robin

I do like to watch wildlife, but have never saved enough money up to purchase a proper wildlife photography equipment set-up. Something always wipes the savings pot out when I’ve got close to having enough for my ideal lens; new boiler, unexpected car problem, washing machine packing in, roof blowing off…

I have a twenty-five year old, small telephoto zoom from an old camera system, complete with a fungus in the optics, on a mount adaptor, which loses the clever autofocus that my camera can do with the native lenses that are designed for it. This would be fine at shorter focal lengths and still subjects, but the keeper rate of shots taken with this longer set up is so low that I rarely use it, and my wildlife appreciation is still more birdwatching through binoculars than photographing.

But I did once make an attempt at setting up a hide in my garden shed doorway, and fashioned a handy naturalistic perch (screwed a branch from some shrub cutting to the pergola). There I could control the distance to the subject and wouldn’t need focus adjustments quite so much… if the birds just cooperated by perching on the intended spot and standing still for a moment.

Right now, I’ve managed to get a few hundred pounds into the savings pot again, so we are obviously not far from the exhaust of the car falling off, or the oven packing up and needing replacing soon.