Garden Diners, Neil Scott

GARDEN DINERS

NEIL SCOTT FRPS

My house borders a tiny woodland strip which is home to a variety of wildlife including birds of many shapes and sizes. Frequent visitors are magpies, blackbirds, feral pigeons, woodpigeons, collared doves and crows. But the most interesting are the smaller birds, the chaffinches, bullfinches, blue tits, great tits, house sparrows and robins. These small birds are regular diners at a bird feeder in my front garden, and their antics and acrobatics when approaching the feeder are amazing to watch. My usual areas of photographic interest are primarily people (candid and street photography), and still life/ abstract/surrealism but I recently decided to branch out a bit and try my hand at bird photography and had just bought a 100 – 400mm lens for my Fujifilm X-T2 camera when we were all sent into lockdown. I decided to use the lens to try my hand at capturing small birds in flight so this was a complete departure from my usual technique and took me well out of my comfort zone.

One border of my garden is composed of 2 metre high dogwood which was beginning to come into leaf when I started – around late March. I placed a small bird table about 2 metres

from the dogwood and set my camera up about 5 metres away. Baiting the table with sunflower hearts I spent some time watching the birds’ flight path as they emerged from their hiding places in the dogwood to approach the table. I set the focus manually by setting up a garden cane about 5 – 6cm behind the table which is where I calculated the birds would be as they were about to land.

After many early abortive attempts due to focussing problems, I read the camera manual, learned how to use manual focus and experimented with high ISO settings. I soon discovered that these birds have incredibly short reaction times – in the order of 30 – 40milliseconds compared to a human 200 ms which explained how these birds were able to perform such fantastic aerial manoeuvres. When the light was good, I was using a setting of 1/2000 second at f8 and an ISO of 3200 or 4000 and the camera set to motordrive at 8 frames/ second. One dilemma was choosing the aperture – small enough to give me sufficient depth of field, but large enough to throw the background out of focus. At f8 and 5 metres the depth of field for a 400mm lens is a mere 5cm – just about the width of a sparrow!

I appreciate that there are many photographers out there who have vastly more experience than me, but this project gave me a lot of pleasure and some reasonable images.

Incredibly short reaction times explained how these birds were able to perform such fantastic “ aerial manoeuvres.