John Gordon/Listening to Birds: Catching Up

Sunday 17 May 2015

Catching Up

May 6 2015 Various Lower Mainland Locations Sunny and Warm

It has been a whirlwind of a week. I landed up in emergency Saturday morning after I fell and jammed my hand, hence the lack of blogging. I finally managed to drive again and spent a few hours out shooting both the lightweight Nikon P900 and the heavier Tamron 150mm-600mm. I still can't carry the Nikon 500mm, tripod and camera body.
Here are pix from these two systems and brief explanation to how they came about.

Brewer's Blackbird

All three pictures were taken from my car on the same heap of manure pile at the side of 184 St and 8th Ave. The pungent smell was one thing, worst the wind was coming toward me filling my car with a pungent aroma, as soon as the flies started to arrive it was time to go. The things us birders have to put up with, if it isn't a sewage pond or garbage dump it's a manure pile!
It was also late in the morning the sun was high and the lighting dreadful but I was just happy to get out of my chair and get birding again after my minor mishap. I shot these with a beanbag to hold the camera and lens steady with the Tamron 150mm-600mm.

I have had the lens a year now and I am still enjoying it mainly due to the opportunities it has given me to capture images I might not have been able to. However is you are using the Nikon 300mm F4 with a 1.4 or 1.7 converter much the same results can be achieved except for there is no VR. Nikon have just released a super sharp 300 F4 which has VR and can be paired with the above converters which may give sharper results, albeit at a cost. Saying that, check out my blog with the Lapland Longspurs a few weeks ago and you'll see the Tamron under good light is very capable and a less expensive solution.

For example I took the Tamron to the UK for a month in Jan 2015 (see Blog) and it worked fine, so much so that I never used the monopod I had packed.