The Quiet Picture

This belongs to the category not-so-nice. If you’re squeamish, don’t open the picture! When I was photographing the birds, I noticed this one great tit which had a head injury. Looks almost like someone did open brain surgery on it, flesh wounds and a swollen forehead. It was pecking away at the peanuts, seemingly not bothered by the injury at all, but one wonders… can it survive tomorrow? It will be a cold night, and later it will be snowing and raining. The winter is tough on little birds even when they’re fit.

Everybody who knows me knows that I’m a sucker for a good snowfall. Needless to say that I was out with the camera today in what was my first opportunity this winter to photograph in the falling snow. Had to enjoy it while it lasts because the temperatures are already creeping up to zero and it will probably start raining soon, most of the snow will be gone by tomorrow evening. So it’s back to bird photography, then…

I’ve never visited my favourite tarn in the winter, so I remedied that today. I was almost sure that the little brook would not be frozen over yet despite the cold weather this week, and I do like the contrast between open water and snow. I can’t claim that the landscape was particularly stunning, but in my eyes it was beautiful. Just to see how the snow is starting to cover the detail, it creates such pleasingly simple sceneries that I can hardly wait until winter starts for real. We’ve had a few of these false starts already, getting closer to the time when the snow should stay on the ground!

I did warn you about posting a lot of bird pictures (and I didn’t promise that they’d be good, either). But today I’m trying to present some alternative poses so it’s not just the traditional bird on a stick all the time. I was actually very close to trashing the great tit picture because there’s no eye visible. But the image is sharp enough and I realised that the bird is looking (or seems to be looking) straight at the spot of light in the background… so I thought it was kinda nice, actually, and saved the picture.

The willow tit image is perhaps not critically sharp, but the bird is looking straight at the camera. So it’s another one that came very close to the trash can. Another thing I like about both these images is that they are full frame – the willow tit image is rotated by one degree but no cropping otherwise. So as long as I get the composition right, I’m close enough for the 300mm lens to deliver.

I’ve no idea what’s going on. My cold is not getting any better, but thankfully it’s not getting any worse either. It’s one of those mild things I typically get, but now it’s been going for almost a week and that’s very un-typical. But I’ve had enough of sitting inside and abandoned my Star Trek DS9 marathon in favour of sitting in my blind for a while, dressed in enough layers to stay warm on a polar expedition. It’s been a dark and foggy day so I had to go up to ISO 800 to get any reasonable shutter speeds. I decided to nevermind the noise, in fact I didn’t even care if I didn’t get any keepers at all. Just to be outside for a change was good enough!

A very pleasant surprise then to get one frame that I’m actually happy with. A black and white bird in a foggy forest was begging for the black and white treatment in Lightroom. This branch the willow tit is sitting on, it’s my favourite perch (I wish it was a fave for the birds as well…). The way all the branches are running diagonally in the frame, I think it gives a nice flow to the image and it even works when the bird is looking out of the frame like it does here. But then again, I’m biased. Still looking for better perches… or rather, will be looking for better perches as soon as my sinuses are unclogged.

And yes, I’m feeling terribly sorry for myself at the moment, in case you missed it.

My cold is still keeping me at home, I’m not too sick not to work but I’m not well enough to travel to work and sit around other people all day either. So I’m working from home; nice to have that option. This morning when I woke up, the landscape had transformed – it looks like winter now! And no, I didn’t go walkabout to photograph anything, if I’m too sick to go to work then I’m too sick to go photograph, fair is fair. The picture is the scene I see from my living room window! At the moment it’s already raining, so the snow won’t last much longer. But it was a 13 cm layer this morning, a promise of things to come…

But oh how I need some fresh air, the outside looks so inviting even with the melting snow and fog. I’ve been cooped up in the flat since Tuesday, I’m going crazy!

I learned something else about photographing from a blind: dress warmly. I froze my butt off on Saturday and apparently wasn’t warm enough on Sunday either because I now have a cold. Let’s hope it’s not the swine variety and that I will get off as easy as I normally do.

The worst part about being sick, for me, is that it takes weeks before I’m completely restored, even when I only have a very mild cold. Oh well. I stocked up on bird food yesterday so as long as I’m well enough to re-fill the feeders, I will hopefully have some birds left when I’m ready to use the blind again!

As I said yesterday, I expected there to be more birds and as it turned out, there were. Constant traffic! I sat in the blind for two hours, shot 213 frames and kept… 9. I wouldn’t be doing this with film! Normally I’m happy if I just get something which is sharp and correctly exposed when I’m photographing birds, but too much is too much so I started throwing away some technically good pictures as well. I expect the numbers to get even worse in the future, the more pictures I have a of a species, the more selective I can get… at the moment it’s mostly great tits, it came to a point where I decided that I won’t shoot any more great tits and just waited for the other birds. I was happy to get a few good frames of a willow tit and a blue tit, but the nuthatches and coal tits avoided my perches as yet. No sign of the crested tit so far, I hope it’s still around though.

So all I’ll have to post until the snow arrives is birds. You have been warned.

The winter is making itself heard. Or seen. We got quite a few days with snowfall and twice we ever got a snow cover to speak of, but because the temperatures were constantly hovering around zero, the snow was gone overnight or during the day so I didn’t have any snow left at my snow meter. The rain millimeters contain some melt snow though.

Temperature (High): 5°C
Temperature (Low): -3°C
Temperature (Average): 1°C

Barometer (High): 1032 mbar
Barometer (Low): 978 mbar
Barometer (Avg): 1012 mbar

Totally sunny days: 5

Rain: 55 mm
Days with rain: 13

Snow cover (High): 0 cm
Snow cover (Low): 0 cm
Snow cover (Avg): 0 cm
New snow: 0 cm
Days with snowfall: 6

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