Great Tit flies away with a peanut.

I have taken dozens and dozens of photos of the small birds in flight on the edge of the wood and in front of my hide and almost all of them have been useless, a few of them almost OK but at last I have got one that I am almost happy with.  It's such a difficult thing to acheive, firstly you need a shutter speed of at least 1/3000 second and then an f.stop as high as possible to get the maximum amount of depth of field.  The depth of field is important because it is hard to get the flying bird in focus if the centre of the focus point is to narrow. To acheive settings like this the most important  thing is bright light.    I deliberately postioned some peanuts high on an old fence post on a slope so that the background was  distant. This  gave me a really clean uncluttered backdrop to the photographs with the use of my 500mm lens.  Then with the sun shining brightly from right behind me, all the elements were in place.    All I needed was a bird or two to visit the feed and it wasn't long before they came in to the peanuts.  Larger birds like Jays are much easier to get  good photos of.

A Blue Tit just taking to the air, this bird is still in the moult.

I had two sessions at the Kingfisher hide today but without success. Thats due mostly I am sure to the heavy rain that we have had in the last 24 hours which has coloured the water. This is bound to make prey more difficult to find and change behaviour as the birds perhaps search elsewhere for food.