Carrion Crow
Nikon D3s.500mm,1×4,1/600@f10,iso800. Fill flash SB900@-1stop
I managed to enjoy a few quality hours in some fine winter sunshine in company of Carrion Crows at a local park. “Carrion Crows” you’ve got to be kidding! Well for me quality of image not subject matter comes first. What do I mean by this? I do not live next to an amazing nature reserve or next to a dynamic zone like the coast, so I have to look at what subjects I can photograph locally. This forces you to work with what’s available to photograph however frustrating this can be in terms of subject choice, it brings a need to be creative and pushes your technical side. Just look at how many amazing shots of House Sparrow you see. Not many, and its something I need to work on soon, so theres a great project to work on if you have a good population in your area. My initial plan was to capture some flight shots but the wind and sun direction was wrong so head and body shots were the order of the day. Carrion Crows are clever birds. They soon had figured out that there were some tasty morsels in my bag and while I was photographing the birds in front , a few birds had flown behind me to grab what was inside my bag. Luckily I kept spotting them before they could grab what was in the bag. I decided the only course of action was to zip the camera bag up and move it next to my side. A great little game they were playing.
On a technical side I used some fill flash set quite high due to the black plumage, I probably should have added a bit more maybe, -2/3 stop would have been better. This helped open up the details to reveal some wonderful textures, not so boring are they! I hope this encourages you not to worry about travelling hundreds of miles to look at some dot in a field with scores of photographers lined up and to look at whats available to you to go and be creative.
