I couldn’t let go of a good thing, so I drove back to Össjön to take a closer look at the old boats. The wind had picked up from yesterday and there certainly wasn’t any lack of light, so I had a perfect opportunity to try the new ND filter. Stacked with a polariser, I still maxed out at 8 sec but it was just enough for the effect so the filter proved useful – the ND8 would’ve left me short of a few secs.
BTW, the new ND filter is B+W’s Neutral Density 1.8, which is 6 stops. If Hoya made a 6-stop ND, it would be called ND64 – the ND8 is 3 stops.
When I came back home, I saw that my bird feeder was very popular. Time to see if the birds would tolerate me out in the open, because the way I’ve set up the feeder I have no place to hide. I counted on the birds to keep feeding as long as I don’t make any noise or sudden moves, and the gamble paid off – it works! I must confess that the bird images are heavily cropped, for example this one is cropped from horizontal to vertical so I’m losing a lot of real estate, but I don’t care – I’m so bad with moving subjects that I’ll happily back down on my normal target of ”making the picture in the camera”. My main concern is to get a sharp eye in the picture and today’s birds had that, so I probably just doubled up my all time critically sharp bird pictures! Anyway, cropping serves another purpose as well – I get a bigger bird in relation to the frame. Even at 4-5 metres distance, using a 300mm lens (times 1.6), it’s a very small bird. Not gonna take any frame fillers for sure, so I’ll just keep concentrating on getting that sharp eye and a catchlight!
