spotted pardalote

[avkomp]

last year whilst waiting for dusk and the the owls to start doing stuff, this pardy turned up and seemed oblivious to us.
most of the time it was inside the minimum focus range of my lens, so all you could do is look at him.
finally he went somewhere a tad further away so I could focus on him and the background was good. is a rock platform behind him.

d4 600f4 tc17 (1000mm) 1/500 f8 iso 3200. had to pump up the iso cos it was getting dim. full frame image @ around 4.8m

[Alan]

Lovely composition and detail. Remarkable lack of noise for 3200 ISO.

Such beautiful birds

[avkomp]

thanks alan, the d4 is a masterpiece in low light. you cant be underexposing though.they tell me the d4s is better than that, and the d5 a lot better than that. if only I was rich............

[avkomp]

I shot an eastern yellow robin there one evening at 10000 iso and the image was remarkably clean. the original was shot to the right histogram wise though, so pulling exposure back eliminated the noise

[wigz]

Beautiful clean shot with great detail.

[seaslug]

Beautiful bird. It's magic when they come that close.

[Ironwood]

Nice work Stephen, definitely a keeper that one.

[Isac]

Agree with all above. You are definitely a master of your trade. Beautiful work.

[Phoenix]

I can relate to the first part of your story about them being too close.
I would be super pleased with this shot.
At first I thought a little lower pov would be nice but then you would miss all the detail on those gorgeous back feathers.
Lovely neutral background to allow the birds patterns and colour to shine.

[avkomp]

thanks folks.
Jo: I try to shoot at eye level where I can, but this little guy was down a bit of a rock ledge. from memory the lens was more or less on the ground anyhow. the saving grace is that the background is constant. normally they dont come too close but it does happen. another evening,at the same spot, a brown goshawk landed about 5m away when I was sitting at the same spot. that time the camera was on the tripod and some 2m from where I was. I had camo on and was in cover so dont think the gossy saw me, until I tried to very slowly move to the camera that is, and it was ll over then.