Slowly . slowly catches monkey….

After my swim this morning I went to look over the harbour and take some shots of the gulls flying around. I had with me my longest lens combination , a 200mm lens with a 2x extender on my Canon D7 which is equivalent to a 640mm lens on a full frame SLR, a serious piece of glass. This, of course, has a minimal depth of field at f5.6 which I was using to ensure I could autofocus on the birds. I eventually espied a rather nice corner of the harbour, some steps going down to the water with an aquamarine rowing boat tied up alongside and I thought what a great image it would be to capture one of the gills swooping past this background. So I waited and waited until about ten minutes later when a herring gull came flying by. I could not position him exactly where I wanted him but I thought the three elements of the steps the bird and the boat made a worthwhile picture.

I did actually play around in Photoshop to try and move the bird into a more striking position to the left of the steps and flying into the picture but although I had made a reasonable selection of the bird and even put in a drop shadow it never looked quite right so I reverted to the original shot which I already had captured. Actually even if you look closely at this image (LARGE) you will see that the bird is pin sharp whilst the wall is slightly out of focus, a corollary of the narrow depth of field.