger that allows me to operate the shutter from a distance in this case inside this house, so my presence would not disturb the birds. The only difficulty is that the Canon EOS 7D is fairly noisy when you shoot off a high speed continuous burst so it tends to frighten the birds away and you have to wait for them to regain confidence before they approach the bird feeder again.

In order to get maximum depth of field I decided to set up my camera on a tripod just a couple of metres from the bird feeder which with a f5.6 stop would give me about a third of a metre depth of field. Ideally I would have liked something like a metre. Even more problematic was the ASA and the shutter speed. Shooting at 400 ASA gave me a shutter speed of about 1/500th which is really a bit low for catching these tiny birds in flight. However, I persevered and was able to catch the birds just as they were taking off rather than in full flight. I did not want to raise my ASA any higher as I know from experience that for birds against a plain background like our fence there is too much degradation and noise. Oh, for the better weather and much brighter lighting as that will solve all my problems ! Meantime you get a bird that's about to fly