“I’m not camouflaged, I just stun predators into disbelief that I’m there at all”

Ah, hadn’t come across those before - but I now see what you mean!

I acknowledge/blame Wikipedia :)

Magpies and Jays are in the Corvidae family, but not in the Corvus genus (from the same source, but I’m pretty sure I could back this bit up with real paper books). So, colloquially, corvids, but not true crows.

Compare & contrast, since this Jay was being very bold this morning:

And a bonus because it amuses me

Cue rabbit hole of looking up the Corvidae family tree to work out how closely related they are to the “Eurasian” Jays I’m familiar with. Especially as that beak doesn’t look very crow-like. TIL - current hypothesis seems to be they all came from Australian (well, Australasian) origins!

TY - and with results like that I can imagine why you like it!

That’s impressively detailed: what camera/lens were you using?

Double checked and found it wasn’t quite what I thought - 707mm, rather than the 800mm I surely intended.

f/9, ISO-400

Luck played a major part, but watching for them repeating patterns of flight, so I roughly knew where they would go really helped - I really didn’t expect anything this clear, especially as I was relying on reeds to set my focal distance rather than homing in manually as I watched the pathing.

Thank you

Not sure if it’s the same one, but today’s buzzard. I’m embarrassed to admit that, as all I could see was black stocky shape in the direction of the sun, I thought I was just snapping a large crow! Still, heavy messing with the RAW format bought up the following:

Today’s Jay:

You probably also got “Always wear them” advice, and depending on your subjects and issues with your eye, it might be wildly impractical, but you might want to explore taking off your glasses to use the EVF, and correct your focus with the diopter. In particular, I’d guess the EVF is designed to have the eyeball at a specific distance and centred (why else have that rubber surround), and glasses will mess up that distancing, possibly putting it outside the range the diopter can correct.

Ideally, raise the issue with your optometrist, my suggestion is only based on observation, not a sound knowledge of optics and eyes!

It’s not so bad these days :)

Jackdaws are cool too!

Ah, yes, panels of rust go nicely with grain, thank you.

Ah, the best camera is the (best) one you have with you!

(And not seeing the second shot, but then Lemmy and Alexandrite get get into “moods”)

The subject is interesting, but I can’t help feeling this is almost a poster case for using digital cameras, and I’d be curious as to your thoughts:

• To my taste, I’d have wanted to lighten this up a little in post-processing (or to have used a different ISO setting in camera)

• I’m not sure the grainyness is adding anything in this case - again, were I taking this I’d be happy for digital post-processing to remove the noise.

Yup, that sort of short phrase sounds like that which I was hearing today.

Thanks for a full reply, and a lesson in why thinking about aperture is sensible with landscapes.

With the original, it felt right (or at least acceptable) for the sharpness to fade away, and you had the foreground sharp - though sweetspots, and plenty of light do suggest there were better settings.

The roadway definitely doesn’t work well (as you say) because of the out of focus fence on the far left where the mind goes “That’s close, it should be sharp”.

With the transformers - less obviously an issue, but I think with such a complex scene, maximum sharpness across the subject is for the best, and I can well imagine there’s a better choice of aperture to get more of it crisp.

Of course, I’m hardly the best to comment - my joy is wild birds, where there’s rarely enough light, and the birds are usually far enough away that DOF covers them all: thus my f setting is almost always as low as possible.

You nicely caught the awesome “Beams of Light onto Water” effect, I’m jealous.

Out of interest, why were you saddened by sticking at f1.7 on the other shot: I’d have thought “sharper close up, softer in the distance” was a fine choice for this sort of shot, and more light from a lower f setting into the camera is usually good.