Chiffchaff

what a cool name, isn’t it? Great fun to shoot for sure. After getting them on Saturday on not the nicest perches I went out to try for them again tonight. This is what I got. What do you think?

If you want to know how to get songbirds like this contact me

1D Mark IV 600mm Iso 1600

Quite Common Birds, but so much fun to shoot…

Brown Pelicans

Click on the images to see a larger version.

It took this guy about 4 hours to swallow the fish….however, he never considered to let go

Some more images

I’ve added a few first species to my website and below are some exklusive previews as well

If you are interested in doing an exclusive one-on-one or small group workshop with me, it’s the right time to contact me now. Bird season will be in full swing very soon and you’ll have an awesome chance to get a deep insight into the little secrets of bird photography

Black Vulture, Plican and Limpkin

Do what you have to do…

in this case getting completely wet To have the sun in my back I had to get into the water….The temp was about 62 degrees For me as a German still pretty comfortable

Here’s a making of and a result…

full frame

Packing again..

Actually I just arrived back home, but I thought this image is a nice start for some Florida impressions you are going to see the next couple of week.

I drove about 4200 miles in 14 days and brought back home about 300 GB of images

Packing….

On Thursday morning I’ll fly to Florida for two weeks…Hopefully I’ll come back with tons of great photographs

Two big guns…

not much new to post, so here’s an image showing my buddy Chris and me shooting Coal Tits He shoots an 800/5.6 IS and I an 600/4 IS

I uploaded many new Grey Heron and Mew Gull images into my archive

Herons making Of

Since so many people asked me how I got this image I’ll let you know

For the last couple of weeks all lakes have been frozen and so the herons had a hard time finding something to eat. I heard about a spot were fisherman fed the herons and drove there.

I was amazed to see about 30 totally tame herons flying in and fighting for fish as soon as you would throw a piece of fish. After shooting lots of action stuff I decided to go for the ultimate challenge -  a wide angle heron grabbing a piece of fish.

The first attempt I made in the morning using the AF. I just threw a piece of fish in front of me and tried to capture the moment. When i arrived at home and checked the files I saw that all grabbing poses were out of focus. The heron’s movement was just to fast for the AF. It always locked on the body or neck. What to do now? Give up? NO! I jumped into my car and drove back. I arruved with an hour of light to go. Luckily, there was now cop on the highway….

I grabbed my bag of fish and went onto the ice looking for a good spot. The other issue with shooting a WA shot is finding a pleasant background. Once I found a good spot I recognized that I would throw a way too long shaddow on the ice, which would partially shade the heron. After a while I found a good, but very uncomfortable position that made it possible for me to avoid having a shaddow on the heron. To avoid having unsharp images again I used manual focus this time. I put the fish in front of the lens and focussed about 2cm behind hit. I had to lie down with extended arms to avoid having a shaddowed heron When the heron came closer I just pressed the shutter button and let the Mark IV shoot at full 10 fps. This was the only way to get the result I wanted.  After 3000 images and about 50 tries I finally got the image I had in mind

Below are two making of images. Thanks Jakob !

Still going through another 5000 images….

and most of them are sharp….. I had such a blast the last for days with about 30 Grey Heons fighting on a frozen lake. Unfortunately, the ice is gone now.

What a cool camera.

Here are three more. All files are full frames. Taken with Mark IV + 70-200 IS.

Finally

After having great trouble with my Mark IV, cause it just didn’t fokus properly on my 600 IS, the issue is solved now and I can go out shooting

I will write about it in greater detail soon. I will also add tons of new images.

Here are two herons from yesterday. The Mark IV performs just outstanding. Best camera i’ve ever used!