A None too Photogenic Bird

Last week I spent time photographing a pair of Great Crested Grebes under dull lighting conditions and came up with some nice images of what turned out to be a very photogenic bird.  This week I tried to photograph a bird that I have always had difficulty in achieving good results with, the Pied Wagtail.  One of the worse conditions I’ve found is, strangely, bright midday sunlight but set against a mixture of reflective rocks and dark seaweed and areas of shadows.  Combine this with a small, black and white bird that is constantly moving around this environment and you have a real photographic challenge, one I have to admit, I haven’t managed to overcome. Also oddly, the final image of the subject always seems to be slightly soft, not very sharply in focus.  Last year I had the same opportunity to photograph this bird, same location, same weather conditions, almost the same time of year, but with a different lens – the Canon 400mm – but which gave the same results, so it’s not the lens.  I had the x1.4 converter attached, but I also did last week and, in fact, have so around fifty percent of the time with this lens without issues so that can’t be the problem by itself.

The scenario was that I was on a beach, a bright sunny day with a Pied Wagtail catching a plentiful supply of flies.  It was constantly on the move going between the open with a direct sun from the high left, to areas of shade between the rocks.  The image left is the cameras histogram of the image above.  The image preview hasn’t been reproduced accurately here but it does show the rest of the photographs details including the focus point and exposure of which you can see that neither should cause a major problem. For most of the time I kept the ISO at 800 to ensure a fast shutter speed at all times including when I was giving it over exposure compensation.  1/1600 should prevent most camera shake even with a 500mm lens with a converter attached and, although the camera wasn’t on a tripod or even a monopod (I needed mobility) it was well supported between my knees as I sat down – a well trusted method that has worked for me in the past.  These photos are also small web images, so not showing the true defects that I can see on a full size monitor at 100% crops.

This next histogram does show a ‘spike’ on the right hand side, meaning blown out highlights, in this case the sun reflecting off the white rock in the background.  The shutter speed again should be fast enough and I even stopped down the aperture by a stop, but the image looks flat, soft and lacking contrast, which if I increased with this already being a ‘black and white’ bird, would make the image worse.  I’m guessing the poor images are a result of a combination of the circumstances and conditions as I often experience any one of these regularly on separate shoots without any problems.  As I loaded the two cards worth of images into the Lightroom software on my computer, I was deleting the images as quick as they were showing and just gave up after deleting 400 images.  There wasn’t one image that I was really happy with and the few that were ‘ok’ will need a bit of work on to get them to look half decent.  (The reason for so many images taken was that I was trying to catch the bird catching a fly, achieving that special shot– with no success).  All in all, the worst ratio of photos taken to output that I have ever done, by a very long way!   One of the other problems caused by the conditions was the ‘bokeh’ or background focusing effect.  The highlighted areas particularly caused by the seaweed, looked ugly to me and attributed to ruining the final image.  I’m not sure, maybe I just have a mental blockage when it comes to photographing this particular bird, that every image I took looked wrong to me.  It reminds me of sometimes when I tune my guitar – it will just sound out of tune regardless. The following imageS then are probably the best of the bunch with a quick bit of work done of them.

ISO 800 f 7.1 at 1/1250

ISO 800 f 9 at 1/1250

ISO 800 f 9 at 1/800

ISO 800 f 9 at 1/2000

ISO 800 f 9 at 1/2000  -1/3

ISO 800 f 9 at 1/3200  -1/3

ISO 800 f 9 at 1/800

ISO 800 f 9 at 1/1600

ISO 800 f 9 at 1/1250

As always, photographing nature, apart from often being difficult and frustrating, is not the only reason for being interested in it, but for simply watching it.  It was clear this wagtail had it territory along this part of the beach, moving back and forth and seeing off any intruders which included other wagtails. Walking past this part of the beach it wasn’t even obvious that there was any birds in and around the rocks and seaweed.  The black and white plumage gives this bird quite good camouflage.  It was obvious why it was there too, lots and lots of flies.  Often the bird would just stand them and would just need to snap at them as they flew past.  They were also all over me as I sat there photographing the bird.  It was impossible to predict when the bird would go for a fly, hence no successful images of this action – just the results.