My weekend at my in-laws provided me with lots of opportunities for photography! After photographing the great tits in the stoneware jar, I found a very old nestbox on an arbour. It was falling apart with a hole in the bottom corner where I could see the chicks legs! Blue tits had taken up residence here and they were very active, visiting the box every few minutes. I watched them for a while and they nearly always landed on a curved branch of Wysteria just to the left of the box.
The nestbox was quite high up and I wanted to get shots where I was level with the blue tits as they landed briefly with food. Using a ladder, I positioned the ladder and my camera at different angles, about 4 metres from the branch they were landing on. I focused the camera on the joint in the Wysteria, where they seemed to land most frequently. It was quite shady so I had to set the ISO at 500 to achieve a shutter speed of at least 160th second and F8. I moved away and fired the camera via my remote. This technique works really well as the blue tits seemed completely unperturbed by the ladder and camera. It took quite a bit of experimenting to get the settings right, but as they were in and out so regularly, it gave me the perfect opportunity to experiment! I tried the camera in different angles and at different zooms. I took rather a lot of shots…. narrowed it down to these as my favourites!
Photographs such as these also give you the chance to look at what they are bringing in….. lots of different species of caterpillar… now need get a book to ID these!
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