I’ve been down to Sandy, or more specifically the RSPB HQ, about 6 or 8 times in the last year or so and probably had my most successful shooting this morning. I decided to my modify my usual mode of operation [walk and hope for the best] by camping out in the hide for a couple of hours, basically because I had a hangover and didn’t fancy a 3 mile hike largely unspoilt by photography. I’m reasonably pleased with the results although a decent shot of a woodpecker still eludes me. The one in collection of shots here decided to put in an appearance when the light faded particularly badly. Shooting handheld at 400mm isn’t terribly forgiving: anything at less than 1/200 second is guaranteed to be a write-off.

I’ve modified my set-up for the wildlife: centre autofocus, plus a reverting to jpeg: I’m never really going to push the pixels around that much with a wildlife shot, so there’s no point in shooting RAW.

Every time I come back from a session like today, I think I should flick over to shutter priority [I always shoot in aperture priority when I’m not doing something manual because of the flash] and set the ISO to auto but I’ve never experimented with it to see how smart it is at choosing the lowest possible setting for a given exposure…