Not in my patch of sky...

After an early morning swim, I spent about an hour round and about Dunbar Harbour practising using my new lens with the 2X converter on it.

It's certainly more difficult when you don't have a zoom lens to lock onto birds in flight but I guess this comes with experience just as it does with a pair of binoculars.

One of the problems you encounter if you are shooting birds overhead is the heavy shadow areas under their wings. If you increase the exposure when you are processing these images you are in danger of bleaching out the sky. I found the shadow slider in Lightroom to be one of the most helpful controls.

Another problem I found that because you are exposing for large areas of fairly consistent colour ie. sky, even though I was shooting at a fairly low ISO 200, there is a increased tendency towards noise in the image. I found that nearly all my shots were improved by use of Noise Reduction software (Nik Define).

Sadly the image I have chosen for my blip has a rather bleached out sky but that is just the way it was at the time and not due to post-processing. I am not sure whether this gull is really trying to chase off its neighbour but it's being very vocal about it.