Wow, nearly at the end of November and only just getting around to posting august. In august, Auckland got hit with a delta outbreak and so I got stuck in my flat for the entire month. Luckily it was spring, so flowers were just starting to bloom and all the tui starting coming out. So this month and next month are totally dominated by birds, espcially Tui. This was my first time trying to take photos of them, so these photos are a little rough. They get better next month, I promise.

Birds

This was actually taken with my 50mm lens, weirdly. I think initally I was struggling to get the shutter fast enough to freeze the birds without getting too much motion blur. I think I eventually gave up on that and just upped the iso a bit, but here you can see its a fast shutter with a low iso, with the downside being that its much more difficult to get close enough (using this lens).

I like the composition of this, but I wish there was a bit more light on the tui. I really struggled with showing the luminescence of their feathers, as it’s really difficult to show that without completely blowing out the background.

You can see the same thing in these two, where i’m struggling to get enough light on the tui without overexposing the flowers and background. I think I did ok overall, although I wish the birds were a little more out in the open and not hiding behind the flower blossoms. It also looks like they are just a hair out of focus, which is only really apparent if you zoom right in. That’s going to be a running theme as i find it quite difficult to get the focus 100% when the subjects are flapping around so fast.

And again, the same issues are present here. The birds are tricky to expose correctly if you want to get the background details as well. I do quite like the colour scheme here though, the white shows the pink of the cherry blossoms up nicely.

The focus is especially obivously out on the first one here, although i like the overall look of the frame. I think the bird lacks contrast though, as with the blossoms and the white background both competing for attention, it doesn’t really make the bird pop as well as it could. The second one isn’t as bad for this, and the focus is better when you zoom. I may have overcompensated with the green tint in the shadows on that one though.

I think with most of these bird photos, technical stuff aside, sometimes the birds just don’t cooperate. There’s only so much you can do to get a nice pose and frame, and if the birds don’t work with you, all you can do is wait, shoot a bunch and cross your fingers. Getting these photos was a great distraction from the lockdown and watching the case numbers slowly ticking up, and it was a great excuse to get outside. I definitely want to get some more of these shots.

Light painting long exposure

To give you a break from a billion birds, these last three photos were some light painting I tried while trying (and failing) to get a photo of lightning. While waiting for strikes, my flatmate grabbed his laser pointer and we had a blast trying to draw stuff on the neighbours wall. Its actually much harder to draw a straight line then you’d think!

It took a little fiddling to find good settings for the exposure, but it was a fun lil side distraction. These aren’t really processed either. I’d like to try them using sparklers and get a person in frame too.

So there we are, even though it’s lockdown, there are still good oppourtunities to get out and take some photos. Fingers crossed that it ends before Christmas.