Little Egret at St Clement

A maximum count of 14 Little Egrets were in the Tresillian/St Clement area whilst the three Greenshanks and summer pluamge Black-tailed Godwit still linger.  Last night there were also two Whimbrel though these seemed to have moved on today.

Little Egrets at Marazion Marsh

While waiting for the Spoonbill to appear from the reedbed and juncus, I took some shots of this Little Egret. They are so common now in the county in virtually any suitable habitat. You can quite easily ignore them but, given the right conditions, egrets are delightful to photograph and always a challenge to get the correct exposure.

The flight shot below was taken with a higher than normal ISO of 800 and a high aperture of F/6.7 with the intention of raising the shutter speed. The Exif detail gave a reading of 1/2500s, which has caught this Little Egret in good focus. I was particularly happy with the capture of the water drops dripping from its' feet.

The egret below is a different bird to that above and was taken in different light this afternoon. The light was appalling and disappointing as I wanted better light for the target bird, which was a Spoonbill. The ISO was 800 but I opened up the aperture to its' F/4 maximum, just to get the all-important shutter speed up. The best I could get was 1/640s. Exposure was 0.0EV though I have reduced this in Capture NX software.

The images above and below were taken from the standing stone by the viewing area on the Marsh.

Flight shots from the Marsh

The four flight shots below were taken last night in the bright, low, early evening sunlight. I was particularly pleased with the Buzzard shot as the exposure is correct, for once. I raised the EV to plus 1.3 to fool the meter reader as the camera normally compensates for the bright background sky. The only adjustment to the image is some cropping at the edges to correct the rule of thirds.



The Little Egret shots were also taken at Marazion Marsh. This adult bird with newly growing plumes fed and flew along the pool near the road. The three images below were over exposed by EV 0.3 and this has been corrected in Photoshop.

Little Egret at Nansloe Woods

I stumbled across this Little Egret which was fishing from the tree bough above the stream. It occasionally dropped down to the stream and then reappear on a different part of the branch. It was no more than 15 yards away as I photographed it through the heavy foliage. The ISO was set to 640 to raise the shutter speed as the conditions were quite dull. Aperture was wide open at F/5.6, hence the suffused background. I used the 600mm lens with 1.4x TC giving a total focal length of 840mm.

The image below is a heavily cropped version of the full size image just below it.