The birds have flocked to our feeder this summer. It took a while
for them to find it. But once they did - they have been quite active. So
have the squirrels! There were 3 on the deck yesterday. Earlier
this summer we had a family of cardinals - Mom, Dad, and at least two young
ones. They seem to have moved on. Now it is purple finches and sparrows.
I grabbed my camera
to see if I could catch a few of the birds flying around the feeder. I set the
shutter to rapid burst – 7 frames a second and played around with my
settings. I used a polarizing filter and
a -1/3rd stop exposure compensation.
My initial settings were f16 (aperture priority) at ISO 1000 because it
was a bright sunny day. The shutter
speeds ranged from 1/125 sec to 1/160 sec, which was too long to freeze the
birds in flight. 
My second set was done at f5.0 at ISO 2000. The results were better – shutter speeds
changed to 1/2500 sec. Still some blur
on the wings, but some came out okay.
Finally, I changed to f5.0 at ISO 4000 and had much better success. The
noise increased, but at least the images captured the birds without blur on the
wings. More experiments to come!
