On a sunny day in August we wandered over to the Arundel Wetland Centre for a day out with some friends and the wee one. It's a great place with a huge variety of bird life and if you're in to twitching there are some pretty rare species to be found there.
This was an accidental shot of a bird (small, enjoyed eating nuts) at a bird feeder. The light was pretty poor under the trees and as I had the camera on aperture priority it chose a really slow shutter speed. I normally have the camera on manual but the clouds were moving fast and the light was changing a lot so I popped it on aperture for convenience. The bird feeder's blurred a little but the movement of the bird has really been picked up!
There were a lot of swans there and clearly used to being fed, we made sure the little one was out of reach while they wandered over.
The Minolta beercan (70-210) wasn't quite long enough to capture anything too far away so I distracted myself by trying some insect shots. The autofocus struggled a little here but the depth of field is really tight and we're venturing into macro territory so I'm not surprised. The Sony A77 has a funky 'focus peaking' function for manual focus though which is brilliant.
As long as you're fairly quick and the bee/wasp/insect of sorts is content to hang around it can give better results when you use the manual focus than rely on the auto focus. The focus peaking highlights in red the areas of the image in focus so you can see the focus plane move around the image. Really handy for these shots.
I think the last one here is my favourite insect shot. If you view it large you can see the pollen that's already been picked up. Click on the picture to view a slideshow.
It's always pretty cute when they follow their mother around, there were a few ducklings and similar (no idea of the species, sorry) and I managed to get close enough to photograph a few.
I liked this little fellow bobbing around on his own, he looked like he had a plan of action.
It's worth a visit if you're near Arundel, we even saw a watervole having a nibble but they're really shy and he vanished before I could get anything like a decent picture.
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