New year, same old me. Once again I have neglected this page for months and am doing catch up. One of these days i’ll remember to keep up. A lot of the photos i took in january ended up being portraits, or photos that no one apart from me will care about, so i’m not going to post them here.

Lake birds

These ones came from an expedition to the local lake to try out the new zoom lens. We arrived fairly late in the day, so we couldn’t stay for too long before we started losing the light, but we did manage to get these two.

I think the exposure on the Heron(?) was a little underdone, but I like the composure overall.

Something i’m really struggling with for the bird photos, particularily when they’re in flight is the autofocus. I’ve been using point AF since last year when I found autoselect AF was causing me to miss tons of shots from selecting the wrong point. This has been working well for me in combo with back button focus which allows a nice focus-recompose-shoot workflow without the auto selection choosing the wrong point. However, when trying to focus a single point on a moving bird, it really doesn’t work very well.

I think partially it’s the camera, as my camera only has like 12 af zones and isn’t the fastest focuser. I will give autoselect AF a go and see if that can help.

Chicken

Nothing spectacular here, but I liked the contrast that the chicken provides with the background. S/he looks very agressive and fierce.

One more sunset silhouettes

This one was kinda cool. I panned up and merged a few photos into a vertical pano to make a larger photo from the scene while excluding the houses in the foreground. I like how it turned out with the sharp trees.

In the forest

This one is one that turned out differently from what i had pictured. I was going for something a little more… ‘ethereal’. I think it needs lower, warmer light, and more particles in the air to get those slanting sunbeams. I like the crop and the layout, but the light just wasn’t there. Maybe waiting until golden hour would have done it. That and a smoke machine :D

Closing thoughts

Still some issues with focus, but I feel this is gradually improving as I get more used to managing all the parts of taking a photo.