Little Stint in the rain

I found this juv Little Stint today tucked away in a few feet of wet mossy grass, quite content and oblivious to my presence. The shots were taken from the car window at about 20 feet distance.

All the images were taken in RAW File, a format that I am now happy with and convinced that the final images are better quality than a JPEG file.

The light was awful and combined with driving rain and low cloud cover, I inadvertently underexposed slightly by about 1/3rd. All the images have been exposure-corrected in CaptureNX2 software, a simple task when using RAW.

I used the 600mm F/4 lens with 1.4x TC. I'm convinced that after a years' use of this monster lens, it works better with the 1.4 TC than with the 1.7x. The latter for me just gives too many out of focus images. Of the 195 images taken of this stint, approx 90% were in focus and only rejected because of poor composure.

The image below is a 66% crop and the maximum that the image could bare before pixellation became obvious.

EXIF Detail: Aperture Priority. Ap F/7.1 to F/9. ISO400. WB Cloudy. Shutter Speed 1/160s to 1/250s. Exposure from -0.3 EV to 0.0 EV.