Rainbow Lorikeets, and a Mynah

I took these on Monday evening. We have a lot of birds visiting us on our balcony, including Magpies, Lorikeets, Rosella's, Gallah's to name just a few. We feed them so they hang around, so I managed to get these shots.







1D MkII N + Ef300 f/2.8

Cheers,
Barry

Holy smokes! Birds like this come to visit you??? That's pretty amazing.

Nice shots - wonderful color on these little birds. I assume you were shooting wide open or nearly so, accounting for the nicely blurred backgrounds.

With birds like this coming to you, I would consider setting up your own natural looking perches - getting some tree branches or other natural objects, and putting them in a position where the birds will land before going to where the food is, and in a position that is advantageous in terms of the background coloration, direction of the light, etc.

These shots are good, but with the right light and setting, they can be unbelievable.

Hi Barry

Gosh you are so lucky getting birds like this in your garden, all beautiful shots, but I really like the first one, stunning!

Parrots...

Hi Dan and Janet,

In fact I was not shooting wide open. I find that the depth of field at short distances is just far too narrow. The DoF is very apparent in the first image and that was at f/4, so shooting wide open probably would have yielded an out of focus image. The blurry background (bokeh) probably also accounts for the quality of the Canon lens glass. At very short distances, I try to use a smaller aperture for greater DoF, but at longer distances I tend to shoot wider.

These parrots can be very destructive when they want to be, so not sure how long any type of perches would last. In fact they can also be a bit nasty at times to other birds by chasing them away, they become territorial over their food rights...

Pic 1.
1/500 @ f/4 ISO400
Pic 2.
1/800 @ f/4 ISO400
Pic 3.
1/640 @ f/5.6 ISO400

Many Thanks,
Barry