Photo Stories
How I set out to capture a stunning shot of this beautiful, colourful little songbird
It’s over to you as you show off your best photos and the cool stories behind them
Itook these images one Saturday morning in Dartmoor, near Tavistock. It all came about through a friend of mine on Flickr who uploaded a photo of a Dartford warbler. I was surprised to see that these birds were in the area as I didn’t think they came this far south. I asked him where he acquired his shots and he was good enough to give me directions to the exact spot he had seen the birds. The following Saturday a friend and I went on a mission to find some Dartford warblers to photograph.
It took about an hour to get there and, once we had parked up and gathered our gear, we followed the directions given, which took us to a stone pillar. Here we were surrounded by flowering gorse bushes, but no
They were landing in hidden parts of the gorse, we really needed them to land on top for a clear view
Dartford warblers in sight. There were plenty of other species of birds in the gorse – stonechats, dunnocks and the like – but no sign of you-know-what.
After about 30 minutes our hopes of catching sight of this beautiful bird were starting to diminish. When in desperation you do things that you wouldn’t normally do, and in this case I used an app on my phone, called Birds of Britain, in an attempt to attract them. To our surprise about ten minutes later a pair appeared out of nowhere, but then we faced another problem; they were landing in hidden parts of the gorse, and we really needed them to land on top for a clear view. After a few minutes and plenty of patience they flew about and finally came to land on top of the gorse so we could attempt a few photos.
We managed to get a number of good images of this colourful little bird – which has cracking red eyes! As the sun was coming and going all morning I had to keep altering my camera settings to cope with the changing light. Shooting at a focal length of 400mm I had to ensure my shutter speed was fast enough to keep up with these flightly creatures, so I set a high ISO of 640, to give me an average shutter speed of 1/1600 sec, fast enough to capture their quick movements.
Considering the constantly changing weather and light conditions, we both went home happy with our morning’s work.