Spurn Point

a windy late afternoon at Spurn

Short-eared Owl testing

since getting the new Canon 300 2.8 II I have spent little time actually testing its performance just putting it on the settings I used with the old lens -- in the last day or two I have been testing the Image stabiliser mode 3 which only works when you press the shutter; it looks odd as the image is wandering about while you are looking through the viewfinder but -- all these images taken late afternoon, very dull, Canon 1D4 with 300 2.8 II and 1.4x III converter all hand held; mostly ISO 1600 with shutter speeds of 200th second down to 50th second on the perched post shots -- flight shot at 125th second the second image with neat image applied

drake Pochard

one of the best ducks

Snow Buntings

the sunny start soon deteriorated and then it was ISO 800 with minimum depth of field so impossible to get the whole flock in focus in fact usually just 2-5 birds were in the focus depth and their position in the frame was seemingly random! I was trying to capture the vibrance of the excitable flock with the dune vegetation in the shot; one thing that was immediately obvious is the huge volume of human detritus on the beach pervading every shot -- surely at a popular tourist destination a beach clean up would not be too much trouble --

Black-headed and Common Gulls

not all small finches on the beach are Twite

spent some time today watching a flock of Snow Buntings at Cleethorpes -- initially a flock of 80 - 90 small finches were also on the beach and a quick assumption was that they would be Twite but a closer view revealed they were all Linnets; I have struggled to get any decent flight shots of flocks of Linnet but by shooting against the poor low light I managed to get something that was a lot better than I had imagined -- sometimes when you look at images on the computer you get a nice surprise, he middle image, mostly you tend to be disappointed!

a few big gulls

Herring and a single Great Black-back -- argenteus plus one agentatus?