Not being a knowledgable person when it comes to naming wildlife, I simply spotted some interesting long-billed attractive Waders. Fortunately it was not long before a knowledgable birder soon came along equipped with a scope on a tripod, and after chatting briefly, I ventured the question and he supplied me with a name, he had his eyes upon a greenshank and had heard there was a pair of Osprey that had been spotted, and asked had I seen them. I had to reply that I would only have known had someone said: “Oh! Look at those Ospreys.” He did say there were a large number of Lapwings, and I did spot those and fortunately also know what they looked like.
As I arrived I had seen an Egret overfly, but it was before I had set up, I climbed down the bank and sat at the bottom, so that I was less conspicuous than being on top of the bank and silhouetted against the sky, and braced the monopod to the ground so that the camera came neatly to my eye and began taking shots as the godwits came inexorably closer, dipping their long beaks into the water every couple of seconds; this meant that getting shots of a group with all heads above water and in an attractive grouping was ‘interesting’! There was a young grebe together with its parent, doing short length dives
There were times when I did forego using the tripod and opted for using the camera handheld and using manual focus, this was for the shots of birds, such as the terns in flight, as it was quicker if I focussed rather than let autofocus hunt and miss the shots altogether. Had the sun been out more often and brighter, I could have set the lens at the hyperfocal distance and at less than full aperture; but those conditions did not prevail on this occasion.
It was yet another successful gallery of pictures from this excellent Tamron lens – the 150-600mm
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