Feeding Birds

I put a bird feeder in the garden, and after the birds found it, I set up the camera to take photos of them. This gallery contains a handful of the resultant photos.

I put the camera on a tripod and placed it near the feeder. I set my timer to wait an hour (assuming, correctly, that the birds would sit in the trees and refuse to come back to the feeder until they were used to the camera's presence), then start taking a 1 second burst of shots every 45 seconds. On my 20D a 1 second burst provides 5 images.

These images are heavily compromised. I quickly learnt that photographing birds as they feed requires a very fast shutter because they're constantly jumping about. My first batch of shots were just blurs, so all these ones are at high ISO, 200mm, with a large aperture. Excuse the noise. Obviously the camera was completely unattended so they're all auto focus, and in order to get an hour's worth of images on the card, they're all from JPEGs, not RAW.

I took thousands of shots, mostly of an empty feeder. These are the best of the ones with birds in!

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