Lapwings in Flght

Unfortunately I left my blip until light levels were diminishing fast and as I was trying to catch birds on the wing I was having to shoot at 800 ISO and even then I was heavily under-exposed and had to do masses of work in post-processing to get a half decent image and I certainly could not tell what the birds I was shooting were until I had done all this work on the computer.

Normally just before sunset is a good time to catch groups of birds in flight as they all seem to fly around before settling done for the night but when the weather is thundery you are really fighting a losing battle against poor light levels and the real hassle is having to put all the images you want to consider through noise reduction software before even beginning to work on the exposure etc.

These lapwings were circling round for a minute or so before settling on the beach. They were part of a larger group of maybe 20 - 30 birds. To the naked eye they looked pretty well black and the sky much darker than this so I was delighted to discover their colourful markings after processing them. Certainly makes me want to capture them again when the light levels are good.