It is another gorgeous day with nothing but sunny blue skies and frost in the morning. I felt it was pointless to try and top yesterday’s shoot at the lake so I stayed home and waited for the light to fall on the bird feeders. Even when I knew that sunlight is the worst kind of light at this location, I mean it’s not that it makes the birds look bad but it sure makes a mess of the background. I’ve taken great care that my background is far enough from the feeder, but when the light falls on some trees while others are shaded, it’s just a nightmarish contrast that’s impossible to work with. Not that I would let that stop me from trying, all it really means that I throw away about 200 frames because they’re either underexposed or overexposed or both at the same time. And then of course I throw away another 100 frames because they’re blurry… it’s a numbers game for sure!
I’m starting to give up that I can get any variety of birds at the feeder, it’s just the same small birds I’ve had every year. Last year I had huge numbers of greenfinches for a few weeks (I read somewhere that if you let your feeder run out of seeds, the greenfinches leave your feeder and don’t bother to come back) and I’ve seen a few of them now as well, but they are very skittish. They even react when they see me in the window, and when I approach they fly away. This year I have food hanging from two trees, and when I was shooting the birds at the main location, the greenfinches finally came back to eat from the feeder behind my back. But then when I turned around to look, they flew off again. Very un-cooperative! The small birds like coal tits and willow tits don’t mind me at all. I usually stand 2-3 meters from the feeder and they don’t care, and I could stand even closer but it would be too difficult to shoot then!