I was tempted not to bother with any photos from Day 45 even though I spent a good proportion of the day with my camera on a tripod pointing to the sky.
At 9:07am I took this photo of something that is no where near as common as they used to be. In the past you could sometimes see 5 or six vapour trails in the sky but not at the moment. Looking at the blue engines, a tail that seems to blend with the sky and darker markings behind the cockpit I would guess that this is United Airlines.
7 minutes later I took two photos of a Swift flying over the house. I had to be quick and assumed they would not be very good shots. As a result I decided to mount my camera on my tripod with gimbal head and the legs extended to maximum so I could get under the camera when it was pointing up. I also took the battery pack off so I could point the camera more vertical. The two photos turned out to be almost identical so there is only one above.
I quite enjoyed watching out for the Swifts, there were 5 or 6 flying around and screeching. But they were always high in the sky. With the gimbal head I was able to follow them with my camera and took quite a few photos but I have binned 99% of them. A few other birds flew over but all of them were a good distance away. Looking at them now I realise that all of them are dark silhouettes against the sky. Even though I had dialled in some over exposure I now see it was not enough. I think it is because I was using all the camera focus points whereas normally I use a single centre point. When using a single centre point the focus and exposure are taken from a similar area so if the bird is in the centre the exposure would be based partly on the bird. By using all the focus points, and the bird being off centre, the exposure would be based on just the sky and the bird would be under exposed. That was not very clever of me.
This is the index to the Days in our garden series.
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