Walking The Duck ...

For this week's Sunday Challenge, for which we were asked to get out and photograph a bird or birds.

Now that may sound like an easy challenge to many of you out there. I mean as one of our 'leaders' pointed out everywhere in the world has birds: you can visit a lake, a woodland, a wetland or even take pics of the garden birds from the comfort of your own home. They can be flying, up a tree, in a bush, on the ground, in the water, or a budgie in a cage.

Yes indeed, all true. However, I quickly came to realise that much of what you can achieve in this area is down to the equipment you have at your disposal. Now whilst I am lucky enough to have a Nikon D90, I only have the 18-105mm kit lens that came with it and although it's proven to be quite sufficient for most of the photographs I take it does have obvious limitations.

For this particular challenge I found it very difficult to fill the frame with my chosen subject even when I'd zoomed in as far as I could. And when I tried to get closer to the subjects to compensate for this I found most birds flew off before I could get close enough to get the shot I was after.

So, accepting the limitations of my equipment and my poor field craft I decided to pay a visit to nearby Great Ayton. This small village, a few miles from Northallerton, has a large duck population and so I thought they'd be more used to people and so might be more tolerant of any would be photographers.

Once again though what sounded easy became more complicated on the ground and taught me much not only about my camera, but also ducks in general.

For example, I thought with it being a sunny day they'd be on the village green or sunning themselves on the river bank meaning light wouldn't be an issue ... no such luck! No, it turns out that when it's warm and sunny these ducks prefer to be in the water underneath the shade of the densest trees they can find.

And whilst I might normally try to overcome that by shooting at a slower shutter speed I couldn't do that because these pesky birds rarely seem to stay still for a second: constantly moving, flapping their wings and doing anything they can to make getting a decent shot of them nigh on impossible.

This meant that in the end, from literally hundreds of shots (yes really), I only managed to get a handful that I was happy with ... proving that shooting birds isn't all it's quacked up to be!