MY branch!

,



If you don't have a widescreen monitor and would like to see the 1000 pixel wide shot, then just click right here.

I do like to take parrot pictures. Maybe because there are so many wild ones around here and I never saw them back in Alaska. This was taken early in the morning and the sun was just up. The sun was shining directly at the landing cockatoo. I was actually taking pictures of the little rainbow lorikeet that's flying away and tripped the shutter right after this big bloke jumped from a branch about 3 feet behind this one. Guess he just really wanted his picture taken. the Fuji S6500fd does quite good work in these conditions, and I didn't even have the shutter set for high speed pictures. It was manual focus, but everything else was on automatics, and no colour fixing was down in the computer. Very handy camera. Photo by dave.

View From The Trees

The galah is a very common parrot down here in Australia. It is called a Rose-Breasted Cockatoo outside of Aus, but down here (where it comes from) we just call it a galah. They are very playful birds, especially the young ones. They have a loud cheep and an even louder screech when they are trying to act tough. But nothing like the Sulfur's ultra loud squawk though.

This bloke was about 15 feet up a tree, the Fuji S6500fd was on full manual zoom and the camera settings were for full automatics. I just let the camera do all the work and it did it brilliantly. Photo by dave

Lorikeets: breakfast for two, please!

Click on the pic to view at large size.

Every morning, flocks of Australian parrots show up for breakfast at my bird feeders. I get cockatoos, lorikeets, galahs, little corellas, the occasional long billed corella ... plus the usual turtle doves, native crested pigeons, magpie larks, honey eaters, wattle birds, sometimes a wagtail, and a couple of kind of ducks will make a splashdown in the pool. The morning light is a great opportunity for picture-taking, and lorikeets are so photogenic. They're so colorful. You need to be quick with the camera, and digital cameras don't do this kind of photography so well on automatics. You're better off if you go to manual exposure and manual focus. The shot above was pre-focused on the swinging feeder, and to get the perfect exposure on the birds, a few test-frames were taken. You need a fast shutter speed to capture these little buggers: they're quick and they don't stay still for long! Photo by Dave, 2008.

The church of many cockatoos

Click here to view at 1000 pixels wide.

Church architecture is the same, the world over. Australia was colonized by people from every part of the British Isles. They brought so many things with them -- plants, animals, fashions in clothing and architecture -- that sometimes, in South Australia, you could almost think you were in an English village. Almost. This church is in the country town of Strathalbyn, and is so familiar, with its square tower ... but you know you're not in England. See the big white birds sitting on the gate and in the tree at lower left of the shot? Cockatoos. Thousands of these parrots nest in Strathalbyn, along the river which runs through the park in the middle of the town. Conditions on this day in 2007 were very dim; temperature was ambient to cool, with an thick overcast. This made it difficult to get good, sharp pictures, since apertures were large and shutter speeds correspondingly long. (A little photographic theory goes a long way, and most of what you learned in optical photography is applicable to digital cameras!) Photo by Jade, 2007.

Watching The Sun Rise

This Sulfur-Crested Cockatoo had the best seat in the house:


The sun was not yet up. It was about twenty minutes before sunrise, and a few cockatoos had arrived in the yard, and all seemed to turn toward the sunrise. I left the camera on full auto -- focus and exposure -- and trusted the Fuji Finepix to handle the difficult lighting conditions ... which it did! The picture has not been enhanced at all -- this is the raw frame, just as it was shot. Photo by dave, October, 2008.