Lucky

R and I went into Stratford for lunch today, and I took the opportunity to spend twenty minutes in Holy Trinity churchyard with the resident birds. For the first quarter of an hour I only managed to photograph Robins, because two of them had declared territorial rights over the little clearing where I put out food, and were chasing off any other bird that tried to land there. But then I struck lucky, when I spotted a tiny movement in one of the surrounding yew trees, and realised that a Goldcrest was foraging for invertebrates among the leaves.

As I think I've mentioned before, Goldcrests are pretty hard to photograph because they're almost constantly in motion, and in the evergreen trees they favour they appear and disappear unpredictably. To make matters worse it was an overcast day, and I was having to compromise my shutter speed so as to keep the ISO at an acceptable level - so I knew it would be touch and go as to whether I could get any well-focused images. I followed the Goldcrest around the tree as well as I could, used the R5's eye tracking, and shot on high-speed burst whenever it managed to lock onto the bird, and in the end ten of the hundred or so frames I took were good, which was pretty pleasing.

Less amusing was that at the end of its foraging session the Goldcrest dropped down out of the tree onto the top of a nearby monument, offering the perfect portrait opportunity... but at the precise instant when I pressed the shutter button, it was bounced off its perch, by a Robin.