Posts tagged with Birds
15 March 2008 - Heads up at the Lough
This was shot from a precarious position. I jumped up on one of the concrete posts dotted around the pond and very carefully snapped a couple of shots. I just about managed to balance there for a few minutes! See the two black swans everyone else was shooting?
From left to right: Donal, Ryan, Kevin, Katie and Sean spotted me and started shooting the biggest birdbrain there ..
13 March 2008 - The pigeon flies away!
Besides the beautiful swans, there’s the usual gathering of pigeons waddling along on the path picking up bread crumbs.
Too tempting. I had to chase after them and encourage them to fly a little. Some of them need the exercise!
12 March 2008 - Feed the swans at the Lough
Girls feed the swans at the Lough on Sunday afternoon.
Urban acid 
Will posted his first photo from the day on his blog. He did arrive late, but he made up for lost time!
11 March 2008 - The Swan’s Wings
You really only appreciate how large and imposing a swan is when they rear up out of the water and spread their magnificent wings. While at The Lough on Sunday there were a number of fights between swans. Guess it’s that time of the year again, eh?
The swans were fairly tame towards us humans, and allowed us to shoot quite closely, but I’ve had run ins with swans before and I’m always suspicious of them!
Katie caught me as I lay on the ground to get a shot of The Lough Church. Embarrassed? Me? Never, I’ve been in many other more compromising situations just to get a shot!
Ryan posted a whole set of photos from the day and Kevin has posted his first shot.
10 March 2008 - That bread is mine!
A heron swoops in on a bunch of greedy gulls at The Lough yesterday!
For more pictures, check out Katie’s set and Will’s photos!
In retrospect, we were very lucky with the weather for the photowalk. Just after I got home the downpour started and 60mph winds ravaged the south of the country!
I was going to upload a bunch of the photowalk shots today but I’ll let them trickle in and then post the remainer on Friday.
25 October 2007 - The crow stops here
A crow atop a STOP sign on The Grand Parade, Cork.
Shot using a fairly high ISO but bicubic resizing smudges the noise away!
1 April 2007 - The most sent around duck photoI would love to know who made an email attachment of my thieving duck and thank them. The Aflac Duck seems to be a well known part of American insurance marketing and people got a kick out of these ducks stealing money from a lady on the street!
Apparently my thieving duck has become “the most sent-around-ha-ha-look-at-the-duck photo evar” but I wish I had watermarked the image with my blog url. It has appeared on:
To those that linked back here, thank you. To the rest, shame on you, why didn’t you use Google and find my blog?
I’m still chuffed that an image of mine is now an “urban legand” of sorts. Not many can say that! More comments on flickr but please link here if you’re going to link anywhere!
Update – welcome visitors from the Zefrank forum!
Update on June 14th. It appears the News of the World newspaper used the Thieving Duck last Sunday. I sent them off an email this afternoon so hopefully I will hear from them within a day or two.
20 March 2007 - Shadows of prison and freedom
A crow flies off into the freedom of the air with a crumb of bread he found on the pavement. The railings of nearby houses are like those of a prison keeping humans in and trapped and closed off.
Who is free?
11 February 2007 - Cupid’s Arrow and the birds
Cupid’s Arrow in San Francisco provides an interesting silhouette against the evening sky. If you’ve payed close attention to my photos in the past you might think this is a duplicate of another shot but it’s from a slightly different angle and wider, and I feel stronger because of the pattern the birds make in the sky. What do you think?
30 January 2007 - The lonely swan
A solitary swan swims on the calm waters of The Lough as the sun disappears at the end of the day.
Believe it or not, this is a 10 second exposure that turned out much better than I could have hoped! I balanced my camera on the edge of the Lough, set it to Aperture priority mode at f/11, dialed the exposure down two stops, flipped up the camera flash and took the shot.
How does this work?
- By setting the aperture to a fairly high value little light is let into the camera sensor.
- By setting the exposure down two stops the whole scene will be underexposed but bright areas will be exposed mostly correctly.
- Given the above settings, any dark moving objects will be completely invisible so when the flash fired it picked out the swan swimming past and even created a nice reflection in the water.
Hope that helps!