Garden Light Not Quite A Delight

With no plans for the day, a few Sundays back I decided I'd try and spend some time with the garden birds, in-between a lot of periods of helping Dad with the odd job or too at home. A nice day beckoned and although the grass was crisp with an early morning frost, a lot of mist hung in the air. Thats one of the smaller issues I have with living next to a river, waiting for it to clear off was a pain.

Having setup a landing branch just feet from the feeders, I was already attracting plenty of visitors, however the combination of shade from the willow tree at the bottom of the garden caused by the lowly and slowly rising sun and the mist that hung still in the air, made for some pretty high ISO's and some rather grainy early shots.

First to inspect the branch was a Robin, several appeared before me throughout the morning, one second they're perched nicely posing, the next off in a blur of feather after the intruder. Blue Tits, Great Tits & Coal Tits visited frequently and fast. Barely pausing to grab a seed before they were off back into the surrounding woodland, the one species that did takes its time and one of my favourite garden visitors, the Marsh Tit, we seem to have a healthy population in the garden with up to 4 birds visiting at anyone time.

Cock Robin

Marsh Tit

Collared Dove

The clear up specialist arrived roughly about once an hour to pick up the fallen seed, the Collared Dove always seem to know what time to visit, making sure there would be enough to feed on. As the day progressed and the sun moved somewhat higher and further around in the sky, the lighting on the feeding station changed from dull to bright in the mere matter of minutes, from ridiculously high ISO's because of the dull light, I then had to wrestle the camera settings to knockout all of the highlights. Never satisfied! The brightness did however create a nice bokeh effect in the background.

Other visitors included Nuthatch, Goldfinch, Chaffinch & Long Tailed Tits who I shall post about next, plenty of variety and quite an enjoyable few hours spent at home with the camera.

Great Tit Bokeh

Great Tit

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