Don’t worry, these are probably the last bird pictures I’ll post in a while. The season is getting so late that the light just never seems to be right. Yes, that’s what I said! Here’s why. Shortly after sunrise my bird feeder is lit by the warm light. Now that would normally be a good thing, but there’s a forest behind the feeder and the light is just crazy when some tree trunks and branches are lit and others are not. It’s just simply impossible to contain the detail in both, so my only option is to find an angle where the background is even – either lit, or shaded. That first nuthatch was almost overexposed while the background, while not completely blocked, is a featureless black hole. In the second nuthatch, when I took it I thought the forest would be a nice backdrop to the classic nuthatch pose. But that shaded tree trunk in the middle, ugh.
Then I have this one little window of opportunity where I can use the forest floor as background, which gives that nice yellow tone. But I have very little margin for changing the composition, so I just have to hope that the bird sits on that branch in just the right way. But in order to use the forest floor, I have to use a slightly downwards angle to shoot. I can clone off distractions (had to do it with this blue tit) but there’s no amount post-processing that will fix the angle for me.
In October I was still praising overcast weather to get over this problem with contrast. Well, now it’s November and the days are only going to get darker, so I can just about forget bird photography in overcast weather. All of this means that I can just about forget bird photography, full stop. It remains to be seen if I have any birds visiting the feeder in the spring. In the past two years they’ve all but disappeared.
So no birds, no landscapes, no nothing. Is it any wonder that November is my least active month for photography? The only thing that can save the month is some snow. Well, a lot of snow, actually!