Sometimes you get lucky

I do apologise for the grainyness of this shot, but what a pose! I had just started playing with the "sport" mode on the Fuji S6500fd so I wasn't sure how well it would work in low light conditions. It was a cloudy morning and the sun was just up. The rainbow lorikeets were being very active on the feeder so I zoomed in on the feeder, pre-focused on it, set the camera to "sport" mode in the scene select, and then held down the shutter on continuous mode for about 30 seconds while holding the camera steady. Photo by dave

Lorikeets: breakfast for two, please!

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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.