Show your Bird Portraits

Those are great shots Cog! Those birds are awesome too, I see herons from my office window from time to time but I haven't got a chance to photograph them yet. Getting anywhere near the quality you got there will be quite the challenge I guess.

Anyway, I've been busy and didn't do much with birds for a while but today the weather was decent so I gave the "just sit and wait" method a shot. I did this in my garden, so I'm not to crazy about the birds or backgrounds. But I liked how close the little guys got and I had quite a lot of fun observing what's going on around the house. I tried to enhance the present the pervasive pigeon and sparrow by including the fresh apple blossoms ;D
 

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Cog said:
Olympus E-M1 Mark II + OLYMPUS M.300mm F4.0
Shot from a kayak, handheld.










Real pleasure to watch your photos Cog! And the bird seems to be (very) collaborative! I'm not sure it recognized the camera you are using ;)!
And my humble contribution from today... Just Zoo - I don't think I'm ready for real hike so far...
Actually the Night Heron do not belong to the Zoo - it's free...
 

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Thank you for your comments. I'm glad you liked the photos. Herons get less anxious once they start hunting, which for this particular kind of herons (Western reef heron) means they run like mad trying to catch fish in the shallow water. If it were up to me, I'd call them dancing herons because that's what it looks like.

I bought Olympus for two reasons. 1) I wanted a much smaller camera with decent IQ not to draw too much attention in public places. People in this country are paranoid about being shot on a big pro-looking camera. I'm tired of talking to security every time I want to take a picture. 2) 300mm lens on a micro 4/3 gives me 600mm at f/4. This is really nice, and a similarly light 600mm lens on a Canon is too much for me both financially and in terms of size and weight. So I guess it works. I take both cameras with me on a kayak trip and then use either one according to the situation.
 
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Cog said:
Thank you for your comments. I'm glad you liked the photos. Herons get less anxious once they start hunting, which for this particular kind of herons (Western reef heron) means they run like mad trying to catch fish in the shallow water. If it were up to me, I'd call them dancing herons because that's what it looks like.

I bought Olympus for two reasons. 1) I wanted a much smaller camera with decent IQ not to draw too much attention in public places. People in this country are paranoid about being shot on a big pro-looking camera. I'm tired of talking to security every time I want to take a picture. 2) 300mm lens on a micro 4/3 gives me 600mm at f/4. This is really nice, and a similarly light 600mm lens on a Canon is too much for me both financially and in terms of size and weight. So I guess it works. I take both cameras with me on a kayak trip and then use either one according to the situation.

Interesting! What country it is Cog? Egretta gularis gularis (the black form of this bird) is as far as I know a "citizen" of western Africa?
And BTW, one of the pictures of your kayak attracts my attention - it happen I know that alphabet(s) :)!
 
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ISv said:
Interesting! What country it is Cog? Egretta gularis gularis (the black form of this bird) is as far as I know a "citizen" of western Africa?
And BTW, one of the pictures of your kayak attracts my attention - it happen I know that alphabet(s) :)!
It's Qatar. This heron is also native to the Gulf, Iran, and India. :) And as a native Russian, I used the Cyrillic alphabet to paint the named of my kayak. :)
 
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Nice pictures Joules, and everyone else. It's a tree sparrow by the way, only a locally common species nowadays.
It's nice to see the countryside greening up here on the East side of Scotland, been a long winter, I'll use the Yellowhammer image to illustrate this, Known also as the Scotch canary sometimes.
Harry.
 

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DA it seems we can agree that all the modern cameras do a pretty decent job at most things and speaking personally are better at what they do than I am. ;) Still, we tend to obsess about the various nuances.

HB, I'd love to be there seeing what you are! Our leaves haven't come out yet but any day now and many birds will be back. I'd hate not to have at least 3 seasons (I could live without one). :)

Jack
 
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Cog said:
ISv said:
Interesting! What country it is Cog? Egretta gularis gularis (the black form of this bird) is as far as I know a "citizen" of western Africa?
And BTW, one of the pictures of your kayak attracts my attention - it happen I know that alphabet(s) :)!
It's Qatar. This heron is also native to the Gulf, Iran, and India. :) And as a native Russian, I used the Cyrillic alphabet to paint the named of my kayak. :)

Thanks Cog!
Later I noticed between your photos the subspecies shistaceae - it looks to be more typical for your part of the world. Didn't know both subspecies are overlapping there but it's what happen when you get to this forum - you learn everyday - a lot :)!
 
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TWI by Dustin Abbott said:
Some mallards as the water final thaws around here. What interests me about this photo is that I used the Sony a73, Sigma MC-11, and the Canon 100-400L II. Other than some occasional focus racks (which I solved by using the focus limiter), I was able to track BIF quite well, actually.

Agree for the tracking - good job!
Disagree for the mallard, from my point of view your ducks are little bit more interesting than the widespread mallard :).
 
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