On the hottest Saturday for some time, I visited the Tring reservoirs in the hope of capturing images of dragonflies; this did not happen, I saw only one very fleetingly, but with a bright sky there turned out to be a good opportunity to capture gulls and common tern in flight, and with any luck perhaps the terns in dives, something which has proved elusive in the past due to their incredible speed. I was luckier this day, but even then, twice the images were blurred despite shutter speeds of 1/1000th of a second and faster! I have every respect for the TV cameramen who manage to follow actions like this with such accuracy and quality.
A member of the public had discarded a whole slice of bread at some time and a hapless duck went towards it and was duly mobbed by a greedy flock of gulls who gave it no quarter. Flock seems an inadequate description for a collection of gulls, a ‘squabble’ of gulls would seem more appropriate. Terns seem on the whole to be better mannered, though I have seen a successful fishing tern subsequently mobbed and robbed in flight, by its compatriots.
Although I recognise the inflight turn of a tern, to a dive, it is still very tricky to follow the bird down and capture the dive and the result; the burst rate of the EOS7D is just able to capture part but invariably the critically important actions occur between frames. This day I was using the EOS5D II body, so I felt proud I had captured something of the dive because the rate is far slower due to the larger image transfer.
As I wandered away at the end of my sojourn I spotted a robin, and just by the stream saw some tiny fish swimming over the weir, and I shot that shot to show a small girl what her mother was trying to point out, earlier I had seen some slightly larger young fish swimming between tow tanks by the Grand Union Canal.
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