This morning, as I was having my coffee and chatting on the phone with a friend, I was wandering around the house looking out the windows. (Do you do that? I know I should be DOING something, but I wander through the house and look out all the windows.) This time someone was looking back — a red-tailed hawk! Well, the friend and I had a good discussion going and I didn’t want to say, STOP, THERE’S A HAWK IN MY TREE!!! Let me go get my camera! Fortunately, my camera is always within handy reach, and I was able to grab some one-handed shots of this guy. He could see my focusing beam and would stare at me, but apparently I didn’t look like a threat because he sat out in this tree for about ten minutes.
The challenge was getting the camera to focus on the bird, not the tree branches, and I didn’t think it would work to holler out, Hey, You, would you mind stepping out from behind the branches, fluff your feathers, and turn a little to the left? He already looked a little pissy. (And I know this isn’t a great shot — I’m WAY past the 12x optical zoom and well into the digital zoom, probably up to the full 48x. That results in the grainy look.)
I had the same problem in Texas with this tri-colored heron. You would have thought he was avoiding the paparazzi! Or maybe he was just shy. And by the way, did you know paparazzi is plural and paparazzo is singular? The useless things you learn when you check your spelling!
You can see by the sharpness of the photo that I was much closer to this bird and didn’t have to go into the digital zoom.
So when you get a picture where you can see the camera chose the wrong object on which to focus, just try again and again, if necessary. You can usually land a shot on the desired subject.
–Sue
