I decided to try to get some flight shots of the birds. I have occasionally gotten a lucky shot of a bird with wings spread, so I figured I should be able to get one deliberately. Put the camera to continuous shooting and fire off a series, something’s gotta work, right? Wrong. After 297 frames I didn’t a single picture where the bird would have the wings spread and the eye would be sharp. Not one. But I got plenty of pictures of empty perches and quite a few amputated birds with either head or the tail missing. And when I finally got the whole bird, I found that the shutter speed was too slow to contain sharpness in the eye. The action is so fast that there’s motion blur even at 1/800 sec. Crazy! I don’t mind the wings blurring, but the eye just has to be sharp or it’s the bin.

Usually the reason I missed the bird take off was that it wasn’t sitting there long enough to focus anyway (same problem I always have with the birds). And then when the bird finally sat there a bit longer, I would keep my finger on the shutter and by the time the bird took off, the buffer was full so the camera wouldn’t fire anymore! LOL!

The only bird pictures I got today were the same old stationary ones then. But even if I didn’t get the pictures I wanted, I had another close encounter that I will remember for a long time to come. I’m not wearing any camouflage now because the birds accept my presence anyway. Just to prove it, a blue tit sat on my lens and I was just amazed to look at it from such close distance. And then… it got even closer and sat on my shutter finger! My favourite bird on my shutter finger. Wow!

In the afternoon I walked to the lake to have a closer look at the ice. Clear ice is not something to be taken for granted, usually we get snow when it gets cold so the ice is covered from start. The ice cover along the shore varies but it seemed to be about 5cm at best, all solid steel ice. I was expecting to take some more landscape-ish pictures of the ice, but when I found the bubbles I just concentrated on them instead. No landscapes, just a lot of small ice-scapes!

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With so many failed photographs today, I decided to put some of them to good use instead of just trashing outright. So I created an album on Facebook, it’s kind of a tutorial of what not to do when photographing birds!