Merry Christmas!

Just a quick post to wish you all Merry Christmas, this is a shot of a bauble on my Christmas tree, snapped it a few weeks back as I realised I didn't have any Xmas related images!

Photographing A Full Moon

Photographing the moon is something I have never done before, so on a very clear crisp evening I ventured out with my camera, 100-400mm lens and 2x extender mounted on a tripod. It's surprising just how bright the moon really is as I soon found out when I shot the first image at 1/160 second on f11 at ISO 400. Previous attempts to capture the subtle gradations on the moons surface failed with overexposure including 1/50 second and 1/80 second. However, this is not to say that using slightly longer exposures cannot give pleasing results. The second image you see here (shot on a separate evening) with the moon more bleached out, out of focus behind the spiked branches blurred from the breeze, combined with an exposure of 1/2 second, offers enough light to highlight the foreground detail, whilst giving the impression of movement but the downside is that the moons detail is lost which is why I chose an aperture of f8 to keep the depth of field relatively shallow.

Goldfinch Pays A Visit

I was very excited to see a new visitor to my garden last week in the form of a beautiful Goldfinch, who didn't stick around for long but just long enough for me to grab my camera and take his picture. This is a very pretty bird with bright orange on its head and vivid golden yellow on its wings, I am assuming that it's natural food source is becoming more scarce as winter draws in and so the Goldfinches will be more frequent visitors to the bird feeders.

I have really gotten in to bird photography recently, it's something I had never done previously so when I bought my new digital SLR I bought a decent zoom lens too so that I could get as close as possible to these tiny garden birds.