Bird of Prey

This was a real fortuitous shot. I happened upon a lady staring in the trees holding a camera. She showed me this little fella, who she feels was waiting to raid a nest.There were some angry birds around including magpies making a massive amount of noise. Clarity was challenging with this picture due to my camera being hand-held, my 100-400mm lens is a tad heavy, I needed to have a high shutter speed, lowest aperture and the dull day meant that this led to a very dark exposure. To compensate for this I upped the ISO which increases the sensitivity to light. The trade off when editing and cropping is what they call ‘noise’ that slight granular effect. This can add to an image but with something like this you want it as sharp as possible. Thankfully editing software enables you to do this and I have started to notice how many photographers now use very high ISO settings.  Anyway back to the Kestrel.. cute eh?? It wasn’t the only Bird of Prey that I saw that day either, I was privileged to see a sparrow hawk.