I was up at dawn today,well not much of a hardship as it was a little before 8! I had worked out that the Blackcaps would probably be wanting to feed as soon as dawn broke and I guessed that the apple may be their first port of call. I was correct. Within minutes of getting in to the hide with sun still far to low for anything to do with potography, the male put in an appearance at the “breakfast bar”. I took one quick photo and oddly the shutter sound spooked him and he left immediately. It took 15 minutes for him to make another visit this time the sun had risen a little bit, well lets say that by now it wasn’t dark anymore!
Conditions were not at all ideal for photography and I adjusted the camera to the extremes to try and get the highest shutter speed possible because I have learnt that this is probably the single most important factor in bird photography. This is assuming that you have got the camera on a rock steady tripod. So for the photographers amongst you I set the ISO to 3200, and the aperture to f5.6 but now I was still only getting a shutter speed of 1/15 sec. This was ridiculously slow for any kind of photography. I adjusted the aperture compensation down half a click, reasoning that I would be able to compensate for that on the computer later but you can never do anything about a blurred image due to a moving subject.
So I am set there almost holding my breath as he appeared in my viewfinder and got stuck in to the apple. I took a series of photos and they were all pretty blurred and grainy apart from just the one above. When you consider the settings on the camera this is a half decent photo I think you will agree. It’s far more than I could have hoped for anyway. So here is a little “filmstrip” sequence of his appearance, scroll down to the bottom for a look.

As you can see he was really having a good feed. I would not have imagined that apple has enough protein to sustain a bird after and during a frosty night. The female did not show today which is odd I think