Islay and playing with the new camera

Recently returned from a second visit to Islay. If you don't know the island then it is a wildlife gem, especially for birds and is the lazy birdwatcher's paradise. We did visit one bird reserve but saw more species of bird from the front garden of the cottage - though seeing the arrival of several hundred barnacle geese and watching a hen harrier upsetting loads of the smaller birds at the reserve was pretty good.

The storms drove some of the usually more distant sea birds close to shore. These were taken with K5 and a 25-30 year old Sigma 70-210mm zoom. I'm relearning manual focus and think I have more to learn. The garden wall in the last one shows just how close the gannets came.

Islay is also home to some great distilleries.

All comments welcomed.

Dave

A very nice set, and great timing there, very well taken.

I think I would prefer these in full colour. I would also crop vigorously, so that the gannet, which is the subject, was much more prominent. As it is, he's rather lost at sea.

Now, getting down to more important matters, did you visit the Bowmore distillery?

G

Thanks for the comments.

I did try cropping, but the limitations of the lens (or more likely my limitations) resulted in poor shots.

Don't understand your comment about "full colour", George. These have had a few PP tweaks but the colour is as it was at the time.

But to the most important question. Yes I did visit the Bowmore distillery and all the others apart from Caol Ila, which was closed.

Dave

I like these shots

Whilst this is not a technical response as such I tend to find that with bird shots they either really stand out when cropping in or they do not - I don't mean the loss of pixels I am referring to sharpness and this seems to be good.

I would be happy with the shots you have above as you have captured them well expecially given the focal length.

Given the distance you appear to be working with my only useful suggestion is sadly that a longer focal length or getting nearer may be the only real ways of improving this kind of shot.

I suppose that I am trying to say that given the disatnce and lens you have probably done as well as could be expected and probably better than I may have done

Regards

stu