I found an old tree trunk in Clyne while I was watching a Marsh Tit in a nearby bush. I thought it would be a great place to make some images of a few birds, but with nothing apart from the Marsh tit around I didn’t think much more of it. While my back was turned, this Robin came down to investigate the trunk for food even though I was only about 2 metres away. That’s the great thing about parks, gardens and winter, the birds are relatively used to human presence any way but the cold make s them even more tolerant as the search for food is more important than ever. Typically in this situation I had my wide angle lens fitted to the camera and was carrying my rucksack on my back.?Amazingly the?Robin?allowed me to take off my rucksack, attach my Wimberely sidekick head, mount my 500mm lens and camera and assemble and mount my flashgun, extra battery pack,?flash extender and flash bracket without being scared off! I didn’t use fill in flash with this image mainly because having mounted the flash etc. I found that the batteries in the flashgun were dead and I didn’t want to push my luck and change the batteries as well while the Robin was hanging around! I don’t think the image suffers for not having the flash, although it does help remove colour casts. This is my first image of a Robin in snow, and although not a prize winner, it will now be added to my Christmas Card image list.
The light really started to go, but I kept making images even though I thought I was wasting my time. That’s the beauty of digital, failed images don’t cost anything to try. My shutter speed had dropped to 1/40th of a second at 800 ISO, which with a 500mm lens normal means blurry images, but fill in flash just picks out all the subject details and keeps them sharp. Also by waiting for the Robin to keep still even though it was singing I managed to get the image below.
