Sunday, 18-Dec-11 19:46:00 CET

Blue Tit picking up snacks

This Blue Tit is picking up some snacks from a bush in my garden.

I mounted a teleconverter before the 55 – 300 lens. The converter consumes light so to compensate for this I changed the ISO setting to 600 – 800. I set the aperture so that the opening was big. It is still difficult for me to know what F number makes a big or small hole but I know that when the aperture is set to a big hole then the focal length is small.

The good thing with a small focal length is that items before and behind the thing you are interested in will become blurry. So this is the secret of the fancy blurry backgrounds in images that you see in all professional photography. I think that a compact camera got such a small lens system so they don´t make it easy to produce these blurry backgrounds.

The Nikon D5100 camera displays an “image” of the aperture and the F number next to it so I don´t need to remember what a high F number means. A good thing with a big hole is that much light is received so this compensate slightly for the teleconverter so with this the shutter speed can be increased. But not much.

I know that for people new to this DSLR jargon, this is all abra-cadabra. Don´t worry, if you hold a camera like this in your hands then you can try all these things and really soon it is easy to understand.

To compensate for slow shutter speed the camera needs to be mounted on a tripod, for best result. I did not have a tripod so I arranged a chair and a box to rest the camera on. I used manual focus because I wanted the bird to be in focus and not one or another branch. Then I turned on the anti-vibration system of the camera and took a deep breath and hoped for good luck to get sharp pictures.

Oh I almost forgot... Before shooting these images I cleaned the windows.