Since it’s weekend, I went for a walk as usual. It’s been keeping warm so I didn’t need a cap, or thermal underwear, or winter boots, or camera… in fact, I didn’t even need the gloves. This is supposed to be January?! Not any January I have ever seen… we had better winter weather in England! So needless to say that I’m a little bit ticked off. Global warming sucks. Yes, I take it personally. Because of the weather, the weekend was set out to be a blank memory card. But in the morning during a brief spell of sunshine I got a flurry of activity at my bird feeder, and it wasn’t just the birds. A handsome squirrel paid a visit, as well. LOL!

This was the first time since the summer that I used my 300mm lens. Two concerns:
1) I didn’t get any tack sharp pictures. I know the lens is sharp so either I (=camera or the lens) have a focus problem, or then my long lens technique is bad. The shutter speeds were 1/500-1/640 so camera shake shouldn’t have been a problem, sometimes I used IS and sometimes not, too bad the EXIF doesn’t show that. I didn’t use a tripod, but held the lens on the window sill.
2) Waffle pattern bokeh. I haven’t noticed that before so I wonder if the spruce trees I had as a background could create the waffle effect, with all those needles going this way and that? If not, then the camera sensor is shite. But, this is just about the first time I’ve had to worry about a waffle bokeh so I hope it’s the spruce needles…!

I didn’t experience any major focus issues with the lens last summer. Sure I thought some pictures could’ve been sharper than they were and I often resorted to manual focusing (which is normal with close-up photography), but sometimes I have the same thing with my 70-200mm lens as well. In that case, the problem relates to the camera. But most of the time the images are sharp… so I don’t know what conclusions I can draw here. Crap! I hate having to worry about this. Although in the grand scheme of things, if camera focus is my biggest worry, then everything is fine. There’s that global warming stuff, you know…