I'm all a Flutter

Much to my delight this morning I woke to find dozens of birds and even a squirel visiting our newly installed feeder. I purchased this about a week ago and after doing some thinking decided on a location for our first feeder and put it up about 4 days ago. These critters are really our first "seen" visitors. Yesterday was the first day that I noticed seeds (black oil sunflower) were missing. What I had originally set out to do ths morning was to just see how close I could get to these chickadees, nuthatches and titmice from my windows with the 300mm. It was about 15 shots into this that I had a revelation. There were so many birs coming and going making it hard to set up on one subject. I was getting many badly composed shots. It occurred to me that I should take advantage of all of this action and try out some stop motion shooting. I have zero experience with all of this so allot of guess work and out of the wazoo thinking.

The nice part about this is that the feeder is not going anywhere and neither are the birds so I have plenty of chances to fail before I get it right. Tomorrow is always another day.




I love the action that I got on this tufted titmouse with a full wing and tail spread and a nice face view,however I failed in a few regards. Over exposed and too slow of a shutter speed to stop the wing movement completely.

Tamron 70-300mm on all of these shots. I am still waiting on the Canon 70-300mm delivered.


f 5.6
1/200 sec.
ISO-1600
WB-cloudy
160mm
freehand (no tripod)
812-Warming filter

I did manage to stop the wing motion a bit better on this titmouse but I am not liking the color composition much ... this may be due to the filter but i am not 100% sold it is? I feel it came out pretty grainy as well. I am not impressed with this one either.

f 5.6

1/2000 sec.

ISO - 1600

WB-sun

180mm

Freehand

812-Warming filter

I am not sure what happened to create the feeding frenzy for this shot but I was delighted to see all of the action! I am still seeing grain on this shot however the lighting is a tad lighter that the previous one. I just am not getting it right. I will point out that the first shot was # 1726 and this last one here is # 1905 so It is not as if I took only three shots to come to this conclusion that I need lots of advice !! Side note is that allot of the discarded photos were simply due to bad composition. I do not think that anyone is interested in seeing what a chickadees bum looks like at 300mm :)

f 5.0

1/1250 sec.

ISO 400

WB sun

160mm

Freehand

UV filter

All shots were taken from about 30-35 feet from the feeder. The good news out of this whole mess is I did manage to find out that we have a Red Bellied Woodpecker living in the forest behind the house. I did catch an action shot of it departing the feeder but it is a bit blurry and did not want to post until I could capture a better shot. Of course if I get bored later, you may just see it anyway !

Please post comments if you have any advice that can help :)