Ringed Plovers at Davidstow

Below are some shots from yesterday of various age Ringed Plovers.  I was lucky with the clear early morning light. EXIF details: Ap F/5.6 ISO 125.  Exposure -0.3EV. Matrix metering. WB Cloudy.

Ringed Plovers at Long Rock Beach, Cornwall

These first year and adult Ringed Plovers were among 200 or so on Long Rock and Marazion Beach yesterday morning at first light.  I had it in mind that there could be a scarce wader or even a yank vagrant to be found, but no such luck.  To date, there has only been one reported American wader so far this autumn and that was a Pectoral Sandpiper at Maer Lake.  Anyway, these Ring's posed nicely.

Ringed Plovers at Davidstow

These shots of Ringed Plover were taken last week on Davidstow Airfield. A new laptop and Nikon Capture NX2 software has now enabled me to take shots in RAW. Several people in the know have recommended RAW but you do need the most powerful pc available to use the program properly. That said, my 4 gig ram Packard Bell is still struggling to cope with the 22 meg files.

I can see the difference in the quality of the final image compared to the previous JPEG Files. The beauty of RAW of course is that you can make some drastic alterations to exposure and white balance afterwards. In a nutshell, as long as the image is in sharp focus, you can recorrect every mistake to make a poor shot look reasonable.

The light was really poor when I took these shots, varying from low mist to bursts of sunshine. The original dull shots were barely acceptable though the exposure has been tweaked upwards to yield some fair results.

The photos were taken with a 600mm F/4 with a 1.4x Teleconverter from the car window. Original EXIF detail is: Focal length: 840mm, Shutter speed 1/800s, ISO 640, WB Cloudy, Exposure -0.7EV, Aperture F/7.1.